Founding Fathers and War

COMMENTARY: Overlooked Exit Strategy  (Washington Times)…Bruce Fein

President-elect Barack Obama should embrace an overlooked riskless exit strategy for the war in Iraq that has inflicted more than the equivalent of another Sept. 11, 2001, on brave American soldiers.

Every Founding Father agreed that one man or small group of men should never be entrusted with authority to initiate warfare because they would be driven by visions of power and glory into reckless military adventures. Future Justice of the Supreme Court, James Wilson, at the Pennsylvania ratification convention, explained: “This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or single body of men, to involve us in such distress; for the important power of declaring war is vested in the legislature at large: this declaration must be made with the concurrence of the House of Representatives: from this circumstance we may draw a certain conclusion that nothing but our interest can draw us into war.”

James Madison, future president of the United States and father of the Constitution, amplified in a letter to Thomas Jefferson: “The Constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the legislature.”