“Listening to him,” Cheney wrote of Powell, “made me think about how Vietnam had shaped the views of America’s top generals. They had seen loss of public support for the Vietnam War undermine the war effort as well as damage the reputation of the military. There was a view in the Pentagon, for which I had a lot of sympathy, that the civilian leadership had blown it in Vietnam by failing to make the tough decisions that were required to have a chance at prevailing. I understood where Powell was coming from, but I couldn’t accept it. Our responsibility at the Department of Defense was to make sure the president had a full range of options to consider.”
If Cheney believed Powell was dragging his heels all through the early stages of Desert Shield, he was partly right. Throughout the process Powell had agitated for a clear statement from the president of mission objectives, a real effort by the president’s political team to win the support of the American people, and a commitment of all necessary resources. He would admit to overstepping his bounds in pressing the president on these essentially political questions, but he would not apologize for it. He had observed very little internal debate in the White House about whether or not we ought to make this war, and he believed the men and women sent to fight in the Persian Gulf deserved a real and genuine consideration of that question by their civilian leaders. He’d lived through two tours in Vietnam, seen his brother officers demoralized, seen the Army disavowed by the general public and close to broken as an institution. Reluctant warrior? “Guilty,” Powell would write in his autobiography. “War is a deadly game; and I do not believe in spending the lives of Americans lightly.” There would be no repeat of Vietnam while he was in charge, no lives needlessly thrown away. “Perhaps I was the ghost of Vietnam,” he told a television interviewer in 1995. “If it caused me to be the skunk at the picnic,” his compatriots in the George Herbert Walker Bush administration could all “take a deep smell.”
According to Powell’s excellent biographer, Karen DeYoung, the general’s presentation at the October 30 meeting gave the president’s closest confidant on matters of war and peace, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, a snootful of something he didn’t much like. “Scowcroft was taken aback by the size of the attack force Powell was proposing,” DeYoung wrote of that moment. “The military, he believed, had moved from reluctance to undertake an offensive operation at all to a deliberately inflated plan designed to make the president think twice about the effort.”
Scowcroft … he was onto something there.
The thing was, there was no other institutional brake on the war-making machine, at least not one the president acknowledged. One of the last remaining brake lines had been severed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In the previous year, since the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the beginning of the end for the United States’ Cold War foe of more than forty years, the Department of Defense had been fighting a fierce bureaucratic battle to hold on to the lion’s share of its spectacularly large Reagan-inflated budget. It was still a dangerous world out there, and Secretary of Defense Cheney, for one, meant to keep the nation’s military on high idle. He had made it clear that all those hopelessly irenic congressmen and senators like Ted Kennedy who insisted on redirecting resources from the military into programs like job retraining and education and—my God!—universal health care were simply harebrained. “In a speech in Washington before a Princeton University student group,” the Los Angeles Times reported a month after the fall of the Wall, “Cheney excoriated ‘irresponsible’ critics who suggest ‘there is some kind of big peace dividend here to be cashed in and to buy all the goodies everybody on Capitol Hill can think about buying.’ ”
Within six months, the Hill’s most powerful Democrat on the budget had conceded Cheney’s point. The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee bluntly waved off a gathering of mayors who asked that defense money be reallocated to urban programs. “There’s no money.… The peace dividend is already going to be swallowed.”
The real “peace dividend,” it turned out, in a twist of sad and stunning irony, was that it became much easier to make war in places like the Persian Gulf without worrying about the opportunity cost for our ongoing standoff with the Soviets. “We could be so lavish with resources because the world had changed,” Powell later said. To fight a war in the Gulf, for example, “we could now afford to pull divisions out of Germany that had been there for the past forty years to stop a Soviet offensive that was no longer coming.”
And of course Reagan’s presidential antidote for the nation’s Vietnam syndrome—to simply ignore the Constitution, or go around the Congress, when you want to make war—had proved hugely successful in cutting the constraints on war in all but one particular. The only line still tying down the US war machine was the legacy of Creighton Abrams, the good old Abrams Doctrine—the idea that sending the military into war would mean, by definition, sending the country into war. In 1990, it was not possible to mobilize the military for action of any considerable size (as Lyndon Johnson had tragically done in Vietnam) without calling up the Guard and Reserves. The wrenching actuality of calling all those weekend warriors to active duty—active combat duty, active you-could-be-killed-on-the-field-of-battle duty—would not go unnoticed. Colin Powell had told President Bush, “Sir, call-up means pulling people out of their jobs. It affects businesses. It means disrupting thousands of families. It’s a major political decision.” The Abrams Doctrine made sure that a decision in Washington, DC, to start a war rang clear in every state and every city and just about every one-horse town in America. Colin Powell was counting on it.
Not that Powell was opposed to kicking Saddam’s ass, but he hoped to have public recognition, and public debate, and a real show of popular support, before the bombs started flying. When the president’s pushy little chief of staff, John Sununu, had suggested they could simply leave the Reserves at home and still whip Saddam, Powell insisted. The Reserves needed to be called up, right away, and a lot of them.
