posted 08-26-2002 12:25 AM               

Some See Such Support As Politically Helpful

By Mike Allen and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers

Monday, August 26, 2002; Page A01

Lawyers for President Bush have concluded he can launch an attack on Iraq without new approval from Congress, in part because they say that permission remains in force from the 1991 resolution giving Bush's father authority to wage war in the Persian Gulf, according to administration officials.

At the same time, some administration officials are arguing internally that the president should seek lawmakers' backing anyway to build public support and to avoid souring congressional relations. If Bush took that course, he still would be likely to assert that congressional consent was not legally necessary, the officials said.

Whatever the White House decides about its obligations under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, some House and Senate leaders appear determined to push resolutions of support for ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein when Congress returns after Labor Day because they consider the issue too grave for Congress to be sidestepped.

Administration officials say privately that military strikes against Hussein's regime are virtually inevitable, although all the specifics have not been decided and action is not imminent.

Bush has said repeatedly he will consult lawmakers before deciding how to proceed but has pointedly stopped short of saying he will request their approval. The difference between getting legislators' opinions, as opposed to their permission, could lead to a showdown this fall between Congress and the White House.

"We don't want to be in the legal position of asking Congress to authorize the use of force when the president already has that full authority," said a senior administration official involved in setting the strategy. "We don't want, in getting a resolution, to have conceded that one was constitutionally necessary."

Harold Hongju Koh, a professor of international law at Yale Law School who was an assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, called it shortsighted for the administration to try to avoid a full congressional debate about such an expensive and perilous operation.

"The constitutional structure tries to make war hard to get into, so the president has to show leadership and make his case to the elected representatives," Koh said. "This argument may permit them to get us into the war, but it won't give them the political support at home and abroad to sustain that effort."

Whether to secure formal congressional support is only one of many questions confronting Bush as he decides on a course of action toward Iraq. The president has strongly signaled his interest in toppling Hussein's regime, in large measure because of what administration officials describe as the country's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. But Bush has not settled on the kind of military attack to pursue, nor has he mounted a full-blown effort to line up support from allies or the U.S. public for an invasion.

Inside the White House, a full-throated debate over some of these issues has been underway for some time. In particular, White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales had his deputy, Timothy E. Flanigan, develop the administration's legal position on questions surrounding a war with Iraq.

That legal review is largely complete, officials said, with the consensus emerging that the president would not be legally bound to obtain approval for action against Iraq. In making this case, officials point first to the Constitution's designation of the president as commander-in-chief.

Administration officials also cite the 1991 Persian Gulf resolution authorizing the use of military force against Iraq. The resolution allowed the use of force to enforce United Nations Security Council resolutions, including demands that Iraq eliminate weapons of mass destruction and open the country to U.N. inspectors.
"No one thinks that Iraq has fulfilled them," an administration official said.

Administration officials said their position was bolstered by a Sept. 14 resolution -- passed 98 to 0 in the Senate and 420 to 1 in the House -- endorsing a military response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That argument would depend on linking Iraq and al Qaeda.

Although the administration has not publicly made this case in detail, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said at a July 30 news conference, "Are there al Qaeda in Iraq? Yes." Last week, U.S. intelligence officials told The Washington Post that a number of high-ranking al Qaeda members have taken refuge in Iraq.

War-powers disputes have occurred frequently since 1800, when the Supreme Court upheld President John Adams's undeclared war with France. The Constitution grants the president the duties and powers of commander-in-chief of the armed forces. But because of the framers' concern that an unchecked executive might make war because of thirst for glory or personal revenge, they gave Congress the power to declare war. The result is a murky separation of powers that has led to arguments and even litigation between the White House and Congress.

The 1973 War Powers Resolution was intended to bridge the roles by allowing the president to act unilaterally with military force for 60 to 90 days, with congressional approval required for troops to remain engaged in hostilities after that.

Every president since has objected to the resolution, beginning with Richard M. Nixon, who vetoed its creation but was overridden by lawmakers dismayed by the escalation of U.S. deployments in the undeclared war in Vietnam. Vice President Cheney, when he was a member of Congress from Wyoming, called for the repeal of the resolution, which he said was "unworkable and of dubious constitutionality."

Critics of the Bush administration's expansive view of presidential power include some leading conservatives. "George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt never claimed war powers close to what Bush is claiming," said Bruce Fein, a constitutional scholar who was associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration.

Michael J. Glennon, an international law professor at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, specifically questioned the administration's reliance on the Gulf War resolution. He said that authority "was narrowly circumscribed and was directed at reversing the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait."

Glennon said the authority apparently ended on April 6, 1991, when Iraq formalized a cease-fire with a notification to the U.N. Security Council. "Once extinguished, the authority did not revive when Iraq failed to comply with its obligations," Glennon said.

