They called her Amazing Grace. That would be the late Grace Murray Hopper – Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. The Navy named a guided-missile destroyer after her – because she really was amazing. She dragged our military, kicking and screaming, into the computer age, with disarming wit and a brilliant mind. Those two things seldom go together, but she was the one who invented COBOL, the first machine-independent programming language. That changed everything – modern life would not be possible without general programming languages – and she came up with the term “debugging” a computer or a system. While she was working on a Mark II Computer at a Navy research lab in Dahlgren, Virginia, in 1947, her team discovered a moth stuck in a relay, screwing things up. She smiled and told everyone they had “debugged” the computer, because they had, and the term stuck. What’s left of that moth can be found in the group’s log book at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, because it’s historic in an ironic way. What’s not ironic is her work creating most of the systems that make our modern Navy, connected in real time around the world, even possible. She was also famous for being able to explain to the befuddled top brass, in simple terms, what all the new systems would do and why they were absolutely necessary. They often didn’t get it, but there were ways around that. She was often found of saying what everyone knows – “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.” That’s sometimes given as it’s easier to apologize that to ask for permission, but the idea is clear. Get the job done. Hell, sometimes you don’t even have to ask for forgiveness, or apologize. What’s done is done. There’s nothing to say. Grace Hopper may have been the highest ranking woman ever in our military and at the time of her retirement one of the oldest active-duty commissioned officers in Navy history – just shy of ninety – but she was a pirate at heart.
There are, however, limits to such pirate-thinking. Teenagers know this. The heartfelt apology or the sincere plea for forgiveness just does cut it when you took the family car out for a spin and ended up at rock concert in Altoona. You’re grounded. There’s an actual authority figure with the power to make you pay for your foolishness, for doing what you knew you shouldn’t have done. You should have asked for permission. Yeah, you wouldn’t have got it, but you should have asked. Maybe, had you asked, you really would have received permission, or something. But now it’s too late. You misjudged where the power lies. It wasn’t with you. In this case, apologies only make things worse.
You’ll get over it. You won’t be a teenager forever, and in the real world you will soon enter no one is ever quite sure who has the real power at any given time. We even have a government like that, with its separation of powers. Congress gets to do certain things and the president others, and the judicial branch, at the Supreme Court level, gets to decide others, mainly about whether the president or Congress is breaking the rules – but Congress, with the states, can change the rules, amending the Constitution, if Congees and the states, representing the people, decides that the Supreme Court is flat-out wrong. There’s no “parent figure” here. Do what you will. Apologize later, if necessary. It’s seldom necessary.
The system guarantees a perpetual mess, or glorious democracy at work, but now that we’re at war with ISIS – unless we’re not because we’re not sending in troops – one question keeps coming up. Okay, we’re bombing the crap out of ISIS in Syria now, not just Iraq – Iraq asked us to do that and Syria didn’t – and we are sending in those boots on the ground, at least five or six hundred troops, as advisors or something, so, should Obama have asked Congress for permission to do this? This sure looks like war.
That’s where things get complicated. The president is free to wage war as he sees fit, against ISIS, but he’s not free to declare war. Only Congress can do that, and only Congress can fund a war – because war is a serious business. Congress has only declared war five times – the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and then World War II. Those were formal wars. Everything else was something else. The commander-in-chief has needed permission to take military action from time to time, but that permission has taken many forms. There have been military engagements authorized by United Nations Security Council Resolutions and the fully funded by Congress, like the Korean War, and other lesser military engagements that had no declaration of war, but these were not formal wars. Something else was authorized by Congress, spending mostly, as with the Vietnam War. That was authorized by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution back in 1964, and in 2002 there was the Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq – to match the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force against Terrorists – which was really a catch-all. The terms of the 2001 act were vague. George Bush could do whatever he wanted, anywhere, and Congress would advance the funds, because jihadist terrorism was everywhere, not just in Iraq, and we were fighting terrorism in general, really, which is everywhere, and as Bush put it, we were really fighting evil itself, which is certainly everywhere. That was blanket permission and that resolution is still in force. Obama has that one in his hip pocket.
