| Since we have had relatively few wars, war powers provisions are among the most naive and ill-tested of any part of the constitution. In fact the need for the recent supreme court cases on Habeas Corpus (one of the oldest concepts in our common law) shows just how untested they are... and even when there is fairly clear legal doctrine, technologies such as rendition to other jurisdictions often renders the courts powerless to check presidential whims. I would also not agree that just because something is considered (or found after the fact) to be constitutional that it is necessarily right or just. To respond to your actual point... consider the sanctity of an individual's private, productive life. If soldiers are going to come through the door and put you in prison, they had better have a pretty good reason. In law, those reasons are very clearly articulated. Most Americans would claim that they consider things like due process to be exceptionally important aspects of our legal system... yet we are shockingly capable of ignoring them when the subgroup being violated is a small minority, and we succumb to the weakest arguments in favor of excesses. Your argument could easily be used to justify any excessive use of power on the grounds that it's better than being blown up. By that logic, short of blowing up the citizenry, the president should have no checks on wartime powers (and calling something like post-911 a "war" gives rise to the question of what exactly constitutes one). To zoom back out briefly and conclude, I think the letter of the law and legal justification is largely secondary... we can judge ourselves morally by how we acted in various situations, regardless of whether or not it was currently legal. War, war propaganda, etc., cloud human judgment. Nobody other than a casualty ever really understands war, and so we are all doomed to reason poorly about it always. I'd argue that the pre-war aspect of much of US behavior on China (from Obama's trade war salvos to Krugman's rants) is one reason why Americans are so willing to embrace propaganda again so soon after the Iraq fiasco. |
I don't think that's an accurate representation. We've had a short history compared to European states, but we've packed a lot of fighting into that time: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl30172.htm