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No Congress, No Peace



By Jonathan Schwarz


Gauging the Bushabsence of congressional action does not mean he can legally do so in contravention of congressional action. If Congress specifically forbids Bush from attacking Iran, and he does so anyway, it would precipitate a political crisis. Fortunately, Congress has some powerful tools at its disposal. Here's what it could do:

Cut Off Funding
Congress' biggest constitutional bargaining chip is the power of the purse. It could send an extremely strong message by stipulating in future supplemental defense appropriations bills that none of that money could be spent on attacking Iran. Freshman Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) tried to add such a restriction to the $93 billion in supplemental appropriations that went before Congress earlier this year. There is an inexact precedent for this in the 1982 Boland Amendment, which prohibited U.S. intelligence agencies from covertly spending money to overthrow the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The Reagan administration's attempts to circumvent this law became the genesis of the Iran-Contra scandal.
The Bush administration might well claim such a requirement was an unconstitutional infringement on the president's authority to defend the country and the troops from Iranian "meddling" in Iraq, and proceed with an attack on Tehran anyway. To prevent this, Congress could make such a funding prohibition "non-severable" from the rest of the appropriations bill. This means that if the president ignored that particular section of the bill, the entire bill would become inoperative. Congress also could prohibit Bush from using any other funds to attack Iran, essentially challenging the administration to blatantly violate federal law.
Close the Loopholes

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Get Good Intel
There's already been some congressional push-back on the administration's murky claims that Iran is behind attacks on American troops in Iraq. That is a start, but ongoing, aggressive oversight of how the White House is using intelligence about Iran is critical.

The most recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear capability, completed in 2005, judged that Tehran could not build a nuclear bomb much earlier than 2015. A new NIE is near completion but may be held up by the administration, because its findings will likely echo those of the 2005 NIE and should reflect the CIA's reported inability to find conclusive evidence of any Iranian nuclear weapons program.

So, despite what the Bush administration says, there's plenty of time to strategize. The congressional intelligence committees should demand that the new NIE be finished, and then hold high-profile hearings on its findings, with witnesses explaining why there's no cause for panic. Congress could also commission an nie that examines the possible consequences of an American attack on Iran. Its findings would likely dampen war fever.

Don't Get Fooled Again
We now know that in early 2002, President Bush authorized the CIA to smuggle exiles into Iraq, where they would announce a coup, forcing Saddam to attack them in violation of the southern no-fly zone, and providing the United States with a pretext to invade. This plot was never executed, but it raises questions about whether the administration might be planning a similar provocation against Iran. According to The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, the White House is running clandestine operations in Iran without the legally mandated congressional oversight. Vice President Cheney and his staff are reportedly avoiding oversight requirements by running the operations through the Pentagon rather than the CIA and using Saudi funding rather than money appropriated by Congress.

Congress must immediately demand answers about what the administration is doing now in Iran. Only a coordinated congressional effort can uncover the truth and help Americans understand how they could be bamboozled into yet another war.

Of course, the unfortunate reality is that without public pressure, the Democratic leadership is unlikely to take most or even some of these actions. It doesn't help that Democratic presidential candidates have been echoing the administration's refrain that "all options are on the table" regarding Iran. If the Democrats continue to sit tight as the White House decides its next move, the administration will have won the first battle of the next war without firing a single shot.

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Photo Essay: American Happiness and the Need to Consume
Clara Jeffery

Photo Essay by Brian Ulrich


The photos on these pages are selected from photographer Brian Ulrich's Copia project, which began after 9/11. "In 2001, citizens were encouraged to take to the malls to boost the U.S. economy through shopping," he says, "thereby equating consumerism with patriotism. The Copia project, a direct response to that advice, is a long-term photographic examination of the peculiarities and complexities of the consumer-dominated culture in which we live."

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