The best Sununu and the White House politicals could get was an agreement to hold the official announcement of the call-up for a week or ten days. “The political experts,” wrote Scowcroft, “wanted to delay the announcement until after the congressional elections.” The decision with the war council had been made on October 30, the elections were November 6, and on November 8 the troops were officially called up. By the time Cheney picked up the phone and told congressional leaders that the president’s massive and momentous buildup on the Kuwaiti border was under way … and by the time George Bush stepped up to a White House podium to make the bland statement that “I have today directed the secretary of defense to increase the size of the US forces committed to Desert Shield to ensure that the coalition has an adequate offensive military option should that be necessary to achieve our common goals,” warning bells were already pealing throughout the land. The formal announcement rang clear and rang loud. It was the Abrams Doctrine at work. Not just the president, not just the military, but the country was facing up to the very real possibility of war. “After 14 weeks of proceeding virtually unchallenged at home,” the New York Times lead political reporter wrote within days of Bush’s announcement, “the United States policy in the Persian Gulf has become the focus of a national debate.”
Right!
The debate got tense, and in a hurry. The 101st Congress had come to a close before the elections, and the 102nd wasn’t scheduled to reconvene until the beginning of January, but that just meant there wasn’t much else on the national agenda to crowd out war talk. Big-time Democrats in the Senate ran for the open and available microphones and, as Bush saw it, started playing to the headline writers. Ted Kennedy remonstrated against the president’s reckless “headlong” drive toward war with Saddam. “Silence by Congress,” Massachusetts’s senior senator said, “is an abdication of our constitutional responsibility and an acquiescence in war.” The Senate majority leader George Mitchell was tougher on the president, stating flatly that Bush “has no
legal authority, none whatever,” to take the country to war. “The Constitution clearly invests that great responsibility in the Congress and the Congress alone.”
And it wasn’t just Democrats.
Even Dick Lugar, a Republican senator, supposedly a friend to the administration, was promising to stick the congressional nose deep into the White House’s war-making business. He suggested it might be prudent for the president to spend as much energy convincing the American people that a shooting war against the Iraqi Army was the right thing to do as he was spending in convincing the rest of the world. Lugar went so far as to call for a rare special session of a lame-duck Congress to vote on a resolution authorizing a war in the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, leaders in both the House and the Senate let Bush know they would get going on oversight hearings into the president’s policies in the Gulf tout de suite, before the new Congress convened.
As far as Bush was concerned, this aggression would not stand either.
The president called the congressional leaders into the White House and fired a warning shot. He had bent over backward to “consult” with Congress, he said, but “consultation is a two-way street. I think it is only fair that I get to hear your specific ideas in private about the tough choices we face before people go out and take public stances.” He pulled out press clippings; read them back, verbatim, to his loudest antagonists; and told them that Saddam might just get the message that the United States didn’t have the spine to stay the course. “This is the wrong signal to send at this time.” And about all that talk of Congress having an exclusive power to declare war? Forget it. According to one report out of the meeting, the president had pulled a copy of the Constitution from his suit jacket and waved it in front of the bipartisan congressional delegation. Bush knew what the document said about war powers, he told the group, but “it also says that I’m the commander in chief.”
What’d they think, he was some kind of wimp?
There were some members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who were squarely with Bush. They were with him on the old Reagan line that open public debate was a dangerous thing. Republican Senate leader Bob Dole asked, “How do we have open debate without sending the wrong signal to Saddam?” Republican congressman Henry Hyde went so far as to say that “Congress are supposed to be leaders. We should be carrying the [president’s] message to the people.”
But the point was, the debate in Congress had already begun. The call-up of the Reserves had assured it. There was going to be a public airing of the merits of this war, no matter what the president said.
On November 20, a few days after Bush’s “I’m the commander in chief” performance, a group of forty-five House members led by Rep. Ron Dellums gathered the Capitol Hill press corps to announce that they had filed a lawsuit asking the federal district court in Washington, DC, to demand that the president send to Congress a formal declaration of war to be debated and voted on before American troops were sent into battle. “There is no necessity for quick action here,” said one congressman. “We are not being invaded. There is no reason at all why the Constitution in this case should not be honored. And that’s what this lawsuit is all about.”
This was a more aggressive challenge to the president than that initial warning letter from the Speaker of the House three weeks earlier, before 200,000 more Americans had been pointed east and told to pack. Dellums and company were essentially asking a judge to tie the president’s hands unless and until he got Congress on board. “Some people have said, ‘Well, don’t you believe that this would inconvenience the president?’ ” Dellums said. “The Constitution is designed to inconvenience one person from taking us to war. War is a very solemn and sobering and extraordinary act and it should not be granted to one person.”
“Some people are saying you’re not inconveniencing [the president],” one reporter observed. “You’re undermining his ability to conduct an effective policy in the Persian Gulf.”