Is that good enough? ISIS had nothing to do with 9/11 thirteen years ago. Congress wasn’t voting for killer drones killing bad guys in Syria this week, guys who were tossed out of al-Qaeda years ago for being too stupidly brutal, even for them. Give it up. That old thing doesn’t pertain now.
After all, last year the Supreme Court tossed out key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – things had changed over the years. If anyone wants to stop Republicans in many states from making sure that blacks and Hispanics and students and the poor and elderly never vote again, well, Congress have to come up with new legislation. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 addressed problems of the sixties, you see – that old thing pertains to nothing now. The Supreme Court was clear. It’s up to Congress to fix that old thing, or come up with something new, otherwise the Court sees no way they can tell Republicans they cannot disenfranchise anyone at all that they find troublesome. Some laws pass their expiration date.
Congress won’t pass anything on this matter. There’s no point in trying. Nothing of the sort could ever pass the solidly Republican House these days, where the Tea Party folks want their country back, their pre-1965 country. That might be regrettable, depending on your politics, but the Supreme Court said that the politics of all this wasn’t their concern. The old law talked about old times. It cannot be enforced now, and it might be the same with the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force against Terrorists, which also talked about old times. It might be that Obama needs to go back and ask for permission for the new war, which isn’t exactly the old war, which might not even be a war, but sure looks like one.
Clay Hanna, one of the boots on the ground in the previous war in Iraq, argues that Obama should get congressional authority for the very real new war:
If Congress declares war, and the full force and might of the U.S. military and her allies are deployed, I have no doubt that we will fatally strike the Islamic State.
But without this clarity, without “boots on the ground” and above all an acknowledgement of what these really are, the president’s strategy amounts to nothing more than amorphous rhetoric and disingenuous platitudes. It is at the core a cynical plan to incite war and fund violence, backed by a vague hope that not only will we remain unaffected but somehow we will achieve peace. Don’t deceive yourself or us any longer, Mr. President: There is no good war and no participant gets to walk away with clean hands. Not even you.
This is war. Send in the troops, lots of them, and man-up. Stop the careful talk, and Congress should man-up too. Authorize war. Otherwise, stop talking nonsense.
That’s not going to happen. Obama won’t ask – he says he already has authorization – and Congress is unlikely to man up. Brian Beutler argues here that Congress wants war but doesn’t want to authorize a war, because “voting on the issue would violate the Optimal Preening Principle, which tends to govern these debates” – and that’s not to be underestimated:
Killing terrorists, or alleged terrorists, might be popular. But it’s also something the military (and thus, the president) does. Meanwhile, on a good day, Congress votes on legislation. The president might use a new AUMF to do things the public overwhelmingly supports, but that won’t help the embattled congressperson who would have to defend granting the president unlimited war-making power or defend voting against bombing terrorists because the AUMF wasn’t expansive enough. Instead, by not being forced to take a stance, Obama’s opponents will be able to frame the issue however they want to.
Likewise, when something goes wrong – as it inevitably will – members of Congress won’t want to be linked to it with their votes, and won’t want their votes constraining them from harrumphing about it on camera. Constituents won’t credit them if things go swimmingly anyhow, so they see no upside in sticking their necks out.
That may be how the political world works, but at Politico, Bruce Ackerman finds that inexcusable:
Neither the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel nor the White House Counsel has issued a serious legal opinion presenting its side of the argument. This represents a profound breach of the rule of law. Worse yet, Congress’ failure to address the constitutional issues during its regular session threatens to create a legal vacuum which only the courts will be in a position to resolve. Unless extraordinary steps are taken, the result will be the worst of all possible worlds, in which a problematic Supreme Court decision only exacerbates the ongoing crisis of constitutional legitimacy.
Our separation of powers system really does guarantee a perpetual mess, but a constitution lawyer, Eric Posner, argues that Ackerman has it all wrong:
Ackerman is right that the Obama administration’s reliance on the 2001 AUMF is phony, but he’s wrong to say that Obama has broken with American constitutional traditions. That tradition dictates that the president must give a nod to Congress if he can, but otherwise he is legally free to go to war, subject to vague limits that have never been worked out. That’s not to say that Congress is helpless. It can refuse to fund a war if it objects to it. But the real constraint on the president’s war-making powers is not law, but politics.
