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No Congress, No Peace

News: If the United States spreads its Middle Eastern disaster into Iran, it won't be the fault of George W. Bush alone – a Democratic Congress will share some of the blame. Fortunately, the legislative branch has effective options for stopping war before it starts.

By Jonathan Schwarz


Gauging the Bush administration's true intentions toward Iran is not easy. Each week brings a new story that hints at a struggle between the hardliners who'd like to take down one more point on the Axis of Evil and the realists who prefer one disastrous Middle East conflict at a time. Given the administration's track record, uncoordinated and sporadic attempts by members of Congress to prevent an attack on Iran will restrain it no more than would cobwebs. Yet Congress does possess the power to stop a war—if it chooses to exercise it. If we wake up one morning to find cruise missiles flying, the responsibility will not be Bush's alone. It will also belong to a Democratic-controlled Congress that could have acted but decided not to.
What, then, would a serious congressional strategy to block a war with Iran look like? Constitutional scholars and congressional staff agree there's no one magic answer. The alarming truth is that 220 years after the adoption of the Constitution, there are few settled answers about what legal powers the executive branch possesses to start a war. But there are several steps Congress could take to make a war with Iran politically very difficult for the White House.
Unfortunately, the Constitution isn't much help here. It does state that Congress alone has the ability to declare war, but precedent, inertia, and technology have eroded this power almost to naught. (In the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles, the commander in chief can launch an apocalyptic nuclear strike without so much as a courtesy call to the speaker of the House.) The 1973 War Powers Act requires the president to "consult" Congress before launching military action; if he doesn't receive further authorization, he must cease operations within 60 days. But this leaves the door wide open for all sorts of attacks—a massive bombing campaign could certainly be carried out within two months. Bill Clinton arguably breached the War Powers Act during his 78-day Kosovo bombing campaign, without consequences.
The limiting factor on a determined president, then, is not whether an attack is legal. Rather, it is how high a political cost he's willing to pay. Just because Bush can launch an attack on Iran in the absence 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
Both of the Authorizations to Use Military Force (aumfs) passed by Congress—in September 2001 for Afghanistan, and October 2002 for Iraq—contain language that might conceivably be used to justify an attack on Iran. The 2001 aumf authorized the president to use force not just against the perpetrators of 9/11 but also against anyone who "harbored such organizations or persons." After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Iran arrested several senior members of Al Qaeda. Though they are apparently being held as bargaining chips with the United States, someone could argue that Iran is in fact "harboring" them.
Attacking Iran under the 2002 AUMF, which gave the president power to defend against "the continuing threat posed by Iraq," is even more of a reach. But squaring that kind of circle is what executive branch lawyers are for. As a former Bush administration official told me, "If I had to make the case for war with Iran, I would definitely look to the 2002 authorization. So that's one loophole Congress would want to nail shut." Congress would be prudent to rewrite both AUMFs to explicitly exclude action against Iran.

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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.

[IQ]

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."

[IQ]

An Assault in Iraq, a Stage Hit in London

Dominic Jephcott as a soldier and Harriet Walter as a reporter in “Fallujah."

By JANE PERLEZ
Published: May 29, 2007

LONDON, May 28 — Soon after Falluja became a symbol of the horrific violence and aggressive American tactics in Iraq, the theater director Jonathan Holmes listened to a group of British generals and journalists conduct a post-mortem on what had happened during the assault on that town.



Jonathan Holmes, the writer and director of the antiwar play “Fallujah.”


Mr. Holmes, antiwar in his beliefs but a newcomer to war talk, was struck by the drama of the dialogue, the surprisingly articulate nature of the soldiers, even their charisma, as they thrashed out the what-ifs.

“This guy came and he looked like Sam Neill and he seemed to be sincerely devoted to doing things better,” Mr. Holmes said of one of the British generals at that seminar, held at Oxford. “I took down what they said, and it was immediately theatrical.”

Thus the play “Fallujah,” now at the Old Truman Theater in London’s East End, was born. The play (which uses the preferred British spelling in its title) is the latest entrant in the growing canon of documentary theater that concentrates on Iraq.

Mr. Holmes has tried to convey the 2004 assault on Falluja, when the Americans used a ferocious strategy to re-establish control of the town after the massacre of four American contract workers, whose mutilated bodies were dragged through the streets and strung from a bridge.

At the time of the attack, described by officials as an attempt to pacify the place and empty it of enemy insurgents, many civilians fled, and journalists were kept out. In the aftermath the United States military said that most of those killed had been military-age males, and that the high number of dead attested to the accuracy of the marines.