Administration officials have intensively researched President George H.W. Bush's approach as he began the buildup for Operation Desert Storm, and it appears to track the evolution of their own thinking. The elder Bush initially said the War Powers Resolution did not apply to the buildup in the Persian Gulf, triggered by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1989, because hostilities were not imminent.

Bob Woodward reported in "The Commanders" that Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Maine), later defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, told Bush during a White House meeting in 1990 that the administration should seek a vote of support for the operation "for the sake of unity between the administration and the Congress, for the sake of the troops in the desert who deserved a government unified."

The elder Bush eventually did so. While still insisting that a resolution was not necessary, his administration lobbied hard for it. In January 1991, it passed the Senate by 52 to 47 and the House by 250 to 183.

As consistently as presidents have husbanded their war-making authority, Congress has tried to preserve its role. This time, Senate leaders -- including Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), who views himself as the guardian of Senate prerogatives -- maintain that the president must come to Congress before making a massive commitment of troops to oust Hussein. Byrd recently asked a dozen constitutional scholars for their views about a president's legal authority to take military action in Iraq.

Although administration officials are adamant that no authorization is required, some have begun to argue internally that it might be desirable as a matter of politics and statesmanship.

"The legal question and the practical question may be very different," one administration official said. "There is a view that while there is not a legal necessity to seek anything further, as a matter of statesmanship and politics and practicality, it's necessary -- or at a minimum, strongly advisable -- to do it."

One compromise would be for Bush's allies in
Congress to introduce a resolution of support without having the president ask for it. Administration officials said they are concerned, though, that a war-powers resolution might add conditions, such as specifying that military action in Iraq is acceptable only for the purpose of eliminating weapons of mass destruction.

posted 08-27-2002 02:50 PM            

Saddam To Be Target Of
Britain's New 'E-Bomb'
The Telegraph - London
8-27-2

AND
http://www.rense.com/general28/pup.htm

Saudi Press Trashes Cheney
As Israeli Puppet
By Carl Limbacher
NewsMax.com Staff
8-27-2

posted 08-29-2002 12:49 PM               

By NEIL A. LEWIS with DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Aug. 28 — Senior administration officials said today that they expected President Bush eventually to seek some new explicit sign of approval from Congress — but not necessarily a formal vote — before launching any military campaign against Iraq.

At the same time, officials in Washington and in Crawford, Tex., where Mr. Bush is in the last four days of vacation at his ranch, are engaged in an intense debate over whether they should seek to involve the United Nations one last time to bolster the case they want to make in Congress against Saddam Hussein.

As one top adviser described the argument, Mr. Bush must decide "whether to go it alone or go to the U.N." with one final if largely symbolic effort to force Mr. Hussein to re-admit arms inspectors, who left Iraq three and a half years ago.

While Mr. Bush has not expressed an opinion on that issue, a White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, told reporters today in Crawford that "our goal is disarmament," and added, "we know that we can't verify disarmament."

Although the officials said a consensus had been reached among Mr. Bush's advisers about how to proceed with Congress, one senior official cautioned tonight that Mr. Bush had not reviewed any final recommendations and that members of the cabinet had not yet discussed the subject.

"We haven't gotten there yet," the official said.Despite confident assertions by the White House this week that the president has all the legal authority and Congressional approval he needs for an invasion of Iraq, officials said there was in fact widespread recognition that it would be unwise to attack without a new expression of support from Congress.

One official suggested that the statements indicating that new Congressional approval was not necessary were a way of preparing the ground for talks with lawmakers. The official added that the assertion might make Congress more pliant on the nature or wording of any statement backing military action.It was "like the opening round in a negotiation," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Many lawmakers have lined up to denounce the administration for asserting that the 1991 resolution authorizing the Persian Gulf war provides a legal justification for a new invasion.

One official said that while there may be a by-the-book legal argument, "it's very hard to get away with it in a political sense."As if to underscore that point, Senator John Warner of Virginia, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, today complained of "an information gap" between the White House and Congress and called for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to be summoned to the committee to explain the need for military action.

In Crawford, Mr. Bush and his aides have spent considerable time weighing the potential benefits and risks of turning to the United Nations in a last-ditch effort to develop an international consensus that Mr. Hussein must go, officials said.

Some administration officials believe that another rebuff from Mr. Hussein regarding inspectors would strengthen the administration's case before Congress. But a failure to win Security Council approval of military action to enforce Iraq's commitment to disarm after the gulf war could undercut the administration.

Secretary General Kofi Annan seemed to confirm those fears at a news conference today in Botswana, when he said, "The U.N. is not agitating for military action" against Iraq.

China and Russia, which both have veto power in the Security Council, oppose military action. France, which also holds a veto, has demanded a Security Council vote and has made it clear it would oppose military action without evidence of an imminent threat from Iraq.

