Posting #24: The story of when wars begin and end
The story: Americans are led to believe that there are clear beginnings and endings to its wars, that the wars are just and so only last as long as necessary, and that the President controls these starts and finishes. For instance, if they know anything about the American war in Vietnam, they know it began because of the justifying “domino theory,” that President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) began the war by ordering the gallant March 8, 1965 landing of Marines on the shores of Da Nang, and the war ended ten years later with the valiant April 30, 1975 evacuation of Saigon as the North Vietnamese entered the city. The United States, Americans learn, had no meaningful interests or engagement there before 1965 or after 1975. This ten-year duration is implied in fictional films, stories, and documentary narratives like The Last Days in Vietnam (Rory Kennedy, 2014), by well-regarded scholars of international relations (Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism, ix), and in high school History textbooks (James Loewen, 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me, Chapter 9).
My take on the story: The main problem with this story is that the American war in Vietnam never was declared, making it hard to discern its beginning and ending, who started it, or whether it was justified. In fact, although only Congress and not the President has the constitutional authority to declare war, none of the 250-or-so uses of armed force since World War II have been declared and many, if not all, have been initiated by whomever was the current President.
The House of Representatives website outlines this predicament, declaring that “whether the Constitution empowers the President to commit troops abroad to further national interests absent a declaration of war or specific congressional authorization short of such a declaration has been controversial.” According to the Senate website, however, since World War II, instead of doing its job as the official war-declarer, Congress “has agreed to resolutions authorizing the use of military force [to the president] and continues to shape U.S. military policy through appropriations and oversight” (emphasis added).
These, in effect, blank-check resolutions have covered all contingencies that might provoke a president to take the country to war. For the war in Vietnam, with the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution, Congress granted then-President Johnson the authority “to increase U.S. involvement in the war between North and South Vietnam” (emphasis added to mark how Americans already were involved there). Then-President Nixon continued to use this resolution to conduct war in Vietnam from 1969 until 1971, when Congress repealed the resolution. Once it was learned that Nixon had extended the war to secret bombing in Cambodia from 1969-1970 without Congress’s authorization, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution of 1973, meant to limit the president’s ability to initiate military action abroad. Nixon vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode his veto. Still, the United States continued to war in Vietnam until mid-1973, when Congress cut off all funding for the war and all American combat troops had been withdrawn and POWs had been released.
For the most recent “forever” wars, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force against Terrorists resolution (AUMF), granting then-President Bush the authority to take the nation to wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), a resolution that then-Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden continued to use. This resolution was only repealed by Congress in 2023, well after the United States had withdrawn combat units in both countries.
Both the Tonkin and AUMF (especially related to Iraq) resolutions, it turns out, were based on faulty if not false information, which means lives and treasure were spent needlessly. More importantly to me, Congress’s refusal to formally declare war is an abdication of congressional responsibility, meaning the Executive branch of government, the Presidency, has/is given unregulated power to take the country into combat.
The US think tank Niskanen Center comments on this domestic abdication and unconstitutional power as a wholly political move on the part of Congress and presidents:
Punting responsibility for declaring or authorizing war allows politicians to avoid the appearance of opposing a war that might prove popular if successful, or supporting a war that would be unpopular if unsuccessful. But given its lack of salience, American presidents are unlikely to pay any electoral price for failing to seek a declaration of war or authorizations to use military force—nor are members of Congress likely to pay any price for failing to hold a president accountable for that failure” (emphasis added).
The institute also points out that this is a worldwide phenomenon because the costs to states of declaring war are high: “the reason states are no longer inclined to declare war is the proliferation of [international] laws governing the conduct of armed conflict. [Professor Elizabeth Saunders] argues that the increased number of codified jus in bello laws raises the compliance costs of formally acknowledging that states are at war when they use military force.”
So while the US is not alone in refusing to declare as war their uses of military force, well, the US is likely to use its immense military force more frequently than any other nation. If the primary tool one has is a hammer, everything probably looks like a nail.
Historical specificity about the American war in Vietnam
As a matter of history, though, according to the infamous Pentagon Papers that studied American involvement in Vietnam from 1945-1967, the United States was involved in combat or supporting combat in Vietnam since World War II, and so two decades before the story Americans are told. According to the Miller Center, “the highly classified study revealed that administrations from Harry S. Truman's through Lyndon B. Johnson's had willingly deceived the American people about the nation's involvement in Vietnam,” and that Nixon opposed the study because it would reflect badly on his own administration’s legacy in the war.
