A Franciscan Abroad

Brad Birzer on CatholicVote.org has an interesting piece on the constitutionality of current U.S. actions in Libya. He argues quite simply that the Executive Branch of the U.S. (i.e. the President) does not have the power to declare war; according to Article I of the U.S. Constitution only Congress has this power. It doesn’t matter that the President is not calling this a war, but a military intervention (or whatever, the name they use is not important). The fact is that any significant military action almost certainly constitutes a war the sense intended by the Constitution and therefore requires a declaration by Congress. By this standard there hasn’t been a legal war since World War II. This includes everything from the Korean War to our current adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.

Birzer is of course correct in his argument and I wish that more people would take the idea seriously (It’s not a new argument, among others Gary Wills makes it in his book Bomb Power). As Birzer points out the decision to wage war should be made by the people of this nation as a whole when represented by a duly elected Congress. The reason why is that to wage war involves a significant commitment of resources and lives, some of whom will die. This is not a decision to be taken lightly, nor is it one that can be effectively carried out without the commitment of an entire nation. One of the big problems with how we currently wage war is how little our wars directly effect people in the U.S. outside of the relatively small military community. It’s possible to completely forget we are even at war if one does not read newspapers of know someone in the military.

More importantly than this, however, is the fact that waging war commits the moral credibility – a credibility that we all share – of the U.S. to a particular act of aggression. We all share in the moral responsibility for our current wars, all three of them. By allowing the president to wage war without the declaration of Congress we allow others to control our morality and, in a sense, cede our moral autonomy to another. From a Catholic point of view this is not possible; we may ignore our moral responsibilities, but we cannot remove them (although we can sometimes lose our status as moral persons through mental defect or the like). Whether we like it or not the U.S.’s wars are our wars and we all share the guilt of them.

Finally, one of the core principles of Just War theory is that a war must be declared by a competent authority, which under the U.S. Constitution is Congress, in order to be considered just. Arguably, every war since WWII has been unjust and immoral, regardless of the reasons behind them, and all Catholics have a moral responsibility not to participate in them. This is a too little considered part of Just War theory: people usually know that if one makes a moral judgment that a war is just they have a moral responsibility to support it in any way they can. What is usually not appreciated here is the opposite is also true: if one makes a moral determination that a war is unjust they are morally obligated to oppose it and refuse to participate in it.

In short, all of our current foreign wars are wrong, both legally and morally, and should be stopped as soon as possible. Furthermore, it is past time for the U.S. Congress to stop ignoring its constitutional responsibilities and reassert its right to control who the U.S. makes war on.