Presidents wage wars under history’s long shadows, and perhaps
no shadow looms larger over President Bush’s Global War on Terror
than does that of President Lincoln’s command in the Civil War.
Rightly or wrongly, Bush’s proponents point to Lincoln in support
of the current war’s specifics (say, military commissions) and
generalities (say, Bush’s persistence in the face of contrary
public opinion). It should not surprise, then, that Bush’s critics
would seek to turn the Lincoln example against Bush. But
in attempting to accomplish as much in Monday’s Washington
Post, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
mischaracterizes the history he purports to describe.
In the Monday Post, Schlesinger evaluates the current
debate on Iran by warning of “ominous preparations for and dark
rumors of a preventative war against Iran.” Suggesting that an
attack on Iran would come about not by congressional authorization
but rather by “presidential prerogative,” he cites then-Rep.
Abraham Lincoln’s 1848 letter to his law partner, William Herndon, on
the matter of President James Polk’s Mexican War.
In that letter, Lincoln responded to Herndon’s defense of
President Polk’s attack on Mexican soil. In reply to Herndon’s
suggestion that a President is always justified in invading foreign
soil when “necessary to repel invasion,” and that the President —
“the sole judge” of whether such “necessity” exists — need not
consult Congress, Lincoln wrote, “Allow the President to invade a
neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary for such
purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure.” The President,
Lincoln warned, could not be trusted to be the “sole judge” of such
necessity: “You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the
[foreign power] invading us’ … but he will say to you, ‘Be
silent: I see it, if you don’t.’”
Schlesinger suggests that Lincoln’s opinion, as stated in the
1848 letter, is directly relevant to the current Iran debate.
Indeed, he goes so far as to say that “Abraham Lincoln would
rejoice” if the “messianic” George W. Bush were to “forgo solo
preventative war and return to cooperation with other countries in
the interest of collective security.”
To even the most poorly versed student of history, Schlesinger’s
distortion of the current Iran debate should give pause. In no way
could warnings of the threat posed by Iran be called a matter of
“presidential prerogative.” Generally speaking, the Iran threat was
in recent times flagged by Democrats as a means for
criticizing alleged U.S. military overextension in Iraq, and today
the Iran debate occupies both of the elected branches. Schlesinger
could not seriously suggest that President Bush has embraced the
military option with greater enthusiasm than Congress has. In no
way could the reasonable observer take President Bush, pointing to
the threat posed by Iran, as purporting to declare, “Be silent: I
see it, if you don’t.” Schlesinger’s attention apparently is
focused so intently (as always) on Camelot that he boasts complete
ignorance of contemporary events. But his reading of Lincoln proves
no more accurate than does his reading of the Iran situation.
OF COURSE, SCHLESINGER MAKES it hard to discern precisely what his
criticism of Bush actually is. At the onset of the essay, he
criticizes “preventative war as a presidential prerogative” — that
is, preventative war undertaken without consultation of Congress.
But later, in describing what he sees to be the first and second
“Bush war[s],” he cites two wars whose commencement was
authorized by Congress: the attacks on Afghanistan’s
Taliban and Iraq’s Hussein regime. And his prescription — that
Bush abandon “preventative war” in favor of international
cooperation — is a statement in favor of international
multilateralism over interbranch unilateralism as much as it is one
of multilateralism over “presidential prerogative.” After all, the
“sorrows of death and destruction” cited by Schlesinger result from
congressionally-authorized preventative war so much as they do from
presidential preventative war.
If Schlesinger means to use Lincoln in criticizing preventative
war without congressional approval, then, his point is for all
purposes moot: President Bush has not suggested that he would
commence military action without congressional approval. But if
Schlesinger means to use Lincoln’s letter to Herndon as criticizing
preventative war in general, then his argument, though not
moot, is baseless.
Lincoln made clear in his letter to Herndon that he disagreed
with Herndon’s suggestion that the President could, “without
violation of the Constitution, cross the line and invade the
territory of another country, and that whether such necessity
exists in any given case the President is the sole judge.” Such a
view of the presidency, Lincoln concluded, violated the
Constitution’s separation of powers. For that reason, the letter
culminated not with a discussion of preventative war but rather
with a discussion of the Constitution’s assignment of the power to
declare war to Congress. The letter from which Schlesinger pulls
Lincoln’s words is therefore not a statement against preventative
war generally, but rather one against presidential
preventative war specifically.
LINCOLN’S POSITION ON PREVENTATIVE war in general is not
easily discerned from the Mexican War debates. Lincoln was a vocal
critic of Polk’s actions, true. Lincoln demonstrated as much in
another letter to Herndon two weeks earlier,
where he noted that his vote in the House represented his opinion
that “the war was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally
commenced by the President.” But the harsh words quoted by
Schlesinger go to the latter point — unconstitutionality — not
the former point — necessity.
In that respect, the search for Lincoln’s opinion on the
necessity of preventative war in general is made more difficult by
the Mexican War’s peculiar facts: Polk commenced hostilities and
then asked not for a declaration of war, but rather for a
declaration that a state of war already existed. Congress passed
such a resolution on May 13, 1846. Lincoln agreed with Polk that
the President was empowered to respond unilaterally to foreign
aggression on American soil; he noted as much in his January 12,
1848 speech on the floor of the House. Therefore, his
criticism of the war’s commencement went to the war’s
constitutionality — did Polk inaugurate an illegal war without
requisite congressional approval? — as much as the war’s
propriety. Throughout the debates, Lincoln’s focus on (as he put it
in his speech) “the President’s conduct in the commencement of this
war” blurred the lines between the law of war and the morality and
practicality of war. Schlesinger could have pointed to this nuanced
debate, but instead he relied on the only words Lincoln put to pen
in this debate that go, unquestionably, to the legal question
alone.
Lincoln’s approach to preventative action in defense of national
security remained complicated throughout his public life. In the
Civil War, for example, he was not as hawkish as were some members
of his Cabinet. He disagreed with Secretary of State Seward, who
wanted to declare war on Great Britain, Canada, and Russia if any
of those nations refused publicly to foreswear intervention on
behalf of the Confederacy. But at the same time, Lincoln’s navy
intercepted ships sailing from England to Mexico and seized even
noncontraband on the ground that such supplies, shipped from
neutral to neutral, would eventually reach the Confederacy by land.
(A federal court accepted this justification during the war, but
the Supreme Court ultimately rejected it the 1866 case, The
Peterhoff.) Lincoln understood that at times national security
requires that the nation project military force into foreign
territory even when that foreign nation had not yet commenced
hostilities against the United States.
To try to draw from Lincoln’s Herndon letter’s specific
criticism a general criticism of preventative war is folly at best
and dishonesty at worst. Neither is worthy of serious discussion of
history. But for Schlesinger to cast all nuance and detail aside,
to take a single letter which, on its face, deals only with a
separation of powers issue, and to use it as the basis of a
criticism of preventative war per se is astonishing.
