Commentary: Kalb's 'The Road to War' By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/de-Borchgrave/2013/06/05/Commentary-Kalbs-The-Road-to-War/UPI-94291370429069/

Commentary: Kalb's 'The Road to War'

By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
UPI Editor at Large
WASHINGTON, June 5 (UPI) -- He is the senior statesman of U.S. media. Tall, handsome, brilliant, unfailingly courteous, Marvin Kalb looks and acts more like a senior statesman than the chief diplomatic correspondent he was for CBS News and NBC over 30 years when these networks cared about world news.

Now these media organizations still bill themselves as world news networks but, most nights, forget about the rest of the world.

Following his prize-studded reportorial career, Kalb became the first director of journalism's school of higher learning at Harvard -- the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Now, still the profession's senior statesman, he runs the center's Washington office and hosts "The Kalb Report."

The author of two best-selling novels and a book titled, "One Scandalous Story: Clinton, Lewinsky and 13 days That Transformed American Journalism," Kalb's 13th book -- his best -- excoriates Congress for relinquishing its constitutional obligation to declare war.

The electronic media invariably beat the war drums, presumably in subconscious anticipation of higher ratings for blood and guts live from the scene of the action, what war correspondents called "bang bang" assignments.

This could be one of the reasons the United States has gone to war time and again since World War II without the constitutional requirement of a congressional mandate.

In his latest book "The Road to War -- Presidential Commitments Honored and Betrayed," Kalb reminds us that the U.S. Constitution stipulates beyond the shadow of a doubt that only Congress can declare war. But the last declaration of war authorized by Congress was World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

For the past 40 years, says Kalb, the United States, like kings of yesteryear, was drawn into non-stop wars, from Korea to Vietnam, Panama to Grenada, Lebanon to Bosnia, Afghanistan to Iraq, using volunteers who are dispatched abroad wherever modern-day war lords say they need them.

Mass media welcomes war, Kalb argues, noting the last president authorized by Congress to declare war was Franklin Roosevelt after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941.