Making War
Lehman, John
Making War offers more than the title promises. The author does not take us down a narrow spiral staircase to the basement of a law library with shelves full of legal scholarship that seeks to...
...To mobilize the necessary support among the American people for such a war the President and Congress must make a solemn vow that they are in this effort together...
...It is the voyage through a slice of world history in which war has not yet been abolished, a voyage by a global power whose foundation rests on democratic government and whose self-image calls for the propagation of the democratic faith...
...war effort at an earlier stage...
...From my Pentagon experience as undersecretary for policy during the Reagan Administration, I can fully subscribe to this view...
...World Wars I and II were "solemn," declared by Congress...
...The problem is not the War Powers Act, but the lawyers in the executive branch who want to have it both ways: avoid violating the act and avoid recognizing it as valid law...
...For this voyage there are no orange-colored buoys that tell the captain where peace ends and war begins...
...in fact, the formal name for "covert action" used to be Special Activities...
...0 ne of the most important conclusions in Making War is to be found in a sentence innocuously tucked away on page 91: "The actual uses of force by Presidents Reagan and Bush, for example, have actually been facilitated and enabled by the War Powers Act rather than restricted...
...action overseas to which the vernacular label "covert action" has become stuck...
...A President cannot continue to lead the nation in a major war effort that entails substantial American casualties if the war is cast as an "imperfect" one...
...This approach forces presidents who make the mistake of giving too much sway to their lawyers into disastrous contortions...
...This distinction has remained valid to this day...
...But former secretary of the navy John Lehman chose to write a breezier story...
...The author does not take us down a narrow spiral staircase to the basement of a law library with shelves full of legal scholarship that seeks to extract from the American Constitution the legally correct way of committing the United States to war...
...To be sure, the author recognizes that the constitutional question of "war powers" is as philosophically profound as it is politically important...
...If anything, this lack of secrecy may have contributed to the success...
...he aims at—and hits—political targets as well...
...For example, one of his broadsides thunders into the excessive bureaucracy in the American government, whose...
...This "fourth branch" includes, for example, 560,000 procurement officers who are the tenured (and well-meaning) government officialsforced by law to maintain the elaborate obstacle course that Congress erected to impede efficient procurement by the Pentagon...
...Or more precisely, this malignant growth was started by the domestic repercussions of the Indochina war—the "war" between the presidency and Congress...
...And, lastly, the gun turrets swing at the Inspectors General and their staffs, an entirely new organism that has been implanted since 1976 into nearly every executive department and agency...
...withdrawal from Vietnam...
...The current legal and administrative provisions for covert actions do not demand secrecy...
...support to the Afghan resistance...
...Lehman is mistaken in considering this an important flaw...
...Moreover, the president can designate any government agency, not just the CIA, to carry out such activities...
...Secrecy is not essential for covert action programs to succeed, but congressional support is.growth traces back to the Indochina war...
...Supreme Court issued an opinion, recalled in Lehman's book, that recognized a difference between "solemn" wars and "imperfect" wars...
...The "fourth branch" within the sweep of Lehman's gun turrets also includes the quintupling of congressional staff since 1974—the unelected managers of Congress who are more permanent even than the elected members (and often more influential...
...if the War Powers Resolution had been in force at that time...
...The most successful covert action in history was the U.S...
...And conversely, if the War Powers Act had been passed before the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the Johnson and Nixon administrations would have been reminded of the relevance of the Supreme Court's distinction from 1800 between "imperfect" and "solemn" wars...
...The Gulf War was backed by congressional action, while the intrusion into Grenada and the punitive air raid against Qaddafi were not, and did not have to be...
...Lehman calls this new bureaucracy the "Fourth Branch of Government," a vast, powerful, multifaceted network of permanent government employees who have been added to the Washington establishment since the U.S...
...On this issue, John Lehman's book fastens onto tangential points and misses the heart of the matter...
...In hindsight, one might even argue that the war in Indochina would have had less disastrous consequences for the U.S...
...When covert action becomes a large-scale operation it cannot be kept secret...
...One important presidential instrument for "making war" is that special kind of secret, or not-so-secret, U.S...
...Instead of using the "power of money" (the topic of Lehman's last chapter) to pull the rug out from under America's war effort, Congress would have had either to stop or support the U.S...
...171 S ome pettifogging reviewers have faulted Lehman for not being earnest enough about the proper confines of his topic...
...He does not stay fixed on the legal issue of war powers...
...More sophisticated readers, by contrast, will discover something engaging in the wide sweep of Lehman's gun turrets...
...One hundred seventy-three years before the War Powers Act was passed over President Nixon's veto (despite the valiant lobbying by John Lehman, who was then on the NSC staff), the U.S...
...Lehman provides a telling case in point with his vivid story of how in the fall of 1983, the Reagan administration maneuvered itself into the ill-conceived intervention in Beirut that led to the tragic killing of 241 Marines by one terrorist bomb...
...Oh Lord, what Ho Chi Minh has wrought in Washington...
...He takes us up to the captain's desk to retrace our past voyage on our ship of state as well as the acts of loyalty and courage...
...and so, in a way,was the recent Gulf War, to which the book devotes its opening chapter...
...After a somewhat secretive beginning, the general scope and thrust of the Afghan program (though not every operational detail) were openly discussed in congressional hearings and in the media...
Vol. 26 • April 1993 • No. 4
