Iran and the power of the presidency

(Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia)

Although France's new leadership has been more hawkish in its Iran pronouncements than the Bush Administration, which has yet to go further than the perfunctory "all options are on the table" statements, speculation has grown that a U.S. attack on Iran may be only a matter of months away.

And not for nothing. Iraq has gone from a boil to a simmer for the first time since the explosion in civil strife after February of 2006, allowing attention to turn elsewhere. Four years of European diplomacy have done absolutely nothing to dissuade Iran from going nuclear. And Iran is increasingly, if indirectly, killing Western troops and sabotaging the new democracies of the Middle East. All potentially pointing to an armed confrontation with Iran. But with an anti-war Congress that has already signaled opposition to action against Iran, is there even a possibility of such a thing?

It was not so many years ago that another "lame duck" president, facing a hostile Congress and a United Nations Security Council veto, launched an air war. In March of 1999, President Bill Clinton had 22 months remaining in his final term. Both houses of Congress were vehemently opposed to the Administration, so much so that the House of Representatives had recently made Clinton only the second president to be impeached. Russia, on the Security Council, was certain to veto any resolution for action against Russia's "little brothers," the Serbs.

Nonetheless, invoking the support of NATO, Clinton waged a 78-day air war on Serbia over the issue of Kosovo, and by the time the bombs stopped dropping, Congress had done as it usually does and capitulated to the Commander-in-Chief, funding the operations with money to spare.

This was the trend through the 1990s. It is mistaken for a placid period, but the military missions came one after another: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, plus many strikes on Iraq, attacks against Afghanistan and Sudan, and a major show of force off Taiwan. All while the United States Armed Forces was being hacked to half its 1992 size, leaving a rump of the Cold War army that would have to improvise and take up the new war against Islamic fascism as of 2001. Congress might as well have stayed home. The Clinton Administration ordered half a dozen military actions citing UN resolutions or NATO support, but without the advance approval of Congress, and often over Congressional opposition.

The Bush Administration, for all the Iraq resolution rejections at the UN Security Council, did seek and receive prior Congressional consent for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, in the 2001 and 2002 "Authorization for Use of Military Force" resolutions, on top of the standing Iraq Liberation Act of 1998.

Of course, the aerial campaigns of the 1990s are an order of magnitude or two down from the full-scale, "boots-on-the-ground," regime-changing wars of today, but it is mainly '90s-style air strikes that are being considered for Iran.

The most pertinent U.S. law in the Iran case may be the 1973 War Powers Act. It was passed by a radicalized post-Vietnam Congress, overriding a veto by President Richard Nixon, and was intended to restrict the role of Commander-in-Chief. But it actually codified the principle that a president can order military action without Congressional authorization, requiring only that the president seek approval within 60 days -- assuming the operation has lasted that long -- and report to Congress within 48 hours.

Presidents since Nixon have tended to take a dim view of the War Powers Act -- Clinton called it "constitutionally defective" -- but it remains the most explicit expression in law of the Congressional view on war powers.

If all this is a sullying of the U.S. Constitution, it is one with a long and respectable pedigree. The United States has used military force a couple hundred times in its couple of centuries; the majority of those deployments have lacked Congressional consent, and only five times has Congress actually declared war as per the Constitution. The subordination of Congress, in its current form, started with President Harry Truman in 1950, and subsequent administrations have entrenched the practice of committing U.S. forces first and asking for permission later, if at all.

Part of the rationale for this is legitimate enough: The necessity of immediate action or an element of surprise. Conducting public hearings, debates, and votes on a military mission for weeks or months beforehand does let the cat out of the bag. But the motivations are also less noble. Congresses are often hostile to the executive branch and likely to automatically refuse approval for "the president's war," administrations tend to view Congress as a second-rate institution on matters of war and peace, and Congresses can be divided, not to mention loath to claim responsibility for risky missions. So presidents often invoke the fullest interpretation of the Commander-in-Chief mantle, and order an operation unilaterally, Congress notwithstanding.

