WASHINGTON REPORT: A Political Ash Wednesday

...What did the sinking of the Cambodian gunboats, in retaliation, contribute to the safe repatriation of the Mayaguez crew...

...They succumbed to the conventional assertion of bellicose presidents, including Ford, that the Constitution contains an inherent right to send military forces to protect American lives and property...

...Actually, Gulliver kicked back more than once...

...They had their chance in May of 1975...

...President Ford's dispatching of Marines and the Air Force to deal with the seizure came as if Cambodia had invaded San Diego...

...And, in so doing, Mr...

...There are restrictions and prohibitions about the use of military force in Southeast Asia...

...The United States Government knew that in early May South Korean and Panamanian vessels had been fired upon in the same area...

...However, there is a basis for a reasonable surmise that an effort to regain the vessel by diplomatic means had not yet been fully exercised...

...That lesson has obviously not been learned...

...This was known to the White House, but the military operation continued anyway, in which American servicemen were killed...

...Bellum vobiscum...

...Furthermore, the chronology known now shows that the Cambodian Government had agreed to release the ship...

...Yet these same senators argued in the 1960s and into the 1970s that President Johnson, for one, had grossly misapplied the support for him contained in the Gulf-of-Tonkin resolution approved by the Senate, with only Senators Gruening and Morse dissenting, after an American destroyer had been fired upon by North Vietnamese craft...

...This suggests our military operation was one of punishment and retaliation, not one to simply retrieve ship and crew...

...Perhaps this was, indeed, his prime consideration during the whole episode...

...At this writing, the full story is not available-if it ever is permitted to become available to the public, except in fragments leaked to favorite pressmen...

...Indeed, some of the principal senatorial supporters of the cited restrictive legislation did publicly take this position...

...Ford dealt a major setback to Ronald Reagan and others who would challenge him for his party's presidential nomination next year...

...Some of these senators had risked their political futures during the height of our belligerency in Vietnam by working successfully to enact into law restrictions upon a president's authority to commit troops to combat...

...One requires, among other things, consultation with the Congress before a military operation is undertaken...

...Even one body of opinion in "international law" that supports President Ford in his actions states that the military action should not be "excessive"-Whiteman's Digest of International Law, and Corwin's The President: Office and Powers that discusses "the action of Great Britain, in connection with the Canadian rebellion of 1837, in invading American waters and destroying the Caroline, a vessel employed by American sympathizers with the rebels to convey arms to them...

...These senators ignored the waters for the waves...

...Let none of them strut about in the Senate ever again denouncing presidents who abuse their authority in foreign policy...

...Doves and hawks said in effect to the Cambodian Government: you Lilliputians kicked our dog...

...It can be narrowly argued that the prohibitions and restraints upon the use of military force did not apply in the case of the seizure of the Mayaguez...

...now, we, the world's Gulliver, are kicking your dog...

...There's the so-called Church-Case provision of law that forbids a president to engage in military hostilities in, over or around Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia...

...The United States, at the time, recognized this principle and accepted invasion of its waters...

...Yet senators turned their backs on these laws, which they had worked so hard for and voted for in an effort to restrain presidents from launching unnecessary military missions...

...Presidents who made military commitments and, as if in an afterthought, notified the Congress...

...There's also the 1973 War Powers Act which states that a president may commit military forces to hostilities or situations wherein hostilities might occur only pursuant to (a) a declaration of war, (b) specific statutory authorization, or (c) a national emergency created by an attack upon the United States, its territory, possessions or its armed forces...

...WASHINGTON REPORT A POLITICAL ASH WEDNESDAY There they were on a Wednesday in mid-May applauding President Ford for his overwrought military response to a Cambodian gunboat's seizure of an American merchant ship, the Mayaguez, and its crew in the Gulf of Siam...

...All the finery of their forthcoming rationales for their position in this episode will not disguise their failure...

...The Panamanian vessel, in fact, had been boarded by crew of a Cambodian gunboat...

...At least five, and perhaps many more, American combat soldiers were killed in the effort to retrieve the American-flag vessel and the crew...

...Even men in the Pentagon were saying, when the seizure was first made known, that it quite likely was the result of a belligerent Cambodian gunboat commander-and not the result of an order from the disorganized Cambodian central government, controlled by the Khmer Rouge that had barely installed itself in Phnom Penh, the capital...

...Only a few senators dissented-Abourezk, Clark, Hathaway, Kennedy and McGovern among them...

...Even the (Republican) Minority Leader in the Senate, Hugh Scott, conceded that he was informed by telephone that the retrieval operation was to begin, but was not asked about whether it should be undertaken...

...The president, any president, continues to be the helmsman in any gulf he wishes to sail-or any Rubicon he wishes to cross...

...They caved in...

...But Ford's action exceeded the permission contained in the Corwin language, for example...

...There are other restrictions/prohibitions written into law...

...Additionally, it is not clear at this point why the ship hadn't been warned to stay away from the general area...

...Ditto, Senator Mansfield, the (Democratic) Majority Leader...

...The military intervention seemed unnecessary, both as to its initiative and, indisputable, as to its crushing degree...

...Yet five days to a week after these two events happened, the Mayaguez was sailing through these same shipping pathways...

...They went on to declare that the president always has an inherent right to protect American lives and property...

...These were the same men-these United States, senators-who for approximately 10 years had learnedly preached and lectured in erudite phrases and expressively wrung their hands over the appearance of "Caes-arism" in a succession of recent Democratic and Republican presidents...

...To change the simile, we just about sank the entire Cambodian gunboat navy...

...SISYPHUS...

...It was successful, as the chortling President later explained, and that apparently is all that counted in his eyes and those of his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, the Nobel peace prize winner...

...The assertion does have justification, but it has led, too, to unnecessary American military forays to the Philippines, Cuba and other Caribbean places, Central and Latin America, and the Middle East (Lebanon) in the 1950s...

...Yet when the military maneuver to retrieve the May-guez became known, these senior senatorial "doves" reacted as did the legendary senatorial "hawks...

...Most recently, the Senate and the House of Representatives-a majority of them elected after the lethal lesson of the Gulf-of-Tonkin was spread upon the public record-professed to have learned its lesson at the hands of furtive, secretive, presidents-Johnson and Nixon-who, respectively, put us into Vietnam in force and then kept us there until we were licked...

...The brave words of senators, vowing to stand up to presidents who would try to bully nations, have turned to ashes...