Congress must retake war powers

As we all know, each year our country  sets aside the last Monday as Memorial Day. The purpose of this day is, of course, to honor those people who have served in the military to keep our great country safe and particularly those who lost their lives or were injured while in that service, But wouldn’t it be more meaningful if we all made efforts to reduce those injuries and losses of lives?

This can be done by each one of us if we insist that our country follows Article I; Section 8 of our Constitution by not sending our troops into battle for longer than 60 days  unless Congress has issued a formal declaration of war. But no such declaration has been issued by Congress since shortly after Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941. Congress passing so-called War Powers Acts to give discretion to the president to send our troops into military “conflicts” is transparently not the same thing.

What difference would this make? It would require Congress to take full responsibility for sending our troops into battle. As a result Congress would be required publicly to debate critically important issues like who and where the enemy is, what the threats are to our national interests and security, what our goals would be for the war and how we would know when those goals were met so we then could withdraw our troops.

There is a reason to believe that had this Constitutional mandate been honored our country never would have put our troops into Vietnam, Iraq, Panama or even Korea. And what a savings we would have seen. Much less trauma and many fewer deaths for our fighting troops and much less grieving and hardships for their families, not to mention the greatly reduced spending of our tax money, and many fewer civilian deaths in the battle zones overseas. Those lives also count.

In addition, following this mandate would also have the benefit of the people in our country more fully supporting those actions if Congress had actually issued a declaration of war.

To get more specific with the example of Afghanistan, it is reported by the Costs of War Project that  2,442 U.S. military forces and 3, 846 U.S. contractors had been killed in Afghanistan, plus an additional tens of thousand wounded. Sending our forces to Afghanistan cost taxpayers an estimated $2 trillion. Of course, none of this counts the 1,144 coalition (mostly Canadian and United Kingdom) troops or the up to 69,000 Afghan Security Forces and over 47,000 Afghan civilians who were killed.

And we saw similar results in Iraq where between 2003 and 2012, estimates are that 4,441 U.S. forces were killed and another 36,719 were wounded. And this “military conflict” cost the American taxpayers about $1.7 trillion, with another $490 billion being paid thus far for benefits to the veterans which are further estimated to increase to about $6 trillion within the next four decades. In addition, estimates are that about 162,000 Iraqi combatants and civilians were also killed. 

Why should each of us get involved? Because basically it is our government, and if it isn’t working we have no one to blame but ourselves. Yes, there is now a movement in Congress to repeat the 2002 Iraq War authorization, so that is a step in the right direction. But please take this critical issue seriously and contemplate how we all can help in requiring Congress to repeal all these laws and to follow its Constitutional mandate because if it did, soon we would have many fewer lost and injured troops to honor. Can you think of anything more American? Or more important?