Except when you’re a teenager, it’s always better to apologize after the fact than to ask for permission before acting. There are vague limits that have never been worked out. That’s life, and in Foreign Policy, Paul Miller looks at the politics of those who would constrain Obama:
Conservatives are in a bind. They want to support some sort of action against the Islamic State (IS), criticize President Obama for his lack of strategy, and differentiate themselves from George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq — all while avoiding the label of isolationism. The result is a mess.
But after Iraq, everything is a mess:
If you think the lesson is, “We screwed up because we invaded under false pretenses,” then you are likely to argue for extreme caution and careful examination of our motives before undertaking any intervention in the future, much like many liberals currently do.
If you think the lesson is, “We screwed up because we tried to do nation-building, which is impossible and wrong-headed and foolish to even try,” then you are likely to gravitate to a sort of paleo-conservatism and the belief that the military should only be used to blow things up, which is sufficient for keeping America safe.
I find the liberals’ explanation morally simplistic and not backed up by the facts. Our difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan were manifold and came from many, many problems. Reading it like a morality play in which the gods of war punished American hubris for invading without sufficient cause neglects the problems in the planning, management, and oversight of the wars; the drift in American military doctrine since Vietnam; the problems of coalition counterinsurgency; and the dilemmas inherent in coercive peace building.
Maybe Obama shouldn’t ask and Congress shouldn’t agree, or not agree, because no one knows what to ask for. Would that be authorization for endless coercive peace building? That’s a hard sell, and as Jack Shafer argues, that can lead to dark places:
In attacking Syria’s enemy, the United States wasn’t looking to make friends with Syria. President Barack Obama called for Assad to step down in 2011, and it was only last year that the United States was prepared to bomb Syria for having crossed the chemical-weapons “red line” to kill its own citizens. Not that the United States is remarkably choosey about which nations it counts among its allies. Among the Middle East nations joining with the United States to strike Syria is Qatar, which has allowed one of its sheikhs to raise funds for an Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria. As you know, the United States is at war with Al Qaeda in all of its flavors, including the Syria-based Khorasan Group, upon which U.S. bombs fell this week. The Khorasan Group is said to be plotting attacks on the United States and Europe.
Our perpetual war is complicated, however, by the fact that the Islamic State is the sworn enemy of Al Qaeda, from which it split earlier this year because it couldn’t play nice with Al Qaeda’s other affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, which is also fighting the Assad regime. Or, to look at it another way, the enemies of America’s enemies are not automatically America’s friends; and even America’s friends – which can be permissive about the flow of money to Al Qaeda – aren’t necessarily America’s friends either.
America has allies in Syria’s civil war, of course, including Harakat Hazm, part of the Free Syrian Army. Harakat Hazm is fighting Assad, but it has also fought alongside America’s enemy Jabhat al-Nusra, which has not disqualified it from receiving U.S. weapons and training. Harakat Hazm took exception to the American-led bombing of Syria in a statement, calling it an “external intervention” and “an attack on the revolution,” according to a Los Angeles Times report. So Harakat Hazm, America’s friend, which fought with America’s enemy against Syria – which is neither friend nor enemy – objects to the fact that America bombed Syria in pursuit of the Islamic State, which is also Harakat Hazm’s enemy. Meanwhile, the militant Shiite group Hezbollah is drone-bombing Jabat al-Nusra along the Lebanon-Syria border at the same time Israel is downing Syrian jets.
Confused yet? You’ll have plenty of time to catch up.
That’s because this conflict will likely go on for years, because no one can imagine where it’s going or figure out who is on which side, at least this week:
A war with a conclusion that its participants can’t see or can’t imagine is a war without end. None of the dug-in parties in Syria and Iraq look like pushovers, but neither do any of them look like sure bets. Without American intervention, the current war will likely rage on. With regard to American intervention, not even the Pentagon dares to predict an end.
