Ed Huntress wrote:


Of the 100 or more military conflicts the US has been involved in, Congress
has only declared war about a half-dozen times. There are some good reasons
for this, because there are two fundamental problems with declaring war:
First, you acknowledge sovereignty and legitimacy to the entity you're
fighting, under international law. You don't want to grant legitimacy to the
Taliban, for example. If you declare war against an entity that grabbed
power illegitimately, or that you don't want to acknowledge that it is the
true representative of a people, then you stay clear of formal declarations.
They'll bite you in the ass.

The second problem is that a formal declaration of war, under law, amounts
to a war against all of the people of that political entity. In Iraq, it
would mean we were at war with the Iraqi people. We didn't want to do that.

This issue is so over-simplified in the popular discussions about it that it
bears almost no relation to the political realities. Congress has handled it
correctly for the most part: pass an enabling bill, don't make a formal
declaration, and get on with the fight.

Ron Paul's ideas are the current incarnation of the conservative bias toward
isolationism, which was the dominant conservative view until WWII. It sounds
good, it's well-motivated, and we'd probably do well to be as cautious about
war as he suggests we should be. But it's also part of a broader
isolationism that would be ruinous to the US in today's world. You can't be
isolationist today. But you can be much more resistant to starting wars than
we have been in recent decades, and we'll all be better off for it.

--
Ed Huntress



So are we in a war, or a squabble?