If you can't credibly argue that a military action has a good shot of making things better, then aren't you submitting to the kind of ugly militarism that says state-sponsored violence is an end unto itself? After all, while there are real civilian lives being extinguished by the monstrous Assad regime, there will also inevitably be real civilian lives at the explosive end of U.S. cruise missiles (and that's almost certainly the case no matter how many times professional politicians throw around reassuring words like "surgical" and "proportional").
Shouldn't humanitarians be thinking about those lives as as well, and isn't it possible that when you think about all those lives, there are different conclusions? More specifically, isn't it possible that there is a more credible case that rejecting military intervention rather than supporting it would result in less overall human suffering? And if it is possible, then isn't it disingenuous to automatically cast non-intervention as sympathy for dictators rather than as a humanitarian calculation?
That last query can be particularly difficult to ponder because it challenges the way we are programmed to consider intervention and non-intervention only on the Rwanda/Nazi continuum. At one end of the continuum is the Western world opting for non-intervention in Rwanda, thus permitting a genocide. At the other end of that continuum is the United States' decision to intervene in World War II. Though that decision wasn't made primarily to stop the Holocaust, it did end up rescuing the remaining European Jewish population from Nazi death camps.
As a method of evaluating international conflicts, this continuum seems adequate, but it is deliberately deceptive. After all, the decision to forcefully intervene against Saddam Hussein ended up creating vast atrocities -- and it is hardly clear that the war resulted in a net reduction in human suffering. So Iraq proves the whole idea that military intervention is automatically synonymous with morality or humanitarianism is a ruse, and not an accidental one, either. It is designed to guarantee certain ideologically driven policy decisions, regardless of whether those decisions are the right ones.
3. But what about the "red line" of chemical weapons?
President Obama has declared that above and beyond all other considerations, military action can be predicated solely on whether an enemy nation has crossed a "red line" by using chemical weapons. Though the administration insists there is now clear evidence the Syrian government used chemical weapons, the news that the evidence is both no "slam dunk" and not being fully divulged to the public evokes memories of the deliberately misleading rhetoric about Iraq's supposed WMD, and fears that we again are going to go to war on false pretenses.
And yet, as legitimate as those fears are, there's an even deeper problem with the entire "red line" concept. It seems to suggest that if we are going to use military force for humanitarian causes, then that military force should not be contingent on the scope of the atrocities at hand but only on the particular instruments used to commit said atrocities. It says this because, as CNN notes, "(In Syria) there have been massacres. Populated areas have been bombed. Blasts have targeted people lining up for food at bakeries. People have been decapitated. Millions of Syrians are displaced." And here's the thing: Those atrocities, which have killed 100,000 Syrians, were committed with conventional weapons.
It stands to reason, then, that predicating military action exclusively on a chemical weapons "red line" doesn't only say to the world what the Obama administration suggests it does; more specifically, it doesn't just say that the use of such unconventional weapons is unacceptable. It also rather explicitly suggests that in the U.S. government's eyes, atrocities committed with regular old conventional weapons are fine, or at least not atrocious enough to warrant a military response. In other words, it seems to tell other dictators that as long as they kill and maim their own people with conventional armaments, they will remain on the acceptable side of the "red line" and therefore they don't risk a U.S. response.
Noting this isn't to argue for more military interventions in places where chemical weapons are not used (as mentioned above, military intervention often makes things worse). However, it is to spotlight the big problem with the "red line" construct as a sole basis for humanitarian military intervention. Chemical weapons are hideous and awful -- nobody disputes that. But pretending that their use alone is more important than the total extent of a humanitarian crisis runs the risk of effectively absolving and protecting the monsters who commit crimes through more mundane methods.
4. Because there are no easy answers, isn't there an even bigger imperative for Congress to weigh in?
President Obama's decision to seek congressional approval for an attack on Syria has been met with surprise among a political class that has become all too accustomed to presidents ignoring the Constitution. It has also been met with predictable criticism from war-mongers in Permanent Washington who evidently believe merely following the Constitution's war powers provisions is somehow a sign of weakness.
On the merits, of course, the reason that Congress must assert its decision-making power over a military assault on Syria should be obvious. That reason, in fact, was best articulated by Barack Obama during his first presidential campaign. Back then, he said, "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."
The president was indisputably correct. Simply stated, without the explicit consent of Congress, a president has no constitutional authority to initiate a war with another country that poses no imminent threat to the United States. And as none other than Joe Biden explained only a few years ago, a president who does initiate such a war without such consent is committing an impeachable offense. End of story.
Now sure, there's a whole "unitary executive" ideology that absurdly claims the president can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to whomever he wants. But even if you somehow believe that crap and thus mindlessly dismiss the questions of legality and constitutionality, you probably shouldn't so flippantly dismiss the democratic principles that undergird those questions.
Congress was not given the sole power to declare or reject war for no reason. It was granted that authority to better guarantee public consent for the most dire decisions of all -- the decision to use the American people's resources to kill other human beings, and to officially carry out such violence in all of our names.
Vesting such a decision in the legislative branch isn't some outdated idea; in this age of what the military calls a state of "persistent conflict," it is as necessary as ever, for it reduces the possibility of a single executive using that state to abuse martial power.
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