State of the Union

Meritocracy: Gelman’s Sixth Column

Will Israel Decide When America Goes to War?

By Scott McConnell • March 1, 2013, 1:39 PM

Ali Gharib has the goods here on the proposed Lindsay Graham-Robert Menendez bill to mandate U.S. support for an Israeli strike on Iran. The resolution states that if Israel is “compelled” to attack Iran, the U.S. should “stand with” Israel and provide diplomatic, military, and economic support. A congressional resolution is not an executive commitment—and presumably the administration can ignore it. A similar bill was drafted in 2011 by House Republicans, and failed to get airborne. This one, spearheaded by Graham, a GOP foreign-policy leader, and the incorruptible Democrat Robert Menendez, has the same intent: to broadcast the falsehood that the U.S. and Israel see the Iranian nuclear issue in exactly the same terms, to counter the White House’s diplomatic efforts to stop Israel from igniting a war. If the resolution fouls efforts to reach a negotiated agreement about Iran’s nuclear program, that would be gravy. (It calls for the U.S to prevent an Iranian nuclear “capability”—which is a more aggressive formulation than Obama’s stated policy of preventing an Iranian “nuclear weapon.”) In spirit and intent, the resolution seeks to limit American options and outsource critical American decisions about war and peace to Israel.

AIPAC, which gathers in Washington for a show of strength this coming week (there will be protests), is reportedly making support for the Graham-Menendez resolution one of its main “asks” when they send lobbyists up to Capitol Hill. During the Hagel confirmation hearings, Graham dared the Nebraskan to name some of the “stupid” things AIPAC makes the Senate do. Hagel didn’t rise to the bait, but he if had, he could have replied that trying to bind the United States to Israeli decisions about bombing Iran would be one of them.

Posted in Foreign policy. Tagged Ali Gharib, Lindsay Graham, Robert Menendez.

19 Responses to Will Israel Decide When America Goes to War?

ArizonaBumblebee says:

March 1, 2013 at 2:25 pm

This proposed legislation would be an unconstitutional intrusion by the legislative branch on the executive. If it passes, President Obama should refuse to sign it and ignore its provisions. The bill would infringe on the President’s constitutionally mandated authorities as the chief representative of the government to foreign entities and commander in chief of the armed forces. Senator Graham really needs to get a grip on his life. This is a silly bill and shows how desperate the neocons have become in their ongoing efforts to start a war with Iran. What I would like to see, but never will, is a Senate hearing where the neocons are under investigation for being agents of a foreign power, in this case Israel.
icarusr says:

March 1, 2013 at 2:59 pm

“This proposed legislation would be an unconstitutional intrusion by the legislative branch on the executive.”

A resolution, not legislation. Any way, Congress and not the President has the sole constitutional authority to declare war. To properly criticise something, it would do to characterise it correctly.

And it not just silly – it is a purported transfer of war-making power from Congress to the Prime Minister of Israel. Not even the Brits and the French were wreckless enough, in 1939, to guarantee Poland against aggression it would instigate …
Uncle Vanya says:

March 1, 2013 at 3:17 pm

The Israel Lobby reminds me of Jason from the Friday the 13th movies. No matter what happens it comes back again and again to wreak havoc on American foreign policy.

In a century students of history will be flummoxed to answer why a supposedly great nation like the United States let itself be dictated into pursuing actions provably harmful to its own interests by a advocates of a client state.
Mayor of Simpleton says:

March 1, 2013 at 4:18 pm

This is obviously disgusting from the perspective of a normal American, but seen another way it is the logical conclusion of the GOP war-wing’s Israel mania: when they say “no daylight” they mean it, and it means giving Israel control of our military.

I wonder how my fellow citizens will react to being dragged into yet another Middle Eastern meatgrinder at the whim of Netanyahu and his coalition of fanatics.
norman ravitch says:

March 1, 2013 at 4:35 pm

Most indicative is the warm reception Bibi Netanyahu got in Congress during last year’s visit. Perhaps they thought it was the Second Coming and any Jew would do.
Clint says:

March 1, 2013 at 5:44 pm

“Red Light Bob” panders to Israel.

