There Is No Need For Congress To Declare War Because We’re Already At War

American Thinker 

The usual suspects, plus Thomas Massie and Rand Paul, seem apoplectic about Donald Trump giving the order to obliterate a sworn enemy of the US. They all seem to land either on the 1973 War Powers Resolution or Congress’s power under Article I, Section 8 to “Declare War.” Somehow, they insist the President must be on the wrong side of the Constitution. At the same time, they all seem to be unaware of history.

Thomas Jefferson, a contemporary of the conventioners who wrote the Constitution, seems to be of a kind with Trump. Now the threat to America wasn’t as blatant as the nuclear winter threatened by the Ayatollahs, but he faced off against some of their ideological kin in the Barbary pirates.

Those Muslim corsairs were happily capturing American ships and putting American sailors into slavery. This was a war. They had cut down a flagpole and demanded tribute from the US, in effect declaring war by asserting sovereignty over US assets.

Let’s get one thing clear about this. The Barbary pirates were not a manifest threat to the US mainland in the context of military attempts to conquer territory. Nevertheless, this still was war. A territorial threat is not required for a state of war to exist. President Jefferson knew this and sent a task force of Marines to eliminate the threat. He did not go to Congress to get a declaration of war, and Congress did not complain at this “oversight.”

And we should recall that large numbers of sitting Congressmen and Senators, like Jefferson himself, were directly involved in creating and ratifying the new Constitution. None of them is on record opposing this military action. Rather, opinion seemed universally in favor of sending the Marines to defend against a war already underway against the US.

More recent history includes the mission against Libya in response to the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, Clinton’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, and Obama’s multiple Middle Eastern bombing exercises. In each case, Congress did not formally declare war. Obama’s adventures led to considerable carping about whether they were lawful under the Authorization for Use of Military Force that led to Desert Storm. Unfortunately, no one bothered to look deeply at the actual justification for most of these. To this we must go.

Islam has been at war with civilization since its founding. Mohammed was little more than a successful local warlord, but it appears that he was visited by a fallen Elohim who claimed to be the Archangel Gabriel. Jewish history was thereby co-opted into a completely different religion that isn’t compatible with civilization. And it has been at war with civilization ever since.

Rome had civilized North Africa, and it was home to much of Christianity. St. Augustine lived there, as did many of the early church fathers. But shortly after Islam took root, Christian civilization was largely destroyed in North Africa. The Moors (an Islamic group) even conquered Spain.

It took heroic efforts by European Christians to dislodge Islam from Europe. But as we can see, that war never ended. Today, many places in Europe are Islamic “no-go zones,” and most of Europe has passively surrendered.

In short, Islam has declared war, and that war has never ended. The most powerful recent iteration is Iran. There are dozens of Islamic nations, but Iran has been the major player in the war against the West.

Iran sits on vast riches of oil, making it mostly self-financing. It has vigorously threatened America and has participated in multiple attacks on us. Khobar Towers and the Beirut Marine barracks bombings were direct attacks on our military assets. In short, Iran has been openly at war with us for decades.

What we have not done is to stand up and publicly declare this fact. Even The Donald hasn’t quite been up front in explaining this. He intuitively understands it, but until the point is made clear, he leaves the door open for the TDS Left to shout.

We have been at war with Iran for over forty years. No declaration of war on our part matters. The war is an open fact. This is little different from Pearl Harbor in concept.

On December 7, 1941, Japan openly declared war on America by bombing Hawaii. Congress declared war in response, but that was simply not needed. The state of war between Japan and the US was already a fact. The Declaration was pro forma and did not change anything. The same is true when Germany joined Japan and declared war on us. A state of war existed before Congress returned that favor.

President Trump should make it very clear that a state of war has existed between Iran and the US since the storming of our Embassy. International norms treat embassies as the sovereign territory of the country represented in them, and Iran did basically the same thing by invading it as the Barbary pirates did by attacking our consulate in Jefferson’s day. They declared war. They prosecuted it in fits and starts through their terrorist proxies. And they made it crystal clear that they wanted nuclear weapons to destroy us and missiles to get those bombs to us.

Because a state of war already existed, Operation Midnight Hammer was simply a defensive strike to limit the ability of Iran to harm us. Ditto for Operation Epic Fury.

Yes, Epic Fury will free the Iranian populace from the oppression of the Mullahs. But it is much more important in that it is designed to end the state of war between Iran and the US by defeating Iran, just as the Allies defeated Germany in World War II. And because these actions are defensive, there is no need to ask Congress for permission.

A declaration of war would be the act that officially transformed a situation from peace into a solemn, public, international war. Because we were not at peace with Iran (by Iran’s initiative), a declaration of war is not needed. Even Alexander Hamilton noted that the President had the unilateral power to engage in defensive action (Federalist 69).

The President’s detractors need to be called up short with the facts. Islam declared war on us at its inception. Iran specifically did that when it overran our embassy. Donald Trump is simply recognizing that state of war. He is defending us with the objective of ending the war. He must do it with extreme prejudice since the Mullahs refuse to stop their war-making.