Ned is being criticized by some of his friends for saying, in another forum, that someday (soon) some president is going to be held to account for the indiscriminate use of deadly force without a declaration of war. Ned hopes it is not Obama, but feels that Obama, for whom Ned worked for six months, is falling into the trap of hubris that any person with virtually unlimited power can fall prey to. Obama now has, as Bush had before him, essentially as much war-making power as Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914, and we know where that led. Furthermore, actions are within the area of critical U.S. national security interest whenever the President says it is. Nothing more is required.
We believe that the greatest perversion of the Constitution, for some reason unfathomable to us, is the ceding of war-making powers from Congress to the Executive. Even the British Prime Minister has no such power, and is answerable to parliament. Not so Obama.
To be sure, he is simply following in the footsteps of every president since Roosevelt, who, ironically, is the last President to have had a legal declaration of was issued by Congress. Since then, the U.S. has been involved in countless wars and 'police actions', resulting in the despoiling of a significant part of the earth's land and sea area, the deaths of countless creatures and hundreds of thousands of human beings, many of them innocent and many of them children.
But what we hear from this president is 'we need to address bullying in schools,' as if the deaths of innocent children, howbeit dark, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya is just 'collateral damage'
Ned is sick of it, and this president, who opposed Iraq, should know better, and eventually there must be a reckoning.
Let us keep our fingers crossed and hope against experience that this most recent adventure ends well.
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