For Americans, at least so far, this war is rumbling on like background noise. The usual markers of military victory – body-counts tabulated, territories seized and banked, no-fly zones established, governments-in-waiting imposed, and elections supervised – don’t apply to the Syria war. The borders, combatants, allegiances, and military objectives in the Syrian war are too fluid to conform to our usual expectations. Nor do the usual markers of peace seem to exist. There are no peace talks taking shape, no shuttle diplomacy, no evidence of a dominant power about to exert its might to create a lasting peace by flattening everybody.
And in this case, Obama should ask for permission for what, exactly? Ir might be better to do what seems like a good idea at any given moment. He can always apologize later, if necessary, if anyone can figure out what just happened. That’s how Grace Hopper got things done, most of which turned out quite well.
Of course Andrew Sullivan has to butt in:
One way of looking at this is to ask: what should we call this war? Is it, as the Obama administration ludicrously argues, merely an extension of the war against al Qaeda, begin in 2001? Is it a new war on Syria – a sovereign state we have now bombed with no UN authorization? Is it a continuation of the 2003 Iraq War? Or was the 2003 war effectively a continuation of the Gulf War in 1991? I cannot decide. When you have so many over-lapping wars, most without any understanding of “victory”, and when the CIA launches covert wars all over the world all the time anyway, and when a conservative Republican president and his liberal Democratic successor both agree on the necessity of an endless war that creates the terrorism that justifies more war, it’s bewildering.
Sullivan decides to quote the Onion:
Declaring that the terrorist organization’s actions can no longer be ignored, President Obama vowed Wednesday that the United States would use precision airstrikes for as long as needed to ensure that ISIS is divided into dozens of extremist splinter groups. “ISIS poses a significant threat to U.S. interests both overseas and at home, and that is why we are committed to a limited military engagement that will fracture the terrorist network’s leadership and consequently create a myriad of smaller cells, each with its own violent, radical agenda,” said Obama during a primetime address to the nation.
Sullivan is exasperated:
Gitmo remains open; we are still at war in Afghanistan; we are still at war in Iraq; and all this is true despite a president elected explicitly and clearly to end the failed wars he inherited. This comes perilously close to proving that our democracy doesn’t really have much of a say in whether this perpetual war should continue or not. The public just wants “something to be done” in response to videos of beheadings, and seems to have little interest in carefully processing the pros and cons or unintended consequences – even after the catastrophe of the Iraq War under Bush…
Those who argue that the US is in terminal decline, its democracy attenuated, its leaders interchangeable in a perpetual war based on no threats to the United States, have some more evidence on their side from the last couple of months. We are told, in response, that we live in a new world, in which these amorphous threats really do require a forever war to pre-empt and forestall them. But we can never know exactly what those threats really are – because it’s all classified.
I feel, I have to confess, helpless in the face of this – and my job requires me to understand these issues as well as anyone. What of other Americans, going on with their lives, struggling to make ends meet much of the time, barely able to digest what’s left of the news? It’s a recipe for passivity and acceptance, as the CIA and the Pentagon and their myriad lobbyists and fear-mongers do what they want – with no accountability even for war crimes, let alone policy mistakes.
Yeah, well, people do things, questionable things, stupid things, even evil things, and they don’t ask for permission. Who would they ask? What authority with the power to stop them gets to say yes or no to them? That doesn’t seem to be the American people. The issues are too bewildering, and they also don’t know when they’re being lied to, or they find out that they’ve been lied to, years later, when it doesn’t matter anymore. Congress has the constitutional authority to say no to authorization for endless coercive peace building, endless war everywhere, but those guys have their issues. Each of them has to look good to their voters or their career is over. And no one feels compelled to apologize for anything. People might suddenly realize something went terribly wrong. It’s far better no one knows. They didn’t know before, did they? Why trouble them? It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission of course, but it’s stupid to ask for forgiveness when no one knows what you’re talking about.
Then there’s Grace Hopper. It’s a good thing she wasn’t a politician. With her attitude she would have caused real trouble.