I did not support the Iraq War. I disagreed with it from the very beginning and never felt that the Bush administration was telling the truth when it came to the imminent threat of a “mushroom cloud." That said, we are stuck in Iraq, and now the Bush administration has turned its attention to Iran. It is hard to say what will happen with Iran, but if Bush is hell-bent on attacking Iran, there is a correct way to do it.
First and foremost, the president needs to push a formal declaration of war through Congress. The Founding Fathers gave Congress and only Congress the power to declare war. Sure, it made the president "commander in chief" of the armed forces, but any honest reading of the Founders’ intentions and the actual text of the Constitution itself clearly shows the Congress to have the final say on whether or not American troops are sent into battle.
This is no small matter. In fact, it is pretty clear at this point that President Bush, by pushing the nation into war on his own and not demanding that Congress fully debate and explore the intelligence and other issues associated with going to war in Iraq, has created the mess our military now faces there. This lack of accountability on the part of Congress on what amounts to the most important decision a nation will ever face has allowed many who voted for the original resolution to criticize the prosecution of the war and the intelligence it was based upon.
Of course, in the run-up to the Iraq War, Bush left no doubt that he believed he alone was the final arbiter of whether or not we attacked. Members of Congress, like Pontius Pilate, who didn’t want to get his hands dirty by taking a difficult moral stand in the face of political opposition, (by and large) chose to wash their hands of the matter and let Bush have his war.
Now, the president and the more radical neoconservative elements of his administration are in a slow burn, working behind the scenes to develop a casus belli for war in Iran. But this time, skeptics in his administration, the media, and the population as a whole are not cowed by the aftermath of 9/11 and heated rhetoric. If we are to have a war against Iran, at least we can have a full and honest debate about it.
The first step must be full-scale congressional hearings in both houses. If Congress has time to meddle in the internal workings of Major League Baseball’s substance abuse policies, it has more than ample time to start listening to pro and con evidence as to whether or not Iran really has nuclear capabilities and what they might do if they actually were to attain such capabilities. Congress must have these debates this time around in order to educate themselves and the American people. The burden has to be on President Bush and the administration to prove the case for war even if it might result in the declassification of documents they might not otherwise want to declassify. After all, Bush has now based his entire foreign policy on spreading democracy around the world; in democracies, important decisions are made based on an open debate.
Once full and extensive hearings have been held, and, if congressional leadership decides to go ahead and do so, a vote must be held on a declaration of war, not on any non-binding resolution. As a nation we have not fought a declared war in this country since World War II. It is no coincidence that WWII is seen as "the last good war" by so many Americans.
This declaration of war is ultimately the key to the successful prosecution of the war. Only a war that has explicit congressional approval and that is viewed as being adequately discussed and debated will gain and keep the support of the American people for long enough to achieve whatever mission our military and political leaders set forth for Iran.
If I were in Congress, I can say unequivocally that I would not vote for any declaration of war, but I must admit that I would feel far better about the political health of this nation if a genuine debate on the issues presented by Iran’s potential development of nuclear weapons was held. If President Bush takes us to war and Congress lets him do it without a constitutional declaration of war, we will have learned nothing from the history of Iraq and will thus be doomed to repeat it (or worse).
