Against All Enemies

The election of Donald Trump was arguably the worst disaster to befall the United States since September 11, 2001.  But if you ask what will keep me up at night once Trump assumes power, the answer is:  Whatever disaster comes next.

I say “whatever,” but really, I mean terrorism.  If not a large-scale, years-in-the-making cataclysm like 9/11, then perhaps a series of multi-city, mass-casualty suicide bombings like we’ve seen throughout Europe the last several years:  Barbarous, politically-motivated strikes that, individually, are not destructive enough to bring America to its collective knees but, taken together, have the effect of radicalizing ordinary citizens into seeking extraordinary, extralegal measures to ensure such death and disruption doesn’t become (to use the buzzword of the moment) normalized.

You can see it coming from 100 miles away:  Trump conditions his supporters to view all Muslims with suspicion as potential ISIS recruits.  Then one day, their worst fears are realized when actual radical Islamists commit an actual act of terrorism on American soil.  As a consequence, those citizens who for years have been fed a steady diet of revulsion and contempt toward the entire Islamic faith will feel emboldened to act on those worst instincts.

At the street level, this will inevitably take the form of countless assaults and harassment against any and all perceived “foreigners” by brainless white thugs cloaking themselves in the mantle of “patriotism,” cheered on by fellow white thugs waving the flag of white supremacy.

We know this is what would happen following the next terrorist attack because it’s happening right now in the absence of it:  Every other day, we hear about some Muslim-American or other being targeted by deranged white idiots for the sole crime of reading from the wrong bible and praying to the wrong god.  Never mind that virtually every major act of violence in America since 9/11 has been committed by white Christians; never mind that you’re more likely to be killed by a piece of furniture than a terrorist attack; and never mind that, within the United States, organized Islamic jihad isn’t even remotely a thing.

Nope:  We are now firmly entrenched in a post-fact environment, and there’s no amount of data or common sense that will prevent several million of our dumbest countrymen from viewing several million of their fellow citizens as avowed enemies of our very way of life.

It’s an insane, racist, destructive way to think, and the incoming commander-in-chief has been enabling it every step of the way.

Without much doubt, a Trump administration will be lousy for women, lousy for African-Americans, lousy for gays, lousy for Hispanics and lousy for Jews.  But for my money, it is America’s Muslims who are the most vulnerable group of all, because their “otherness” is so completely (and irrationally) tethered to a gang of murderers 5,000 miles away over whose actions they have absolutely no control.

Like German Jews in the 1930s or the young women of Salem, Mass., in 1692, Muslims have become the designated scapegoats for most, if not all, social unrest in the 21^st century, and it is entirely up to us—the non-Muslim majority—to ensure they don’t suffer a similar historical fate.

As with all other heretofore-unthinkable scenarios, we have little cause for complacency on this front.  Never forget:  During the campaign—in response to no specific threat—Trump suggested a blanket prohibition on all Muslims entering the United States “until we know what’s going on,” and also insinuated—albeit in his characteristically slippery, incoherent way—that the government should create some sort of “registry” to keep an eye on Muslims already living in the U.S.  You know, just in case.

The point isn’t whether he really meant it.  As anyone with half a brain ought to know by now, Trump doesn’t really mean anything.

The point—chilling and undeniable—is that, in Trump’s mind, absolutely nothing is out of bounds.  To him, there is no limit to what the president can do for the sake of “national security”:  The ends justify the means, even when the ends themselves are unclear.  Having never read a word of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions or, for that matter, the Old and New Testaments, he believes himself immune to the institutional checks and basic ethical norms that every other democratically-elected official takes for granted and that serve as the societal glue that holds this crazy world together.

Fundamentally, our next president possesses the mind of a dictator, waking up every morning thinking, “If it can be done, why shouldn’t it be?”

Hence the profound unease we should all feel about how he might behave in an emergency—particularly given our country’s abysmal track record in this department.