The debate over whether to continue demanding unfettered weapons inspections and whether to seek explicit Security Council approval for action accelerated this week in part because it became evident that Vice President Dick Cheney and a former secretary of state, James A. Baker III, who was a close confidant of the former President Bush, see the issue quite differently.

Mr. Cheney made clear on Monday that the return of inspectors to Iraq, even if they could act freely, would be useless and dangerous, because it may allow Mr. Hussein more time to proceed with weapons development.

But Mr. Baker argued in an essay Sunday on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times that returning to the United Nations is a political necessity, a view heard often in the State Department.Some senior American diplomats said this week that Mr. Baker may have been acting as a surrogate for the former president, and that the essay was an effort to make sure the younger Mr. Bush heard the counsel of those outside the most hawkish administration circles.

Mr. Bush has not declared himself on this issue, but the working assumption in the White House is that he agrees with Mr. Cheney. "Cheney doesn't freelance," one senior official said.

In disclosing this week that Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, had told the president that he has all the authority he needs to wage war against Iraq, the White House reopened a debate that has periodically vexed policymakers: Can a president launch a war without explicit Congressional approval?

Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, told reporters that Mr. Gonzales concluded that the authority to invade Iraq rests on three legs: the 1991 resolution endorsing the Persian Gulf war, a Congressional resolution enacted just after the Sept. 11 attacks and the president's role as commander in chief.

In reaching back to the 1991 resolution, the administration quickly drew critics both in Congress and outside government.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, the incoming dean at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and an authority on international law, said: "Using the authorization from 1991 would be an enormous stretch.

The idea that Congress would authorize the use of force more than a decade later is something that the text could be stretched to cover, but it would completely contravene the spirit of the resolution and the underlying constitutional values at stake."

Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, joined others in Congress in criticizing Mr. Gonzales's conclusions. "It should come as no surprise that the White House lawyers, who draw their paychecks from the executive branch, are straining to defend the president's attempted power grab," he said on Tuesday.

While officials emphasized that no final decision had been made on how to approach Congress, they said extensive internal discussions had taken place. It remained unclear whether the administration would seek support in the form of a resolution, which would require a vote in either or both houses, or some other assent, like a statement from Congressional leaders.

Although the Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war, presidents have resisted the notion that they must seek approval before dispatching troops. Scholars have estimated that presidents have sent forces abroad 120 to 200 times, but Congress has only formally declared war on five occasions: the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War and the two world wars.

The first President Bush sought Congressional approval for the gulf war, but he did so under pressure, portraying his action as a courtesy to Congress.

Administration officials said they believe that the 1991 resolution would apply to a new invasion for several reasons. One senior official said that in addition to requiring the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, the resolution gave the president the authority to use military force to restore peace and security.

posted 08-30-2002 01:18 PM            

In the letter, Lincoln opposes the President's argument that a
"preemptive strike" was needed, and that only he need be the
judge of that, by using principles from the founding fathers.
George W. Bush: take heed. (This letter was written three
months after Lincoln's famous "Spot Resolution," where he had
questioned whether the "spot" that the Mexican forces initially
attacked, was, in fact, American territory. The spelling and
emphasis are as in the original letter.)

To William H. Herndon
Dear William: Washington, Feb. 15, 1848 Your letter of the
29th Jany. was received last night. Being
exclusively a constitutional argument, I wish to submit some
reflections upon it in the same spirit of kindness that I know
actuates you. Let me first state what I understand to be your
position. It is, that if it shall become NECESSARY, TO REPEL
INVASION, the President may, without violation of the
Constitution, cross the line, and INVADE the teritory(sic) of
another country; and that whether such NECESSITY exists in any
given case, the President is to be the SOLE judge.

Before going further, consider well whether this is, or is
not your position. If it is, it is a position that neither the
President himself, nor any friend of his, so far as I know, has
ever taken. Their only positions are first, that the soil was
OURS where hostilities commenced, and second, that whether it was
rightfully ours OR NOT, CONGRESS HAD ANNEXED IT, and the
President, for that reason was bound to defend it, both of which
are as clearly proved to be false in fact, as you can prove that
your house is not mine. That soil was not ours; and Congress did
not annex or attempt to annex it.

But to return to your position: Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation,
whenever HE shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him
to do so, WHENEVER HE MAY CHOOSE TO SAY he deems it necessary for
such a purpose - and you allow him to make war at pleasure.
Study to see if you can fix ANY LIMIT to his power in this respect,
after you have given him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he
should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to
prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You
may say to him, "I see no probability of the British invading us"
but he will say to you "be silent; I see it, if you don't."
The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making
power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the
following reasons. Kings had always been involving and
impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not
always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our
Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly
oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that
NO ONE MAN should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon
us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our
President where kings have always stood.

Write soon again.
Yours truly, Abraham Lincoln.