Reprinted FromWorld BEYOND War.

According toThe Hill, in an article typical of U.S. media, Trump’s war on Iran is totally legal for 60 days if Congress does nothing, after which it becomes illegal, unless Congress has explicitly OK’d it. This is supposedly because of the War Powers Resolution of 1973. AndThe Hillis not alone in pushing this idea.Fox Newsagrees withThe Hill. So doesTime. So doesUSA Today. So doesThe Washington Post. So doesRoll Call. So doesPolitico. So does every AI bot infecting the internet.

However, theWar Powers Resolutionconsists of words that you can read for yourself, and here are some of them:

“The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”

The same law says that a president who launches a war in any of those three situations, then has 48 hours to submit his first report explaining himself, and 60 days after that report (62 days total — plus a possible extra 30) to entirely knock it off. But none of those three situations exists. So, the president must immediately knock it off — must, in fact, have never started the war. It is simply not true that the war will become illegal after 60 days; it has been illegal since the instant it was begun. It is factually false that it must be ended after 60 days in order to comply with the law; it must be ended immediately.

If the War Powers Resolution did not exist, one could revert to the actual Constitution that the War Powers Resolution claimed to uphold and which says that the decision to declare and wage a war is up to the Congress.

If that weren’t enough, one could also find in the Constitution that spending money on anything is up to the Congress. At least one Congress Member has beenpointing outlately that the Constitution says “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by law.” No law has appropriated a dime for attacking Iran.

If Congress were to appropriate money for the war and/or to declare or authorize the war, there would still remain the problem that the same Constitution makes treaties to which the United States is party “the supreme law of the land” and one of those treaties is the UN Charter, which bans war except in narrow circumstances not met. Variousother treatiesban war entirely.

The wars are all illegal from day 1. But don’t we still want the War Powers Resolution used to try to end them, by forcing votes on whether to end them? Sure, we do. The wars are legally allowed to continue for 0 days, but don’t we still want them stopped at 60 or 62 or 90 or 92 or whatever number of days our so-called government is willing to treat as a deadline? Sure, we do. Endless bloody massacres and fits of massive destruction are horrible, but wouldn’t they be less horrible if they could each be held to 60 days or shorter? Maybe.

Better would be to end each war immediately, right now, and to hold all the future wars to 0 days. How does one do that without a handy mechanism that corporate media outlets all pretend is real? Well, one way would be to use handy mechanisms that are real in written law. They include (redundantly) banning the use of any money for a war. They include impeaching and removing from office those waging a war. They include closing distant foreign bases, thereby making it impossible to get them attacked.

Source: Antiwar.com