Remember:  In response to World War II, Franklin Roosevelt systemically violated the Constitutional rights of 120,000 American citizens in the off-chance they were Japanese sleeper agents—and he is considered the greatest president of the 20^th century.  Eight decades earlier, Abraham Lincoln reacted to the Civil War by unilaterally suspending habeas corpus—a highly unconstitutional move that was roundly condemned by the Supreme Court, whose judgment the president then promptly ignored.  And Lincoln was the greatest man in the history of everything.

You don’t think Trump’s advisers have studied up on those cases and are prepared to use them as a pretext for rounding up Muslims en masse in the aftermath of the next big national calamity?  More worrying still:  Are we at all confident that, in a 9/11-like situation, Republicans in Congress will summon the courage to defend America’s core principles and prevent Trump from assuming dictatorial powers from now until the end of time?

They won’t if they live in competitive districts and fear being “primaried” in the next election.  They won’t if they expect to be labeled unpatriotic and “soft on terror” if they dare suggest that not all Muslims pose a national security risk.  And they certainly won’t if there is a groundswell of support from America’s basket of deplorables to turn the world’s greatest democracy into a perpetual police state with the sole objective of making white people feel safe.

It’s a central—and oft-repeated—lesson of world history:  Republics cannot be destroyed except from within.  In 1787, our founders designed a system of government—subject to layer upon layer of checks and balances—that could withstand every imaginable challenge to its viability save one:  The failure of all three branches to uphold it.

On January 20, Donald Trump will raise his right hand and swear an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”  If his public statements over the last 18 months are any indication, he will probably violate that oath midway through his inaugural address, at which point Congress will need to decide whether it truly values country over party, and whether the principles established in that very Constitution are still worth defending against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Particularly when one of those enemies is sitting in the Oval Office.

A Sitting President

In today’s America, could a cripple be elected president?

It’s a question that has hovered at the edges of our national consciousness for a while.  Having finally caught up with Ken Burns’ terrific PBS series The Roosevelts, I’ve found it move to the forefront of mine.

And the answer, by the way, is yes.

Of course we could elect a leader who is physically disabled.  On what possible basis would we not?

Whenever you listen to historians and other talking heads reminisce about Franklin Roosevelt’s paraplegia—and the elaborate lengths he went to conceal it—you find that it’s simply assumed that no political leader could pull off such a feat today.  That our invasive press corps and the Internet would made it impossible for a 21^st century politician to mask any physical disability from the public on his way to elected office and that, in turn, it is extremely unlikely that such a person could win a national election.

This has long been the conventional wisdom on the matter, yet it’s a total non sequitur.  It skips right past the question of whether Americans would give an openly disabled candidate a fair shot, as if the notion were preposterous and not worth considering.  How wrong of us to think so.

Certainly, it’s true that a disabled person could not hide his or her condition from the public and would never bother to try.  But really, this fact only serves to underline the far more pertinent point that, in the year 2015, there would be no reason to do so.

In this era of the Special Olympics, prosthetic limbs and near-universal availability of ramps and handicapped parking spaces—to say nothing of the protections guaranteed by the Americans With Disabilities Act—disabled Americans are not nearly the pitied social outcasts they used to be.  For all the obvious pain and inconvenience that such afflictions wreak, our public institutions have made the experience as tolerable as they know how.  The stigma is as remote as it’s ever been.

In Franklin Roosevelt’s day, not so much.

Nearly everyone now is aware that the 32^nd president suffered from polio and was unable to walk on his own.  What is far less known—and so compellingly portrayed in The Roosevelts—is how obsessed FDR was with fooling the world into thinking he was invincible.

The situation was as follows:  From August 1921 until his death in April 1945, Roosevelt was paralyzed below the waist, unable to walk or stand on his own power, and in private would use a wheelchair to shuttle from place to place.

However, in public—i.e. the final 12 years of his life—he made every effort to appear to be standing or walking like a normal person.  He would accomplish this either by leaning, ever-so-casually, against a door, railing or podium, or—if forward movement were required—by having trusted confidants flank both sides of his body and essentially carry him from point A to point B, with Roosevelt swaying back and forth to complete the illusion of fitness.