Senator Menendez is being investigated by The FBI, regarding improper lobbying a port security contract for Dr.Salomon Melgen, which involves air flights, underage prostitutes and separately Melgen Medicare fraud.
Concerned Citizen says:

March 1, 2013 at 6:59 pm

Americans have a long history of inciting conflict across the globe since its inception. We are indeed exceptional.
ArizonaBumblebee says:

March 1, 2013 at 9:43 pm

I stand by my comment that the bill would be unconstitutional. I obviously don’t know all the details, but Mr. McConnell said this was legislation and not a sense-of-the-Senate resolution. This is not the first time in American history that the Senate has attempted to dictate to the President how to conduct the foreign policy of the United States. Alexander Hamilton made this attempt in the 1790s when he tried to force President Adams to declare war on France. (Remember the XYZ Affair?) President Adams rebuffed that attempt and so should President Obama.
Bill Pearlman says:

March 2, 2013 at 5:29 am

Hey, genius, it’s a RESOLUTION. If we were so powerful how did we let Hagel get through. How come Pat Buchanan. is still on TV. And how come the TAC runs anti-Israel articles constantly. Certainly we would have shut this all down. I’ll call the elders.
Clint says:

March 2, 2013 at 5:29 am

Mr. Menendez’s Ethics Problem

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/opinion/mr-menendezs-ethics-problem.html?_r=0
JLF says:

March 2, 2013 at 8:55 am

icarusr makes a salient point: Congress has the sole constitutional power to declare war. The president has no say in the matter; a congressional declaration of war does not need the president’s signature to be effective. That said, what if a future congress – the current congress would never do so – declared war on Iran. Would any action by the executive contrary to the declaration be treason? Certainly Congress could not prosecute the war, that is the president’s prerogative as commander-in-chief. But wouldn’t a declaration of war hobble the president in his role as chief diplomat?

Next question: can the extremists in the Republican party capture control of the Senate as they have apparently done in the House?
James Canning says:

March 2, 2013 at 1:14 pm

Great piece. Bravo.
James Canning says:

March 2, 2013 at 1:16 pm

More attention needs to be drawn to the dangerous effort by fools in the US Congress, to declare Iran cannot be allowed to have “nuclear capability”.

As a practical matter, any P5+1 deal with Iran will have to include acceptance of Iranian enrichment to 5%.
James Canning says:

March 2, 2013 at 1:18 pm

Uncle Vanya,

Future historians will have no difficulty seeing why US foreign policy was so often effectively controlled by Israel, in important particulars. It is all about the money. Who has the money, and how is it used to finance political campaigns.
cecelia says:

March 2, 2013 at 10:37 pm

these fools want a war – does it for one moment occur to t hem how awful war is? how many would die? that they would be grieved ? Do they know that war has consequences most of which are unpredictable? That they may not especially like those consequences? It is as if they play a game – never for one second contemplating that this isn’t a game – that it is real and will be horrifying.

Why have we put our lives, the lives of our loved ones, in the hands of these wretched men? How can they even be elected given how careless they are ?
TomB says:

March 3, 2013 at 10:46 pm

The question of the constitutionality of this kind of resolution has been seen before, and I think the only coherent answer is that this sort of thing is just one of the checks and balances built into the document.

Yes, that is, the President is supposed to be the sole organ of American diplomacy, but the Congress has the power to declare war even. So it would be odd to say that it’s unconstitutional for the Congress to merely urge a *lesser* thing, when it has the power to make real a much greater matter.

And, similarly, is the view from the other end of the telescope: What about a President that refused to prosecute war declared by Congress? Is this unconstitutional on his part?

Well but he is not only that sole organ but the Commander-in-Chief too.

And yet on the other side Congress could find his failure to prosecute such a war a high crime or misdemeanor and impeach him.

I think it’s a mistake therefore to imagine that the Framers believed in some secret “one constitutional answer” to all the different situations that could arise out of things like this. Instead I think the far more readily apparent reality that also fits with what the Framers themselves were saying was that yes, situations like this were just the result of separating powers amongst the different branches, with the “wisdom” of politics and the hoped-for goodwill of the people just having to be the final arbiter of who is “right” or “wrong” in the various disputes.

If you read their own words the Framers very quickly realized that there was no way they could anticipate much less answer any even significant number of the kinds of situations that could arise for the country. And thus that the constitution itself had to be limited in what it could do and what answers it could provide. But this, it was also recognized, had its virtues: A document that tries to control to much can easily prove too temporal or too brittle and inflexible to last.

It’s sort of a funny, misleading thing how smart those guys were: They were so smart we want them to answer more questions than they actually endeavored to answer. And yet when we realize they didn’t, instead of concluding they were less the men for it we recognize the endurance of the thing they did engineer, at least partly because of the limits they meant for it, and our estimation of them then just goes up ever farther.
Fran Macadam says:

March 4, 2013 at 2:25 am

I’d like to find a way to separate a profound disagreement with AIPAC’s Likudnik policies from the suspicion of generic anti-semitism. The War Party drumbeats are far from being in the genuine interests of Israel’s long term viability. The internal contradictions will have a far more profound ill fallout for Israel’s future than on America’s. Ironically, the “emergency” for Israel is real – it’s just not the simpleminded one Graham et. al. and their greedy military-industrial puppet masters are propagandizing.
Escher says:

March 4, 2013 at 7:52 am

So the Israeli lobby is meeting this week in DC? Wait, I thought they didn’t exist! So it must be a virtual meeting.
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