If you read closely between the warped
headlines of the establishment media, you will eventually find the
truth about Trump’s decision to strike the Syrian government: it was
illegal.
Yet
most mainstream media outlets clearly supported the
strike. Many U.S. allies also supported the strike, including so-called peaceful
countries such as New Zealand, which stated the strikes were a “proportional response to a
specific incident – the chemical weapons atrocity.” New Zealand also said they would
consider sending troops to Syria if the American government requested them.
Why
isn’t the legality of Trump’s reckless move even on the table for discussion?
Is
it because this is, yet again, no exception to the rule that — as history has
shown us — the United States president has the ultimate right and authority to
lead his country into war without congressional approval or approval from the
United Nations?
How
did this happen?
Following
the wars in Vietnam and Korea, the War
Powers Resolution was
passed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate in 1973 as a means
of curbing the ways by which the U.S. government could enter a war. Under the
act, congressional approval must be obtained before the American president can
commit the country to war. However, the fact that the president still has the
power to launch a war for a 60-day period, following notification to Congress
of the decision to commit U.S. armed forces to military action, still raises
some questions regarding its effective application.
In
1999, under the presidency of Bill Clinton, the United States participated in
NATO’s air war, which we were told was necessary in order to stop the Serbian
ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo. (It is also worth mentioning that the
International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia exonerated former
Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic last year.) This operation did not have a resolution from the United
Nations Security Council – one of two ways in which a country can go to war
with another country (the other is self-defense).
Bill
Clinton, a man who is often widely
confused as some sort of humanitarian, also bombed a
Sudanese pharmaceutical plant in
response to bomb blasts at American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
Clinton’s decision to strike a vital facility that produced medicine for a
struggling Sudanese economy killed thousands between the death toll from the
strike and the subsequent number of people who could no longer receive medical
treatment). The reason we don’t know the full horror of this atrocity is
because the U.S. vetoed a
proposed investigation into the crime.
In
2001, the U.S. also launched an invasion of Afghanistan in response to the
September 11 attacks. This was done without a specific U.N. Security Council
resolution at the time because many viewed the act as one of self-defense. Yet
no one seems concerned with the fact that the U.S. attacked Afghanistan in
response to an attack that involved no Afghans, at least
according to the CIA. Yes, al-Qaeda had a significant base in
Afghanistan, but it was the U.S. that put
them there in the first place.
In
2003, the U.S. launched another invasion, this time in Iraq. This did have U.N. Security Council resolutions
in reference to the events preceding the invasion, but not any resolution that
authorized force. In fact, many members of the Security Council were very
explicit about this fact, including permanent member France (which holds a veto
power).
“We
will not allow the passage of a planned resolution that would authorize the use
of force,” the French
foreign minister said at the time.
Knowing
they would never get a resolution that would explicitly or implicitly authorize
force, the U.S. invaded Iraq anyway. The U.N. Secretary General stated quite unequivocally:
“I
have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN Charter. From our point of
view and from the charter point of view it was illegal.”
Fast
forward a few years to peace prize laureate Barack Obama, who invaded Libya without
Congressional approval in
2011. The U.S. war establishment downplayed America’s
role in the Libyan war to try to justify its involvement yet conveniently
missed the fact that America’s
role was so integral it was deemed to be the “backbone” of any NATO offensive in the 2011
conflict.
Obama
took these war powers further than any president before him. He waged covert
wars and overt wars across so many countries
that Bush and Clinton paled in comparison. In a six-year period, he bombed seven majority-Muslim countries. He also
compiled a secret
“kill list,” personally signing off on murders once a week. The weekly ceremony
was aptly named “Terror Tuesdays.” During the tenure of Obama’s drone strike
assassination program, he also terminated
American citizens without
trial.
Most
notable, however, is Obama’s push to bomb Syria in 2013, which largely fell
through due to the mounting public opposition and even a lack of
support from some of America’s closest allies. His proposal
collapsed completely when Russia intervened diplomatically to provide an
alternative solution.
Never
one to admit defeat, Obama found backdoor
access to bomb Syrian territory a
year later when the terror group ISIS made headlines with the ruthless and
barbaric havoc they were unleashing throughout Iraq and Syria.
Yet
how much of this involved the domestic democratic process? Did Congress approve
a bombing campaign in Syria? Did the U.N. approve America’s decision to bomb a
sovereign country? Did the host country invite the American air force into
Syrian territory?
The
answer to all of these questions should be clear to anyone who has been paying
attention. None of these actions have any democratic accountability. The only
thing the Trump administration learned from this debacle in 2013 was not to
give the public or the international community any time to respond and to
immediately launch air strikes while
eating dessert with Syria’s quasi-ally. In that context, Trump
has expanded the war powers even further than Obama, who was at least subject
to many domestic and international constraints
at the time, whether intentionally or not.
In
full preparation of these developments, Anti-Media released an article in December 2016 entitled “The War Powers Trump Is About
to Inherit from Obama Are Scary as Hell.”
The
warning has apparently fallen on deaf ears. A terrifying aspect of this
horrific reality is that this expansion of the presidential war powers has been
manufactured on purpose because Congress has never taken any significant action
against the president for violating the rules of war. As noted by
journalist Glenn Greenwald:
“What
happened to Obama as a result of involving the U.S in a war that Congress had
rejected? Absolutely nothing, because Congress, due to political cowardice,
wants to abdicate war-making powers to the President. As a country, we have
decided we want an all-powerful president – one who can bomb, and spy, and
detain, and invade with virtually no limits. That’s the machinery of the
imperial presidency that both parties have jointly built and have now handed to President Trump.”
Let
that sink in: the war powers have been designed to rest with the president. In
our present circumstances, a president who orders raids deemed too risky by his warmongering predecessor says he will look Syrian kids in the face and tell them they can’t come to
America. That predecessor just killed over 1,000 Iraqis last month in a ramped up operation
that even the New York Times admits has
“no endgame in sight.”
These
war powers have been used, misused, and abused for decades, ultimately paving
the way for Trump to do what he did last week: bomb a Russian ally directly
without any democratic institutional authority – or authority from the
international institution that supposedly governs peace and war – risking an
all-out war with a nuclear power.
This
isn’t a problem of Obama versus Trump or Bernie Sanders versus Hillary Clinton.
The president has too much power, regardless of who sits on the
throne.
Anyone
who attempts to justify this power could realize how nonsensical and dangerous
it is by replacing all references to the United States above to North Korea and
seeing how that fits their worldview.
If
one country can take these actions unilaterally, then so can others.
Is
this the world we want to live in?