The only way he could stand at all was by wearing a pair of steel leg braces that, by all accounts, were unbelievably painful—a burden not to be wished on anybody, let alone the most powerful man on Earth.  Roosevelt, tasked with willing his country out of the Great Depression and then through a terrible world war, possessed a seemingly superhuman ability to always appear ebullient and resolute, but subsequent evidence has shown that he was forever at war with his own body.  Living as he did was uncomfortable at best, agonizing at worst.

Medically-speaking, he was insane to push himself in this way.  But he was so single-minded about keeping up appearances that he found it politically necessary not to let on that he was paralyzed.

And damned if he didn’t pull it off.  In an epoch with no television, no Internet and a comparatively deferent press corps, most if not all ordinary citizens were not aware that the president’s legs didn’t work.  (It didn’t hurt that the Secret Service would confiscate any film footage that would have made it clear.)  Whether it was deception or self-deception, the American public refused to accept the idea that the leader of the free world had any physical weaknesses.

The $64,000 question, then, is whether we still feel that way today.  To return to my earlier plea:  For what purpose would we deny ourselves the opportunity to elect a qualified presidential candidate just because he cannot walk on his own power?  Would we really have denied ourselves FDR—and reelected Herbert Hoover—if we knew then what we know now?

How stupid do we think we are?

First of all, there is no core presidential duty—then or now—that could not be performed by someone in a wheelchair.  The most guarded, pampered man on Earth will always have the capacity to get wherever he needs to be.  Accommodations will be made.

Second, the rules of political correctness ensure that were an opponent to even suggest that such a person would be unable to serve because of his condition, that person would be pilloried to within an inch of his life—charged with impugning the integrity not just of his opponent, but of every disabled person in America.

That’s roughly what happened in 2014 to Wendy Davis, the Democratic nominee for Texas governor, when she ran a TV ad that referred to her opponent’s own handicap in an attempt to label him a hypocrite.  (Long story.)

And that brings us to my third point, which is that Davis lost that election, meaning that Texas now has a governor in a wheelchair.  His name is Greg Abbott, he has been paraplegic since being struck by a falling tree in 1984 and that fact apparently played no role in the campaign and did not prevent him from being elected to the highest office in the state.  Voters decided his paraplegia is not relevant to the job and that was that.

Which begs perhaps the most important question of all:  Why can’t the rest of America be as enlightened and progressive as Texas?

The G Word

Today in Germany, it’s against the law to deny the existence of the Holocaust.

Today in Turkey, it’s against the law to affirm the existence of the Holocaust.

We’re talking here about two different Holocausts, but the point is the same:  Some countries have the courage to fess up to past atrocities, while others are abject cowards.

For us Americans, the responsibility to acknowledge other countries’ grievous sins would seemingly be straightforward.  And yet, in practice, it has become so fraught and complicated that you’d think we’d committed the crimes ourselves.

I’m speaking, of course, of the annual disgrace that is the American president’s failure to call the Armenian genocide by its rightful name.

Beginning on April 24, 1915—exactly a century ago—the Ottoman Empire in present-day Turkey began a process of premeditated, systematic murder against Christian Armenians living within its borders.  Generally, this was done either through outright slaughter or through prolonged “death marches,” whereby victims would ultimately starve.

At the start of World War I, Armenians numbered roughly two million within the empire itself.  By 1922, about 400,000 were left.

While there remains a debate about the exact numbers, a broad historical consensus has emerged that what happened to Armenians under the Ottoman Turks was, in fact, genocide.  That is, it was a deliberate attempt to annihilate an entire people on the basis of their ethnicity.

(An interesting linguistic footnote:  The word “genocide” did not exist until 1943.  In 1915, U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau referred to the Ottomans’ treatment of Armenians as “race extermination”—a term that, as Christopher Hitchens observed, is “more electrifying” than the one we now use.)

A century on, the legacy of the Armenian Holocaust is as contentious as ever.  However, the basic facts are only “controversial” in the sense that the basic facts about climate change are “controversial.”  Politicians continue to argue, but among the folks who actually know what they’re talking about—in this case, historians—the science is resoundingly settled.

