The "Blunder in the Balkans" (to borrow Rush Limbaugh's apt phrase describing the NATO attacks on Yugoslavia) promises to be the capstone of Bill Clinton's legacy.  The Perjurer-in-Chief and Rapist-in-Chief, the man who heads the most corrupt presidency in American history, has now lead the United States into a war in which we do not belong, either politically, morally or constitutionally.

        The United States has absolutely no vital interests at stake in Yugoslavia; the conflict there is the kind of European war which Americans should avoid, if we follow the advice of the early American presidents, beginning with George Washington in his famous Farewell Address.  The situation in Yugoslavia has been ably summarized by journalist Philip Terzian:  "We are bombing a sovereign nation, not a member of NATO, which is not disturbing its neighbors but seeking, instead, to prevent one of its provinces from seceding.  Bear in mind that the United States fought a bloody, four-year civil war, on the issue of secession (we're against it) and that NATO, in its action against the Serbs, now proposes to invade a European state -- in the Balkans, no less -- to resolve an internal ethnic dispute.  For the first time since 1945, the German air force is in action against another European country.  And everyone agrees that air assaults are not conclusive.  In order to achieve what we want, it might well be necessary to introduce ground troops."

        The Clinton administration's decision to bomb Yugoslavia, under the rubric of NATO, is an incredibly stupid foreign policy blunder.  Not only is the situation there none of the United States' business, our participation in the NATO bombings threatens to de-stabilize eastern Europe far more than anything done by Slobodan Milosevic's government.  (Indeed, it can be argued that the bombing of Kosovo worsened the so-called "ethnic cleansing" and other atrocities being committed by Serbian or Yugoslav forces in that province.)  Critics of the United States and of the West generally can point to the bombings as clear evidence of western "imperialism."  Undoubtedly, many Communists and other leftists in the new NATO member nations of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic are doing just that -- possibly setting back for decades whatever progress in foreign relations the United States has made in eastern Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union.

        Regardless the outcome of the war itself, politically--whether it will bring about the demise of Slobodan Milosevic, and at what price--the lasting importance of the war to Americans will be its significance constitutionally.  What it reveals is that the actual balance of power in matters of foreign policy has shifted decisively toward the President, and that Congress has failed utterly to function as the institution that the Framers of the Constitution intended it to be.  What that signifies, in terms of the concentration of unchecked power in the White House, should be a matter of profound concern to all Americans.

        The Framers of the Constitution gave the power to declare war to Congress, and not to the President, because they recognized that the people have a vital stake in war: it involves the expenditure of American tax dollars as well as the loss of American lives.  For that reason, Congress must be involved in making the initial decision to commit American forces abroad.  As James Madison explained in 1793, the momentous questions of war and peace properly belong to the legislature, where they can be publicly debated by the people's representatives.  The decision to declare war--that is to say, the decision to initiate the use of force, aggressively and not in self-defense--is a decision that only the Congress can make.  The debate over war--indeed, the debate not only over strategy (war versus economic sanctions) but also whether any American intervention is justified, as a matter of policy--should have taken place publicly in both houses of Congress, not in the Oval Office among a clique of presidential advisers. By committing the United States to a course that led inevitably to war, without the explicit authorization of Congress, President Clinton committed an act that violates the Constitution.

    Congress' exclusive power to declare war under Article I, Section 8 is not the only provision of the Constitution violated by Bill Clinton's war in Yugoslavia.  Arguably, the Yugoslav war also violates the first clause of Article I, Section 8, which limits Congress's taxing power -- and hence, the U.S. government's spending power -- to matters which concern "the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States."  Nothing in the Constitution authorizes the President, even with Congress's consent, to use the military forces of the United States not for national defense but for offensive military actions in Europe -- in effect, to transform the U.S. military into a kind of Peace Corps with guns.  Moreover, Article II, Section 2 provides, "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States."  By committing U.S. troops to a NATO operation, under NATO command (whether or not the NATO commander is an American), Clinton has abdicated his legitimate power as commander-in-chief (the power to actually wage war) in the name of asserting a fictitious power as commander-in-chief (the power to enter into war) which in fact usurps Congress's legitimate authority.

