No More Presidential Wars
Remarks to the Committee for the Republic
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, the Watson Institute for International and
Public Affairs, Brown University
5 January 2017, Washington, D.C.
I’m Chas Freeman. In 2003, I helped found what became the
Committee for the Republic, which I continue to chair. The founders of this group were of disparate
political persuasions. But we shared a
fear that the excessive militarization of American foreign policy would
threaten constitutional government in our country. Exploration of the impact of promiscuous
interventionism on the traditions and civil liberties of our republic has
remained the Committee’s core function.
I am proud that
participation in the Committee has grown as it has. I am prouder still that our participants have
retained our political diversity. The
Committee has become one of the very few
institutions – sadly, now maybe the only one -- in Washington with a firm claim
to trans-partisanship. I congratulate
all present on this.
Among us there
are members of the far left and the far right and everything in between. There are fervent internationalists and
isolationists, supporters of both major and most minor political parties,
proponents of industrial policies and of laissez-faire, veterans and citizens
who declined to serve, free traders and protectionists, proponents and
opponents of the Iran nuclear deal, boosters and detractors of the
president-elect, and so forth.
But we all
believe in civil discourse. We meet in dignified
dispute. We are united in our belief
that the root of our country’s greatness is our tradition of respect for our
Constitution, its checks and balances, its Bill of Rights, and its insistence
on the rule of law and due process.
The Committee’s
members have watched with horror as our political system has evolved to
facilitate legislative evasion of accountability for wars and other belligerent
activities launched by successive presidents on their own. These wars have killed, maimed, and orphaned
many thousands of Americans. They have
murdered millions of foreigners and generated increasingly savage blowback
against us and our allies and friends.
They have burdened our posterity with previously unimaginable levels of
debt. They have built a turnkey garrison
state and handed the key to an Executive that asserts powers beyond those
assigned it by the Constitution and the laws.
Our president
and members of the House and Senate have all sworn oaths to uphold the
Constitution and the laws. We believe
they must finally be held to their oaths.
Tonight we ask all present to help us organize to re-empower accountable
government in the United States. We urge
you to insist that members of Congress force the president to comply with our
Constitution by living up to their own responsibilities under it.
Arguments about
who is to blame for the demise of accountable government in the United States
just enable continuing partisan rancor and political inaction. They divide rather than unite Americans. We all have our views on what happened, why
it happened, and how, but if we are to fix government in America we must set
these aside, look forward, not back, and work together to end this most
consequential of all aspects of dysfunctional government. We must ensure that future wars are not launched by secret
councils in the Sit Room, that the purposes, costs, and potential benefits of
using American military power are forthrightly debated in Congress, and that the
people's representatives in that body can no longer hide behind the president
and evade their constitutional responsibility to authorize or veto proposals to
take Americans to war with other states and peoples.
The existential
threats of the Cold War and the imperial temptations of the post-Cold War
“unipolar moment” are both blessedly behind us.
But the politics of expediency that both engendered live on. The collusive evasion of responsibility by the
legislative and executive branches of our government must now end. To preserve our liberties, we must restore
constitutional order to the United States, beginning with the restoration of
the war power to the Congress, where the Constitution wisely assigns it.
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