Which brings us to the unnervingly Orwellian chapter of this story:  The careful refusal by every American president to utter the word “genocide” whenever the subject comes up.

It’s weird and frightening that this is the case, and in more ways than one—even when just considering the present occupant of the Oval Office.

You see, it’s not as if Barack Obama avoids the issue altogether.  Thanks to the efforts of the Armenian community in America and elsewhere, he doesn’t have a choice.

During this centennial week, Obama aides have met with several Armenian-American groups, and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew is in Armenia’s capital to mark the anniversary.  National Security Advisor Susan Rice, meeting with Turkish officials, called for “an open and frank dialogue in Turkey about the atrocities of 1915.”

Nor—while we’re at it—does Obama himself deny the truth that is staring him directly in the face.  In January 2008, as a presidential candidate, he said, “The Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact.”

And yet, in the six-plus years of the Obama administration, the word “genocide” has never passed the lips of any American official.

The explanation for this is depressingly straightforward:  Turkey, a strategic U.S. ally, denies that such a genocide ever took place, and the U.S. is terrified that if we declare otherwise, our relationship with Turkey will suffer irreparable harm.

That’s right:  Our government, in our name, is publicly maintaining a major historical lie in order to placate a foreign country that murdered a million and a half of its own citizens and, a hundred years later, still pretends that it didn’t.

By comparison, just imagine a world in which it was official U.S. policy not to formally recognize an organized plot by Hitler’s Germany to eradicate the Jewish population of Eastern Europe.  (To say nothing of the continent’s gays, Gypsies, Poles and others.)  Imagine if Germany today claimed that the six million Jewish casualties were essentially a fog-of-war coincidence.  Imagine if Angela Merkel arrested and jailed anyone who implied otherwise and the U.S. did nothing meaningful to stop her.

We don’t need to imagine it.  Replace “Germany” with “Turkey” and “Jews” with “Armenians,” and you’re left, more or less, with the world we have.

The Turkish government acknowledges that a great many Armenians were killed in the First World War, but denies that it was the Ottomans’ fault.  Further, thanks to Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, anyone who argues to the contrary can be imprisoned for the crime of “denigrating the Turkish Nation.”  By not going all the way in our condemnation, we Americans—the people who are supposed to be leading the world in justice and freedom—allow the practice to continue.

It’s a moral disgrace by all involved—an insult to Armenians, to history and to truth itself.  And everybody knows it.

That’s the creepiest part:  It’s not just that so many officials are saying something untrue.  They’re saying something untrue that everybody knows is untrue.

It’s the very essence of totalitarianism:  Create your own reality and exert no effort in making anyone believe it.

In actual dictatorships, this strategy works because the leaders wield absolute control over their citizens.  (To wit:  If you’re being starved, tortured, raped, etc., the fact that your government is also duplicitous is not a particularly high concern.)

On the other hand, such transparent dishonesty never works in democracies like ours, because our system is designed to make it impossible.  So long as we retain the freedom of expression, the separation of powers and a reasonably competent press corps, the truth will (eventually) rise to the surface.

So the president will eventually come around on this issue, and the Republic of Turkey will just have to deal with it.

Until that happens, however, Obama’s ongoing squeamishness will continue to validate the pessimism of many voters that the promise of “change” in Washington is an illusion.  That campaign pledges, however sincere at the time, will always ultimately be overruled by entrenched interests at home and abroad.  That insurgents who vow to “shake things up” are no match for the status quo.

To be sure, there’s no point in being naïve about these things.  If you’re the leader of the free world, you can’t just go insulting other countries willy-nilly and expect nothing bad to happen in return.  You have to accept the world as it is, politics is the art of the possible, blah blah blah.

But does the bar for political pragmatism really have to be set this low?  By acceding to other nations’ fantasies about the facts of history, aren’t we diminishing not just history but ourselves?  Are we not paying a random that any other wrongheaded country could demand as well?

Why would we do this?  Why should the bad guys win?

It’s certainly not inevitable.  Just look at Germany.