Using what he calls “eyewitness testimonies” for the script and the overpowering sound effects of rocket fire and low-lying helicopters, Mr. Holmes has fashioned a play that focuses on the traumas of those trapped in the town.

The script is based, he said, on the accounts of people — soldiers, doctors, aid workers and fleeing civilians — who were in or around the scene. They include Jo Wilding, a British antiwar activist who went to Iraq to perform as a clown, and a freelance Canadian journalist, Dahr Jamail, whose accounts were used by Mr. Holmes to create the character Sasha, a television reporter.

Sasha rails against the Americans and complains that some of her reports are not being shown because they are “too passionate.”

The characters also include an Iraqi aid worker, a Christian Iraqi cleric, American soldiers who spout hatred for the Iraqis and British soldiers who show contempt for the Americans.

The anti-American theme is relentless. A British soldier, a member of the coalition forces, calls the assault totally unacceptable and theorizes that “war is an American way to teach geography.” Mr. Holmes says the dialogue of the soldiers comes from several British military men who served in Iraq and helped him understand what had happened.

The play is being staged in a loftlike unused brewery that has been converted into a theater. The props — a Red Cross ambulance, hospital beds, rows of hazardous-materials suits and stylized corpses representing the contractors — are scattered across the floor and along the white walls.

The actors walk on and off a set that resembles an art installation, designed by the Paris-based artists Lucy and Jorge Orta. As they move around the space — an American sniper explaining that he must “completely demoralize the enemy,” agonized aid workers complaining that they can’t reach the needy — the audience follows with them.

For those who don’t want to stand, folding chairs are provided. And if the crowd around the actors gets too dense, television screens hung from the walls convey the action for those who cannot see well.

With antiwar sentiment running deeper in Britain than in the United States, the play has found a ready audience in its monthlong run, which ends on Saturday. Surprisingly, the conservative Daily Telegraph gushed with enthusiasm; The Guardian, a liberal daily, dismissed the effort as too preachy.

On a recent night the audience appeared to be decidedly sympathetic to the high-pitch antiwar message. Young men and women with backpacks and older peaceniks and locals from Brick Lane, where the theater is located in a heavily Bangladeshi neighborhood, mixed easily with the actors.

Mr. Holmes, 31, a senior lecturer in the department of drama at Royal Holloway, University of London, attracted heavyweight help from the theater world. The Shakespearean actress Fiona Shaw gave advice on the script.

Imogen Stubbs, known in Britain for her classical stage performances, plays Jo, the British activist, and tells a compelling story of American soldiers preventing her ambulance from reaching a woman giving birth. At another point she is kidnapped and shakes uncontrollably with fear as Iraqi captors taunt her, saying they will fight for 100 years.



Shereen Martineau, left, and Imogen Stubbs in Jonathan Holmes’s “Fallujah,” nearing the end of its run at the Old Truman Theater in London.


The denunciations of the United States are severe, particularly in the scenes that deal with the use of napalm in Falluja, an allegation made by left-wing critics of the war but never substantiated.

But Mr. Holmes makes no pretense of objectivity. He writes in the introduction to a book about the play and its origins that the theater offers the chance to “publicize the disgrace and to condemn it noisily.” He strove for authority more than authenticity, he said.

Unlike another documentary play, “Guantánamo: ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom,’ ” “Fallujah” breaks with the usual approach in such productions of having the actors sitting on the stage reading scripts.

“On a purely theatrical level, I wanted to do something different from four actors delivering monologues,” Mr. Holmes said. “That approach is like a radio play, quite sad. It gives a sense of avoiding theatricality because of the serious material. I wanted a way to have people think about it more abstractly.”

A starting point for the presentation was the work of the Ortas, whose installation art revolves around themes of society and the military. “I had always seen her work as a set waiting for a play,” Mr. Holmes said of Lucy Orta. “When I approached her, she leapt at it.”

To bring the drama closer to home, Mr. Holmes closes the play with Condoleezza Rice, played by a young Zimbabwean actress, Chipo Chung, who uses a Southern accent far more pronounced than that of the real secretary of state.

Ms. Chung, dressed in a trim “Condi” suit, stands at a pulpit of a Midwestern church and talks of how America’s belief in faith will help overcome those people “who are trying to shake our will.” It’s an unsettling ending after 90 minutes of blanket violence and injustice.

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