"cavelamb himself" wrote in message
...
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?

We're in a war, but not with a country. There is no recognizable political
entity at all; trying to identify one is what led us to invade Iraq. If we
can only take on and beat a *country*, the thinking goes, we will have
asserted our position and dismantled an antagonistic state. (But we still
don't want to *declare* war, or we'll be at war with the people of that
country, as well as the "evil ones." That could be messy.)

But the enemy wasn't really a state. So now we have a generalized,
amorphous, indeterminate war. Welcome to the new world.

--
Ed Huntress