A mere seven decades after committing the most horrible crime against humanity in modern times, the Federal Republic of Germany stands not just as a stable, functioning, open society, but as Europe’s premier economic power and—crucially—just about as un-anti-Semitic as it’s possible for such a country to be.

Of course, in a nation so large, pockets of anti-Jewish sentiment still percolate, some of which manifest themselves through violence.  However, the overall prevalence of German anti-Semitism today is no greater than that of most other nations in Western Europe, and is considerably smaller than some (looking at you, France).

More to the point:  Since completely reinventing itself during and after the Cold War, Germany, in its official acts, has never stopped apologizing for its wretched past, even going so far (as I noted earlier) of punishing anyone who “approves of, denies or belittles an act committed under the rule of National Socialism,” along with anyone who “assaults the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning, or defaming segments of the population.”  This might explain why the country’s Jewish population doubled in the first five years after reunification, and then doubled again over the next decade and a half.

In America, of course, those sorts of laws would be completely unconstitutional, as the First Amendment guarantees the right to insult whoever you want.  However, as both a Jew and a defender of human dignity, I appreciate the sentiment.  Better to outlaw lies than truth.

This is all to say that Turkey will ultimately come to terms with the darkest period in its history, and all the reconciliation that it entails.  We can’t be sure how long it will take for such a proud nation to own up to its past cruelties.  But there is one thing of which we can be sure:  It will have no reason to take that leap until it stops being enabled into complacency by superpowers like us.

Not Broken, Just Bent

Last Saturday, October 11, was National Coming Out Day, when the privately gay among us are encouraged to go public.

As it happens, in the South End neighborhood of Boston, Saturday also marked the final performance of Bent, a chilling two-act drama that handsomely illustrates why coming out can be a terrible and deadly idea.

We’ll call it an unfortunate coincidence.

The play, first performed in 1979—with no less than Ian McKellen as its original leading man—chronicles the torture, imprisonment and mass murder of gays by Nazi Germany before and during World War II. (At the time, “bent” was another word for “queer.”)

For all that European Jews suffered as a singular target of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich during the Holocaust, Bent argues that the plight of the continent’s homosexuals, while not on the same scale, was no less ugly—and far less known by the public, then and now.

(From the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: “Between 1933-45, an estimated 100,000 men [in Germany] were arrested as homosexuals, and of these, some 50,000 […] were sentenced. Most of these men spent time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of the total sentenced were incarcerated in concentration camps.”)

The Boston production of Bent, performed by the Zeitgeist Stage Company, centers on a volcanic performance by local actor Victor Shopov as Max, a promiscuous gay coke user/dealer in 1930s Berlin. In the opening scene in his apartment, Max witnesses his one-night stand getting his throat slashed by a group of bloodthirsty SS officers as part of Hitler’s 1934 crackdown known as the “Night of the Long Knives.” Soon enough, Max and his boyfriend, Rudy, are themselves apprehended and forced aboard a train for Dachau, from whence they will never return.

Upon arriving at the camp—in the play’s most controversial sequence—Max finds a two-tiered system amongst his fellow prisoners: There are the Jews, who are made to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing at all times, and there are the gays, branded with an inverted pink triangle. While the Third Reich abhors and mistreats both groups, an inmate explains to Max that homosexuals are considered the lowest life form of all.

Quick-thinking schemer that he is, Max endeavors—successfully—to convince the prison guards that he is Jewish and not gay, in order to secure a yellow star and (comparatively) favorable treatment.

That’s right: As the Holocaust was getting underway, certain victims determined—perhaps rightly—that assuming a Jewish identity was the least bad option.

That, in short, is what it meant to be gay in Germany in 1934. That was the reward for “coming out” as the person you really were.

(How, you may ask, does Max go about “proving” to the Nazis that he is heterosexual? The phrase “you don’t want to know” may be an overused cliché, but in this case, you really don’t.)