“To do anything other than what we’re suggesting here is to undermine the Constitution of the United States,” Dellums countered. “This is not the president’s sole prerogative.”
In the Senate, the Armed Services Committee, chaired by Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, convened hearings on military readiness and capability in the Gulf, but the hearings quickly turned to questions about the advisability of and the need for a shooting war in Kuwait. And not just whether we ought to fight a war like that, but who would get to say so. Nunn even called as a witness the sharp-eyed Vietnam vet and author James Webb, not long removed from a tour as Reagan’s secretary of the Navy, who argued that Bush needed to get a declaration of war from Congress. Further, if Bush really meant to start a war of this size, his actions ought to live up to the magnitude of that decision. Stop-lossing active-duty troops was one thing, calling up the Guard and Reserves was all well and good, but to knit this into American life even further, the president needed to reinstitute the draft. The entire country needed to feel it, not just the military.
Up till that point, all the president’s steps toward war had been taken unilaterally. But the sheer magnitude of his actions, the number of military personnel he’d had to involve, demanded attention and challenge. The Bush White House seemed to understand that, but to resent and resist it too. “We were confident that the Constitution was on our side when it came to the president’s discretion to use force if necessary,” wrote Brent Scowcroft. “If we sought congressional involvement, it would not be authority we were after, but support.”
Actually, again, not to insist, but the Constitution “with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.” But by 1990 the executive branch wasn’t operating as if this was true anymore. Sure, a president going to war would be wise to engage with Congress on the issue. But that engagement was not determinative of whether we would in fact have that war—it was akin to lining up support from some foreign, sometimes-friendly ally: friends with political benefits. Better to have them on board than not, but if they didn’t come along, no biggie.
Not only didn’t the “question of war” vest in the Legislature anymore—it shouldn’t, either. The loudest voice in the Bush White House in favor of steamrolling the national legislature was the secretary of defense, Dick Cheney. Cheney had cut his bureaucratic teeth (and exceedingly sharp they were) as White House chief of staff during the Gerald Ford presidency, back when Congress was first wielding its War Powers Resolution (stupid regulations!) and making unprecedented and unwelcome trips to the White House to stop Ford from taking the country into another war in Vietnam.
“Cheney and I dealt with this congressional backlash in the Ford White House,” Cheney’s mentor, Donald Rumsfeld, wrote in his autobiography. “In the early days of the Ford Administration, Bryce Harlow, the savvy White House Liaison to Congress, former Eisenhower aide, and friend, told me—and I am paraphrasing from memory: ‘The steady pressure by Congress and the courts is to reduce executive authority. It is inexorable, inevitable, and historical. Resolve that when you leave the White House, leave it with the same authorities it had when you came. Do not contribute to the erosion of presidential power on your watch.’ Harlow’s words left an impression on me, and, I suspect, on Cheney.”
Even before the congressional hearings on Saddam and Kuwait had commenced in November 1990, Secretary of Defense Cheney had shipped out to the Sunday talk-show circuit to sound the old Reagan line about the “risky proposition” of leaving national security decisions in the shaky hands of 535 members of Congress. “I take you back to September 1941, when World War II had been under way for two years,” Cheney said on Meet the Press. “Hitler had taken Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and was halfway to Moscow. And the Congress, in that setting, two months before Pearl Harbor, agreed to extend the draft for twelve more months … by just one vote.” That Saddam Hussein’s misbegotten—and already-stopped-dead-in-its-tracks—adventure in the Middle East was in no way comparable to Hitler�
�s blitzkrieg through Europe was beside Cheney’s point. Cheney’s point was that Congress was sure to get out that white paint … and run with the antelopes. Wimps.
Secretary Cheney was no more conciliatory when he went to Capitol Hill to testify at Nunn’s hearings; this was not a man coming hat in hand to ask his former colleagues for permission for anything. In an exchange with Sen. Edward Kennedy, Cheney laid down a stunning new marker for executive power.
KENNEDY: Barring an act of provocation, do you agree that the president must obtain the approval of Congress in advance before the United States attacks Iraq?
CHENEY: Senator, I do not believe the president requires any additional authorization from the Congress before committing US forces to achieve our objectives in the Gulf.… There have been some two hundred times, more than two hundred times, in our history, when presidents have committed US forces, and on only five of those occasions was there a prior declaration of war. And so I am not one who would argue, in this instance, that the president’s hands are tied or that he is unable, given his constitutional responsibilities as commander in chief, to carry out his responsibilities.
KENNEDY: Well, Mr. Secretary, we’re not talking about Libya [where Reagan had run a one-shot bombing raid on its leader, Muammar Qaddafi]. We’re not talking about Grenada.… We’re talking about 440,000 American troops who are over there. We’re talking about a major kind of American military involvement if it becomes necessary to do so. And do I understand from your response that you are prepared to tell the American people now that barring provocation by Saddam Hussein, that you believe [the president], and [the president] alone, can bring this country to war?
Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power Page 14