Marching Toward Hell II

Michael Scheuer, former CIA Chief of the bin Laden unit, writes in Marching Toward Hell that the Founders intended the United States to be: noninterventionist, commerce-oriented non-ideological, focused on genuine life-and-death national interests, and undergirded by an inflexible bias toward neutrality in other peoples’ wars.

Scheuer harked back to the words of George Washington, “our greatest president.” “The Constitution vests the power of declaring war in the Congress therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.” Scheuer advises that The U.S. military’s reserve forces, including those commanded by state governors, are key components of America’s war-making ability; without them large, long-duration wars overseas are not possible. Because the federal legislature since 1941 has allowed the president to effectively abrogate the constitutional requirement that Congress declares war, the governors must begin to deny the federal government this vital military manpower for use overseas unless Congress has formerly declared war, thereby negating the ability of a president to take America to war simply because he or she is so inclined. There are, after all, few better definitions of a tyranny than a state, where the decision to go to war rests with one individual. By retaining state military units under their command, the governors will provoke a long-needed constitutional confrontation between the electorate and the federal government that may at last return constitutional sanity to the issue of making war.

As conditions stand in Washington today, among the small handful of individuals who seem to understand the intentions of the Founders under the Constitution are Cato Institute scholars, including Chris Preble, Ben Friedman and Justin Logan, and Senator Rand Paul. Chief among America’s Constitutional violators and/or war agitators for the debacle that is Iraq are President Obama, Dick Cheney, John McCain and Lindsey Graham and the neocon cabal in general. Americans, this fall, will have perhaps the final opportunity to elect Constitutionally compliant representatives to the House and Senate.

All Americans and certainly all those constitutionally based Americans running this fall will find Marching Toward Hell, Cato Institute Chris Preble’s The Power Problem and Pat Buchanan’s Where The Right Went Wrong the perfect foreign policy foundation trilogy. I have previously posted a series of articles on The Power Problem here: Part I, Part II, Part III.

Read Part I of Marching Toward Hell by clicking here.