We would be getting ahead of ourselves to assume there will necessarily be an Iran attack. The sabres have yet to be rattled by the Bush Administration, after all. But the question is effectively the President's to decide. He will order strikes on Iran or not, and his lame duck status, the disposition of Congress, and the vetoes on the UN Security Council will have much less to do with it than his judgement of the costs of action and inaction.

Andrew W. Smith/Andrew Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia

The John McCain longshot

Republicans have won seven of the past ten presidential elections. Two of the three lost elections came when the Republican base found the Republican nominee to be insufficiently conservative on domestic policy, and a substantial third party candidacy was mounted. In both elections the Democrat won on the strength of less than half the popular vote. The years were 1992 and 1996, and the Democrat was Bill Clinton, who won in '92 with only 43 percent of the popular vote, and in '96 with 49 percent.

That history is rehearsed here on the occasion of a new poll out of Rasmussen Reports -- which forecast the 2004 presidential vote with uncanny precision -- and of declarations from the more conservative quarters in American politics, including especially James Dobson.

The Rasmussen poll sets Hillary Clinton against Rudy Giuliani, Clinton as Democrat nominee for president and Giuliani as the Republican, then inserts a third-party challenger who satisfies the conservative base of the Republican Party on domestic policy, with the result that Clinton wins, but on the strength of 46 percent of the popular vote. I.e., the candidate who unites the outstanding 54 percent bids fair to become next president of the United States.


And so we come to the conservative base of the Republican Party. James Dobson doesn't presume to act as some official spokesman for the base, but I presume to know him particularly and the base generally to where I can say with some authority that Dobson makes a reasonable representation of the values and votes of devout Christian and traditionally-minded core conservatives. Threats of a third party conservative kamikaze in the event that Rudy Giuliani is Republican nominee are not novel, but on October 8 Dobson appeared on Hannity and Colmes and uttered the starkest pronouncement I have yet heard, that under no circumstances will he vote Giuliani.

In light of the Rasmussen poll and the Dobson declaration, the picture is clearing, that Hillary Clinton cannot command half of the popular vote, and that the Republican Party cannot seize on that with a nominee who doesn't first satisfy its base on domestic policy. Defense and foreign policy don't figure in this, incidentally, the principal Republican candidates being agreed on "beyond the water's edge" questions.

The lessons of '92 and '96 were that Republicans lose nationally when their base is unenthused, that motivating the conservative base goes most of the way to winning national election. Most Americans are not Republican, but most Americans are conservative, and to the extent the Republican Party is the conservative party, it stands to win the most votes in most elections. Those lessons were taken to heart by Karl Rove and his class of strategists particularly, and presumably the thought has occurred to Rove et al. that if the Republican nomination goes again to a less-reliably conservative candidate, the lessons will have been unlearned.

John McCain as of this writing may not qualify for the top tier of the Republican presidential field. But it was one presidential cycle ago that John Kerry ascended from sub-McCainian primary polling to Democrat presidential nominee, and McCain has compared better against Hillary Clinton than some of those Republicans who rank ahead of him in the primary polls.


The Powerline blog on October 7 posted what is to me the shrewdist observation on John McCain and the Rebublican base: McCain is disliked by many Republicans for many reasons, but he is a conservative, and to pull the lever for John McCain would be a good deal less disagreeable than a vote for Giuliani or Romney, to the conservative base. McCain has managed to be a bad Republican but a better conservative than Giuliani and Romney, who are good Republicans but spottier in their conservatism.

And there is another, probably sillier point. 43 of the 43 presidents of the United States have been male, and 42 of those 43 have been what is called in America "WASP". That is a very resilient tendency of history. Of the candidates with national appeal in both parties, there are precious few who satisfy that "historical tendency" test. One is John McCain.


John McCain is a longshot for the presidency, certainly, and the Republican nomination may be the longer part of that longshot, but it may be that McCain makes a more likely "next president of the United States" than the leaders and first runners-up of both parties as of this writing. The core conservative activists now demurring on the prospective Republican nominees are sounding an alarm that may yet be heeded. And they are allowing an opening for John McCain. It would take a comeback on the order of John Kerry's comeback following the Iowa caucuses in 2004, but that's recent demonstration that it can be done.