What about the Levin amendment?
As someone who was in the Senate at the time, I have been struck by the contours of the debate. The situation facing the candidates who cast war votes has, to my surprise, often been presented as a binary one — they could either vote for the war, or not. There was no middle ground.
On the contrary. There was indeed a third way, which Senator James Jeffords, independent of Vermont, hailed at the time as “one of the most important votes we will cast in this process.” And it was opposed by every single senator at the time who now seeks higher office.
A mere 10 hours before the roll was called on the administration-backed Iraq war resolution, the Senate had an opportunity to prevent the current catastrophe in Iraq and to salvage the United States’ international standing. Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, offered a substitute to the war resolution, the Multilateral Use of Force Authorization Act of 2002.
Senator Levin’s amendment called for United Nations approval before force could be authorized. It was unambiguous and compatible with international law. Acutely cognizant of the dangers of the time, and the reality that diplomatic options could at some point be exhausted, Senator Levin wrote an amendment that was nimble: it affirmed that Congress would stand at the ready to reconsider the use of force if, in the judgment of the president, a United Nations resolution was not “promptly adopted” or enforced. Ceding no rights or sovereignty to an international body, the amendment explicitly avowed America’s right to defend itself if threatened.
The real problem here is that by supporting a preemptive war, we have created a precedent for preemptive wars. Formerly, we held the sanctity of a soverign nation as having a very high priority. The only circumstances where we could violate a country's soverignty were a) if it attacked us or our friends or b) in very rare cases if it threatened genocide on a group of its own citizens. How a foreign government handled its own affairs was its own business. That respect for soverignty is now essentially gone from our discussions. Preemptive wars are assumed to be the norm now. And that is the main reason I have deep misgivings about those who voted for the AUMF.
posted by walldon | 11:34 AM
1 Comments:
But the resolution by its own wording did not support preemptive wars, and authorized any action only in a single, narrow context: enforcing the UN resolutions on weapons inspections and possession that Saddam, in fact, was defying at that time. In fact, Bush violated the terms of the resolution, which was successful the moment Saddam came into full compliance by lifting all restrictions on the Hans Blix team. Bush even at that point, at the beginning of March 2003, was still dropping statements that war could be avoided. He was, of course, lying through his teeth about that, too.
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