Doug Miller wrote:
In article , "Charles Spitzer"
wrote:

"Doug Miller" wrote in message
news
In article , Renata
wrote:
Where in the Constitution does it say one of the jobs of our
military
is to bring freedom and democracy to the rest of the world?

I suppose the case could be made that spreading freedom
"promote[s] the
common
defence". There's room for an interesting discussion on that
subject, to
be
sure. The Constitution does specify that the President is
Commander-in-Chief
of the nation's military, and it places little restriction on his
exercise
of
that role.


except for declaring war, which congress has to do.

And did, in this case. Unless there's a substantive difference
between
"declaring war" and passing a joint resolution authorizing an act of
war.


There is. The former compels the President to make war, the latter
merely permits him to do so. Perhaps more importantly (though I
confess to knowing very little about this) there are supposedly
a number of economic issue like insurance rate changes that
are triggered by a formal declaration of war but are not by
the outbreak of undeclared war. A formal declaration of war
evidently is more expensive. A better discussion of this might
be had over on misc.legal.moderated.

As you will recall, when the 2002 resolution was being debated
there was much debate as to whether the wording should be
conditional.

The resolution that passed, was not conditional leaving it
to Bush to decide to go to war or not. IMHO, though I disagree
with Bush's decision, the Congress was right to make the
resolution unconditional. The purpose of the resolution
was to force Iraqi compliance with the UN mandates, to be
effective it had to be as threatening to Saddam Hussein
as possible.

Ironically, the very wording needed to optimise the resolution
for the pupose of making war avoidable, by forcing Iraqi compliance
with the UN mandates, was the same wording that made it legal
for Bush to go to war despite that compliance.

Regarding some of that Iraqi compliance:

http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/News/...q20040202.html

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FF