        Some legal scholars have advanced the extraordinary argument that Congress has neither a constitutional obligation nor a right to declare war before the U.S. joins in a "police action" sanctioned by either the United Nations or NATO.  They argue that U.S. ratification of the U.N. Charter and of the North Atlantic Treaty after World War II made us part of a "new world order" in which member nations can no longer "make war," in the classic sense.  The implication of this argument is that the Article I, Section 8 grant of the war-making power to Congress has been rendered obsolete since 1945.  Even with concurrence of the Senate, however, the President cannot amend the Constitution; only the people can do that, according to the amendment procedures proscribed by the Constitution itself.  Until that happens, the Constitution binds all the branches of government, especially the President, who has no higher obligation than his duty to adhere to the oath he swore, to "preserve, protect, and defend" the Constitution.

        NATO's attack on Yugoslavia, moreover, violates both the United Nations Charter and NATO's basic charter, the North Atlantic Treaty. Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter requires that members "refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state."  Similarly, Article 2(3) states "Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means."  No matter how great a thug Slobodan Milosevic may be -- no matter what atrocities the Serbians commit in Kosovo -- no member of the United Nations has a right, under the U.N. Charter, to initiate the use of force against Yugoslavia.  Article 51 of the Charter does recognize the "inherent right of individual or collective self-defense" for all members, but the bombing of Belgrade is not self-defense; it is an act of aggression. Similarly, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty contemplates use of military power only defensively, not offensively; it provides, "an armed attack on one or more [members] ... shall be considered an attack against them all," clearly a defensive provision.  Needless to say, Yugoslavia has not attacked any NATO member.

        NATO was created for the purposes of mutual defense (by the United States and western European nations) against a hostile Soviet Union. Arguably, with the Soviet Union no longer existing, one might question whether NATO itself is today obsolete.  Even if we assume that Russia poses a great a threat to world peace (and national security) as the former Soviet Union did (a good assumption, considering the instability and political circumstances of Russia today), NATO's legitimacy still rests on its fundamental purpose as a defensive alliance.  Nothing in NATO's charter allows it to become a general European police force, which is what it has now become.

        Advocates of presidential war power (whether defending George Bush's war in the Persian Gulf or the various actions in which Bill Clinton has committed U.S. military forces in such places as Haiti, Bosnia, and now Kosovo) also have asserted that the need for an international consensus prior to a NATO- or U.N.-sanctioned "police action" provides a sufficient check on presidential power.  The validity of that argument, however, is belied by these presidential military actions themselves.  It is not surprising that both Presidents Bush and Clinton by-passed Congress and the American people, choosing instead to first assemble international support. Of course other nations will approve "police actions" staffed almost entirely by U.S. troops and funded almost entirely by U.S. taxpayers.  To be effective, the check on presidential powers must be given to Congress because Congress is directly representative of the American people, who must pay for these "police actions" with their taxes and their blood. International politics cannot adequately substitute for the checks and balances of the Constitution.

    The Framers of the Constitution carefully devised a scheme of separation of powers and checks and balances, in order to minimize the dangers of concentrating too much power in the hands of any one person, or group of persons.  They would be appalled at the resolutions in Congress expressing unqualified support of the President, in whatever actions he should decide to take--resolutions that reveal the degree to which Congress has failed to fulfill its constitutional obligation to act as a check on Presidential power.  Nothing could be farther from the intent of the Framers.  As Thomas Jefferson explained it in 1798, "Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power. ... In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

