Honolulu Weekly

On January 6, nearly 9,000 miles away from their homeport in Pearl Harbor, U.S. Navy warships USS Port Royal and USS Hopper were buzzed by five Iranian Revolutionary Guard patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz, according to U.S. officials. Two days later, the U.S. Department of Defense released a four-minute video segment featuring the patrol boats dumping wooden boxes into the ocean and a static-laden radio transmission announcing, ‘I am coming at you. You will explode after a few minutes.’

‘You’ve all covered the story, and I’m sure I’ll get some questions about some of the details,’ Adm. Michael Mullen told reporters at a Pentagon press conference on Jan. 11. ‘But the incident ought to remind us just how real the threat is posed by Iran and just how ready we are to meet that threat if it comes to it.’

Weeks later, it still isn’t clear what the patrol boats were up to or whether the threatening broadcast was transmitted by their radios or some other source. Just how real a threat they posed may never be known. However, the Strait of Hormuz incident does underscore the U.S. military’s readiness to work with the media in grooming such an incident into a pretext for war.

In mid-January, Iran agreed to answer questions from the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency regarding its past nuclear activities, while President George W. Bush, on his Middle East tour, urged our allies ‘to confront this danger before it is too late.’ And beneath the media radar, bills aimed at preventing the president from taking unjustified military action against Iran are waiting to be heard by the Foreign Affairs Committees of the House and Senate.

Abercrombie, Obama send message to President

As the Bush Administration enters its home stretch ending in January 2009, and political pressure to stabilize the Middle East increases, Hawai’i Representative Neil Abercrombie and Hawai’i-Born Senator Barack Obama have respectively sponsored House Joint Resolution 64 and Senate Joint Resolution 23 to keep the president from a premature attack on the next designated target in its Axis of Evil.

‘Obama and myself thought it was important to clarify the use of force in Iraq,’ Abercrombie says. ‘So that once we pass [the joint resolutions] you cannot use military force granted by the Iraq Resolution to engage in war with Iran.’

The purpose of this joint resolution, Abercrombie says, is to explicitly state that there is nothing in the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243), or any other previous law or resolution, that grants the President permission to use military force against Iran. ‘It’s a measure that places the decision to go to war securely back into the hands of Congress,’ he explains, adding that it is the responsibility of the House and the Senate, as established by the Constitution, to collectively assess whether every diplomatic means to resolving the situation in Iran has been met before authorizing the use of force as the very last resort.

Abercrombie says he recognizes the dangers of the non-binding Kyle-Lieberman amendment, passed by the Senate, which declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to be a terrorist organization, coupled with the possibility that an international incident may be inflated to fulfill political agendas. ‘Incidents [such as what occurred in the Straight of Hormuz] are incidents and not pretexts for war–we need to classify them correctly,’ Abercrombie says.

Should a legitimate reason for war with Iran develop, the joint resolutions specify that the decision to use military force would be made by Congress and not by the Administration. The president would have to properly seek permission from Congress without relying on previous U.S. resolutions dealing with Iraq or in combating terrorism.

‘If the president wants to go to war against Iran, he better come to us [Congress] first,’ Hawai’i Senator Daniel Inouye says in acknowledgement of the Abercrombie-Obama initiative.

Other proposed bills, similar in objective to the joint resolutions, focus more on reestablishing the exclusive power of Congress to authorize war.

House Concurrent Resolution 33, introduced by Rep. Peter DeFazio, states that the President should not initiate military action against Iran without first obtaining authorization from Congress. The bill states that nothing in the history of the ‘Commander-in-Chief’ clause of the Constitution suggests that its authors intended the Bush Administration’s current interpretation–of its granting the president wide latitude to engage U.S. military forces abroad without prior authorization from Congress. The resolution also recognizes the U.S. intelligence report which says that Iran discontinued its program to create nuclear weapons.

House Concurrent Resolution 14, introduced by Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, states that Congress has the sole and exclusive power to declare war.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich goes even further by leading a campaign to impeach Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. In House Resolution 799, Cheney is charged with, among other things, actively and systematically seeking to deceive U.S. citizens and Congress about an alleged threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction for the purpose of going to war.

‘Nobody benefits from war’

Some commentators disagree about the need for legislation to remind the president about the proper way to go to war. According to Hawai’i State Representative Gene Ward, the process for going to war is still protected by the Constitution, and the Abercrombie-Obama joint resolutions would tie the President’s hands in his effort to protect American interests.

‘Nobody benefits from war, everybody loses,’ Ward, a Vietnam veteran, says. ‘The Constitution is clear on how the president and Congress go about with war. The military option is the last option, but you certainly don’t broadcast your next play to the enemy.’

As for the United States’ relationship with Iran, ‘I think with diplomacy and reason and dialogue, this will pass,’ Ward says. ‘I don’t think people in Hawai’i should be afraid [of an imminent conflict with Iran]. We have to look in our own region, at North Korea.’

Others, like blogger Ari Melber of The Huffington Post, warn that war powers resolutions such as Obama’s are irrelevant–because Congress already has the power– and potentially dangerous if they backfire. ‘A failed floor vote on Obama’s resolution Ö might even give hawks more ammunition. Some would surely argue that the failure to pass the resolution reveals that a majority of Congress believes the president already has the power to attack Iran,’ Melber wrote in November.

Clear as the Constitution?

Whether it holds the exclusive power or not, Congress has not formally declared war since entering World War II, instead giving permission to the president in the form of Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMFs) over the last half century.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 created the current mechanism for Congress to go to war, says Jon Van Dyke, professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Hawai’i. Towards the end of the Vietnam War, the resolution was created to define the number of soldiers deployed by the president, require formal reports to Congress and set a time limit in which American forces could be deployed without a formal declaration of war. Since then, he says, the United States has followed the guidelines for the most part and Congress has played a role in the process.

‘The Constitution intended to make it hard to go to war. It still requires Congress to make the decision,’ Van Dyke adds. The structure of the Constitution in declaring war is not the problem so much as the way Congress has been playing its roll in the process–being too willing to grant the president AUMFs, he says.

Rather than being too willing or compliant, the House has actually been quite consistent in regards to dealing with the president and with the prospect of war, says Hawai’i Congresswoman Mazie Hirono, who has co-sponsored the Abercrombie-Obama resolutions and all other bills limiting the president’s power to go to war. The problem is that progress in these efforts often comes to a halt in the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans, she explains.

Hirono says that Iran’s closing of its nuclear weapons program in 2003 illustrates the effectiveness of non-military action. ‘Iran responded to scrutiny which says that international pressure should, would and could have an effect,’ Hirono says. ‘Unless things have changed dramatically, there is no reason we need to do anything militarily against them. We need to be alert.’

With regard to her constituents, the impact that a war with Iran will have on Hawai’i is foreshadowed by the number of troops that have been deployed and who have lost their lives in the war with Iraq, Hirono says. ‘Every day that goes by and we are not having a plan to bring our troops home–the money, cost and lives–is difficult. We’ve spent $1.5 trillion on the war in Iraq. The cost to all of us is the same in our islands and in our world.’

To avert the augmenting of these costs in the face of a truculent Administration, ‘What we need is a vigilant public and a Congress that takes its role seriously,’ Van Dyke says. It would seem that the sponsors of the current resolutions are doing the latter. What remains is for an informed and interested public to join the debate, especially in this crucial election year.