Congress should enact a No Presidential Wars statute

Congress should enact a “No Presidential Wars” statute that defines “presidential wars;” declares them contrary to the U.S. Constitution’s Declare War Clause; and, makes presidential wars prospectively impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors justifying removal from office under Article II, section 4.

This will make America great, prosperous and invincible against aggression faster and surer than any alternative. The United States is currently engaged in nine presidential wars: Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, al Qaeda and ISIS. Every soldier involved in these engagements should be redeployed to the United States with enhanced pay for invincible self-defense. The fully allocated cost of fighting presidential wars since 9/11 approaches a staggering $10 trillion.

War is the oldest scourge of mankind.

It turns children into orphans, wives into widows, and makes fathers bury sons rather than sons bury fathers.

It silences the law, crushes liberty, aggrandizes executive power, spirals debt, diverts genius from production to destruction, promotes secret government, precipitates blowback, and afflicts our own soldiers with PTSD generated suicides. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy in America: “All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.”

Thousands of years of history taught the Constitution’s authors that the executive would be predisposed toward war to enhance power, to excite patriotic support, to operate secret and unaccountable government, and to leave a legacy.

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U.S. foreign policy flies under banner ‘American Exceptionalism’

The modus operandi of the multi-trillion dollar military-industrial-terrorism complex (MITC) is as transparent as is Donald Trump’s narcissism.

The MITC manufactures conflicts by gratuitous interventions abroad. Then it demands trillions of dollars and limitless time to defeat the monsters it created.

The MITC bonanza never ends.

What stuns is not the modus operandi. All organizations covet expansion for the sake of expansion. What amazes is the willingness of the President, Congress, and the American people to feed a failed enterprise.

Russia, China, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and ISIS are six current examples.

The Cold War ended with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. The United States then confronted no existential threats. Our military power dwarfed rivals as an oak dwarfs an acorn. We should have dissolved NATO, ended our troop presence in Europe, and embraced a foreign policy worthy of our democratic dispensation and the sacrifices of Valley Forge: “HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS FOR SELF-DEFENSE, BUT NOT ONE CENT FOR EMPIRE.

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