        American involvement in war is too important a matter to be left to the private deliberations of the President and a small clique of advisers. Surely the lives of tens of thousands of Americans who were lost in Korea and Vietnam -- wars in which other Presidents unilaterally embroiled the country -- bear eloquent witness to the other, non-economic costs of war. Just as surely, the domestic turmoil that resulted from those conflicts, particularly Vietnam, illustrates the danger of Presidents making commitments that the American people do not wholeheartedly support. (Ironically, when he was subject to the military draft, Bill Clinton was opposed to the war in Vietnam, another foolish war in which the United States arguably never should have been involved but at least one in which the U.S. had vital interests at stake, if one believes the Cold War "domino theory."  Today, Clinton is using his powers as Commander-in-Chief to order young American men and women into a war in which no vital U.S. interests are at stake -- further evidence, if any is needed, of this man's hypocrisy.)

        Bill Clinton and his apologists (who, sadly, include many conservatives as well as so-called "liberals") defend U.S. involvement in Yugoslavia with the argument that the United States, as the world's only superpower, has a duty to use its military force for "humanitarian" purposes.  The argument assumes that Americans should assume the responsibility for the world's troubles simply because we are a superpower. But the United States is a superpower -- and, indeed, also is the world's richest nation -- because we deserve to be: because our legal and constitutional system more fully protects free-market capitalism and the rights of the individual than any other system anywhere in the world. Americans should not feel guilty for their wealth or power; they've earned it.  And simply being successful does not make a nation responsible for the problems of other nations, just as being successful as an individual does not make one responsible for the problems of other individuals.  The fundamental rules of morality apply equally to nation-states as to individuals; and the basic rule of morality -- the only rule of morality based on reason rather than emotion or mysticism -- is the precept, DO NO HARM TO OTHERS.  Rather than following that basic rule of good behavior (for nation-states as well as for individuals), Bill Clinton has lead the United States into acts of aggression that violate that principle.  And our so-called "humanitarian" effort -- like similar assumed "humanitarian" policies domestically -- is in fact exacerbating the problem, for the NATO bombing compounds the atrocities being committed upon the people of Kosovo.

        Morally, the essential flaw in Clinton's war on Yugoslavia is the principle of altruism that underlies it.  By "altruism," I mean the moral code that asserts that people should sacrifice their own happiness or well-being to the happiness or well-being of others; the moral code that preaches that self-interest is bad but that self-sacrifice is noble, that the proper ethical posture of human beings is that of sacrificial animals to the supposed "good" of society, or some other collective.  This moral code of altruism is a very old, traditional moral code which has been responsible for virtually all the evil, all the suffering, that has occurred throughout human history.  It is the same moral code which underlies the atrocities being committed in Kosovo itself, where people on both sides of the ethnic conflict (both Serbian and Albanian) ignore the rights of individuals and instead regard people as significant only as members of a collective (in this case, an ethnic group).

        Tyrants throughout human history have justified their tyranny by appealing to some form of collectivism.  The pharoahs of ancient Egypt, the emperors of Imperial Rome, the kings of medieval Europe, all called upon their people to sacrifice their individual well-being to that of the collective; and their accomplices were the priests, who appealed to superstition and mysticism -- the supposed will of the one or more gods -- to convince the people that it was a "sin" not to sacrifice their well-being to the thugs who ran the government.  In more recent times, totalitarian dictators on both the "left" and "right"-- Lenin, Stalin, or Mao, as well as Hitler, Mussolini, or Peron -- similarly have preached that the individual is nothing, that the collective is everything.  They too have been supported by priests, of sorts, namely the so-called "intellectuals" who preach either a sectarian or secular form of civic religion which also condemned as sinful the individual's pursuit of his own happiness or self-interest and which preached a "duty" to serve the state.  As F. A. Hayek has shown in his classic book by the same name, "The Road to Serfdom" has taken many paths in the 20th century.  The call for "national service" which  Bill Clinton and like-minded collectivists (again, both on the left and the right) made at the so-called "Presidents' Conference on America's Future," which took place in Philadelphia two years ago, in late April 1997, differs from the philosophy of other 20th-century totalitarians only in degree, not in kind (as the accompanying collection of quotations illustrate).

