Stop Clinton From Carrying On This War

No doubt about it. We’re heading straight for the blood bath. Now we’re getting word from the White House that a buildup of 50,000 troops on the Kosovo border with Macedonia is the next order of business. Wait for the next upward revision to 150,000 in a week or so. Then 200,000 . . .

We’ve got an administration that doesn’t know how to cut its losses and that is therefore prepared to wipe Serbia off the map rather than lose face. In short, we’re in the countdown phase to disaster. Now we need something that took half a decade to build toward back in the Vietnam era: a huge peace march on Washington. We need a Congress that will go on telling the president loud and clear: You have no mandate for war, and you won’t get the money to fight it.

On May 25, Clinton was in breach of the War Powers Act of 1973. Spare a moment and travel back with me to that same year and see why Congress voted in that law, over Richard Nixon’s veto.

Here we are, on the morning of Aug. 7, 1973, in the Richard B. Russell Senate Office Building, Room 235, where Sen. Stuart Symington (D-Mo.) is presiding over a hearing into the secret bombing of Cambodia. Also present: Sens. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) and Harold Hughes (D-Iowa). The first witness this summer morning is George Moses, who had been an intelligence officer in the 7th Air Force, serving in Vietnam. It was Moses who had written to Hughes alerting him to the secret bombing. Moses read aloud his letter to Hughes: “Two hundred years ago,” it concludes, “we put our faith in the judgment of the people, and that judgment has proved sound.”

“And why,” Hughes asked, “did you send this letter?”

“I have a strong belief in the Constitution as the working document by which this country operates,” Moses replied.

Hughes had said far more explosively a week earlier, when he roared to his colleagues and to the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Earle G. Wheeler: “I want the record to show damned clearly that I totally reject the concept of representation of the American people by notification of one or two members of a certain committee in this Congress of what the war policies of this country are, and if that is or has been the policy of the Pentagon, and still is, I reject it totally. The Congress must correct it, or there never will be a moment in the history of this country in the future when the people will have a hand in the declaration of war or the conduct of war over international borders.”

Congress did “correct” the situation, as Hughes proposed. It passed the War Powers Act of 1973, which requires that within 48 hours of introducing U.S. forces into hostilities, the president must report to Congress. Then within 60 days, he must terminate such use of force unless he gets explicit authority from both houses. Such authority denied, he must withdraw forces.

And authority has been denied Clinton. Congress has now seen to that a couple of times. First, the White House was chilled by a defeat in the House on April 28, when Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) persuaded 25 fellow Demcrats to join him in voting with 187 Republicans to withhold House support for the bombing. Clinton had been intending to use the House vote as authorization not merely for bombing, but for further military escalation including a ground war.

Then, House opponents of war on Serbia dealt the administration another stinging defeat. House leaders had been planning to eliminate a provision in the $300 billion defense authorization bill that would have blocked funds for the war. But amid furious objections from both Republicans and Democrats allied with Kucinich, the leadership on both sides of the aisle realized this tactic wouldn’t fly and abruptly withdrew the entire authorization bill for two weeks.

So Clinton still has no congressional authority for war and faces the possibility that a federal judge will declare he is flouting the Constitution. What measure of public support the air war had is draining away.

Since Clinton sets his course by polling numbers, our best hope now is that Congress and the people send him an even-clearer message that escation of the war would spell political disaster for him and his administration.