Note, then, that American involvement in Vietnam began during World War II, when the US armed the Viet Minh to resist the Japanese occupiers. Following the war, the United States shamefully and despite claims to respect national sovereignty, funded 80% of the 8-year-long post-World War II French effort to recolonize “Indochine.” Once France lost that war in 1954 and Vietnam was partitioned into North and South, the United States (per President Eisenhower) began providing American military advisors to the fledgling South Vietnamese military, ramping up the number of advisors in 1961 (per President Kennedy). By 1963, over 16K American military advisors were deployed to South Vietnam, with escalation continuing. Conscription began (per President Johnson with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution) in 1964, full combat units were deployed to Vietnam in March 1965, and the number of American servicepeople sent to Vietnam peaked at 536K in 1968. By January of 1973, President Nixon was touting the Paris Peace Accords, which ended American involvement in the war, as “Peace with honor.” However, he had to be forced by the Congress, finally, to end the war with the War Powers Resolution of 1973, and by summer of 1973, all US combat troops had been withdrawn.
So much for American involvement in Vietnam lasting ten years, for the President being responsible for declaring and ending the war, and for the war being just. Without a clear and authorized declaration of the beginning and ending of the war and an explanation of the war’s necessity and justness, there is a void in Americans’ historical understanding of the war fought in their name. What I have found is that that absence is filled with stories of winning, though wounded, individual heroes.
Historical specificity about the American war in Afghanistan
A similarly ahistorical situation occurred with stories about American warring in Afghanistan, which has a long history of being a modern battlefield of east versus west.
· First, in the 19th century, the British fought several wars there to prevent Russia from impinging on Britain’s colony, India.
· Second, once the British empire dissolved, the Bolshevik Revolution occurred, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established, Afghanistan more or less allied with the USSR as another communist nation.
· But, third, with unrest in Afghanistan during the 1970s and Soviet fear that Afghanistan would seek help from the capitalist United States, in late-1979, the Soviets invaded. (I was a US Army intelligence officer at the time and read classified reports about the Soviet invasion and war there.) The Soviet incursion led the United States’ CIA to covertly support the Mujahedin, the Afghani Islamic insurgents opposed to the Soviets. This insurgent group also included the Saudi, Osama bin Laden, and his Al Qaeda organization. For the decade-long Soviet war (1979-1989) in Afghanistan, the United States provided weapons (such as the Stinger Missile Launcher) and monies to support the insurgency. “In their wake,” says the US State Department website, “the Soviets left a shattered country in which the Taliban, an Islamic fundamentalist group, seized control, later providing Osama bin Laden with a training base from which to launch terrorist operations worldwide.”
· Fourth, in even more ironic/tragic/horrendous blowback, it was the US-funded Mujahedin that formed the core of the Taliban, the group who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001 and against whom the United States had its own undeclared war for two decades, from 2001 to 2021. Just as the Pentagon Papers revealed how deceptive US administration after administration had been about the wars in Indochina, the Afghanistan Papers revealed equal duplicity. With the AUMF of 2001 still in place, three administrations—Bush, Obama, and Trump—sent American servicepeople and private military contractors (see Posting #10) to Afghanistan, saying publicly the US military was making progress but, in private, knowing there was no chance of victory. After his election loss and on Veterans’ Day 2020, Trump signed the order mandating an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, but senior officials disregarded what they thought was an illegal order. It was only after deploying 1000 servicepeople to Afghanistan to help with what turned out to be a chaotic withdrawal, the fourth administration, Biden, ended the American war there on August 31, 2021.
So much for American involvement in Afghanistan lasting twenty years, for the President being responsible for declaring and ending the war, and for the war being just. As I have said about the war in Vietnam, without a responsible and authorized declaration of the beginning and ending of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a truthful explanation of the wars’ necessity and justness, there is a void in Americans’ historical understanding of the wars, wars fought in their name and with their lives and dollars. Like the stories of the American war in Vietnam, the stories of these recent wars do not include historical specificity but instead are filled solely with tales of individual heroes and courage and honor. Their trauma and heroism, I think, makes us feel alright about the havoc we wreak abroad.
Equally importantly, just as the United States supported the French in Vietnam and the Mujahedin in Afghanistan, and never declared the American wars subsequently fought in those two countries, now the United States is supporting the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza, following Hamas’ attack on southern Israel. Also, for more than two years, the US has supported Ukraine’s resistance to the February 2022 Russian invasion. Given the precedence of US involvement and subsequent wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and given the 2003-2011 war in Iraq based on faulty information about weapons of mass destruction, when might we expect to find ourselves, once again, in an undeclared and potentially unjust war, started by a president who does not have that constitutional authority?
So what?
Why this matters is that although the Congress and President pay a negligible price for their refusal to formally declare war even though the country is in armed conflict, the voting (and tax-paying) public pays a hefty price. They are the ones who take on the immense, interest-accruing national deficit when taxes are not raised to pay for the wars (see Posting #9), they are the ones who suffer the deaths, disabilities, and psychic and moral injuries incurred in combat (see Posting #8), and they are the ones who become numb to the horror of their nation being at war, once again.
War without a clear declaration of beginning and ending becomes naturalized, as what human beings do, a belief my college students repeated to me often. The end effect of the naturalization is to confuse Americans about their history and their culpability in conflict all over the world. Naturalization, absent historical specificity, makes it easier to cast American wars and servicepeople as the noble, honorable, and courageous players in the “human nature” we are fated to.