        The principle of altruism makes bad policy, whether in domestic law or in foreign relations.  In domestic law, it has made possible the so-called "welfare state" and all the problems associated with it -- not only economically but socially and morally -- as David Kelley ably shows in his excellent new book, A Life of One's Own.  In foreign relations, it has made possible a series of wars in the 20th century, beginning with World War I (and Woodrow Wilson's campaign to "make the world safe for democracy"), in which young Americans were told it was their duty to sacrifice their lives not for their own country's freedom or security but for some fancy of the foreign-policy wonks who advise the President.  It's time that those of us who truly "support our troops" -- those of us who believe that the lives of young Americans are too precious to waste on the follies of presidential advisers -- show our support for them by calling for the immediate end of this stupid, wrong, and unconstitutional war.
 
 

COMPASSION FASCISM:  Times Change, But the Collectivist Message Remains Constant*

"We must organize all labor, no matter how dirty and arduous it may be, so that every [citizen] may regard himself as part of that great army of free labor. ... The generation that is now fifteen years old ... must arrange all their tasks of education in such a way that every day, and in every city, the young people shall engage in the practical solution of the problems of common labor, even of the smallest, most simple kind."  -- Vladimir Lenin         "Imagine an army of 100,000 young people restoring urban and rural communities and giving their labor in exchange for education and training. ... [National Service] will harness the energy of our youth and attack the problems of our time.  It literally has the potential to revolutionize the way young people all across America look at their country and feel about themselves."  -- Bill Clinton         "[T]here is the great silent, continuous struggle; the struggle between the State and the individual; between the State which demands and the Individual who attempts to evade such demands.  Because the individual, left to himself, unless he be a saint or a hero, always refuses to pay taxes, obey laws, or go to war."  -- Benito Mussolini         "I'm here because I want to redefine the meaning of citizenship in America. ... [I]f you're asked in school, `What does it mean to be a good citizen?' I want the answer to be, `Well, to be a good citizen, you have to obey the law, you've got to work or be in school, you've got to pay your taxes and -- oh, yes, you have to serve ...."  -- Bill Clinton         "When an opponent says, `I will not come over to your side,' I calmly ask, `Your child belongs to us already. ... What are you?  You will pass on.  Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp.  In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'"  -- Adolf Hitler         "Before they have their own families, the young can make a unique contribution to the family of America.  In doing so, they can acquire the habit of service, and get a deeper understanding of what it really means to be a citizen.  That is the main reason, perhaps, why we are here.  We're here ... for the first President's Summit for America's Future -- to mobilize every community and challenge every citizen ... and to ask our young people to become citizen-servants, too."  -- Bill Clinton         "Family -- see Fascist State."  -- Benito Mussolini's Fascist Dictionary         "Fascism finds it necessary, at the outset, to take away from the ordinary human being what he has been taught and has grown to cherish the most: personal liberty.  And it can be affirmed, without falling into exaggeration, that a curtailment of personal liberty not only has proved to be, but necessarily must be, a fundamental condition of the triumph of Fascism."  -- Mario Palmieri,  The Philosophy of Fascism (1936)         "[W]hen we organized as a country and wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly.... [However, now] there's a lot of irresponsibility.  And so a lot of people say there's too much freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it."  -- Bill Clinton         "In his April 5 radio address outlining the goals of the summit, the President endorsed compulsory volunteerism -- and even called for extending it to middle schools.  In other words, the man who so famously avoided the dangerous duty of fighting in Vietnam as a young man now proposes drafting a new generation of young people to perform a different set of difficult tasks."  -- New York Post editorial, April 27, 1997

* Quotations reprinted from William Norman Grigg, "Compassion Fascism," The New American, vol. 13, no. 12 (June 9, 1997), pp. 24-25.

Copyright 1999 David N. Mayer -- Not To Be Reproduced without Professor Mayer's Permission.