Faced with this horrifying yet undeniable epoch in recent human history, we could content ourselves with the belief that the tenets of Nazism have long since vanished from the Earth, replaced by such appealing alternatives as pluralism, tolerance and democracy. That announcing you are gay—or merely being suspected of it—is not the potential death sentence that it once was, and that everyone today is free to be precisely who they are.

We could say these things as many times as we like, but they wouldn’t be any less of a lie. The point of Bent—much like every creative work ever made about the Holocaust—is that the past is never really past, and that all the evils perpetuated by preceding generations are forever at risk of reasserting themselves in all corners of the globe. That is, when they haven’t been there the whole time.

When it comes to the systematic persecution of gay people, the contemporary examples thereof are almost too numerous to count, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. When open homosexuals are not being rounded up and massacred by the score—as they are, in some cases—they are being denied the basic dignity and autonomy of straight people through legal proscriptions on their employment, their sex lives and their freedoms of speech, assembly and expression.

I underline this grim reality—on the heels of National Coming Out Day, no less—because, as I have said before, this is the best time in the history of the world to be gay. A closet case in 2014 has fewer reasons to remain as such than anyone at any other point in time—particularly here in America, where gay marriage did not exist in 2003 but is now legal in 29 states and counting.

(I would be remiss not to mention that Berlin, where the Bent horror show begins, has had a gay mayor since June 2001.)

In other words, the act of coming out is probably always going to suck in one way or another. For the typical person, it will never be an easy or obvious thing to do and will forever carry all sorts of risks, even though the rewards are as legion as ever before.

I realize this is about as ambivalent as coming out advice can possibly be, and slightly less than encouraging for someone currently weighing the pros and cons, knowing that in announcing one’s homosexuality, there is no turning back.

However, as a general rule—and based on personal experience—I maintain that being honest about your sexual identity is a prerequisite to true happiness in life. Coming out does not solve every problem, but staying in the closet means denying yourself the possibility of being loved by another person. In the absence of that possibility, the pursuit of happiness—the notion of having a fulfilling life—is not merely difficult, but impossible.

The moment I first took coming out seriously was seeing Gus Van Sant’s movie Milk, because it showed how much fun being openly gay can be—particularly for someone with an outsized interest in politics. From then, it took me about eight months to work up the nerve to break the news to my closest friends, and another three years to tell my parents, who provided unconditional support without batting an eyelash. That I could have ever feared otherwise, in retrospect, seems just plain silly.

But I am not necessarily typical. In this and other ways, I consider myself just about the luckiest man on the face of the Earth, with a loving family in an open and welcoming society. I have never suffered because of what I think or who I am, and have never felt that pursuing my true desires was either dangerous or brave.

And so seeing a play like Bent, as I did on Friday, was as much of an eye-opening experience for me as it would be for the average straight person, since it takes place in an environment no less alien to my own than, say, the story of Anne Frank, even though she, like me, was a Jew.

In perhaps the play’s most audacious moment, Max and his most trusted fellow prisoner, Horst, stand several feet apart, both looking straight ahead, and begin a steadily-intensifying erotic verbal exchange that would put a present-day phone sex hotline to shame.

You see, the two of them have been employed by the SS in the task of carrying a large pile of heavy stones from one end of a field to the other and back again, 12 hours per day, every day until further notice. This exercise, they soon understand, has no purpose except to slowly drive them both insane and squelch any hope they might have of ever getting out of Dachau. What is more, under no circumstances are they permitted to touch or make eye contact—a detail torn straight from the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four—and speaking to each other is frowned upon as well. At the start, a heavily-armed guard assures them, “I will always be watching.”

In this environment—one that is inhuman by design—they decide to make love the only way they can. Yes, it might get them killed, and it certainly won’t improve their physical circumstances in any case. It doesn’t matter: Their love for each other has become unavoidable and, to them, is worth following through on. Their act of love is also an act of defiance. Before they die, they are going to live.

That, finally, is why coming out is worth it in the end: Because it’s the key not just to happiness, but to life itself.  There isn’t one without the other.

The Meaning of ‘War’

Here is a trivia question for you:  When was the last time the United States officially declared itself to be at war?

Answer:  December 8, 1941, the day after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, inducing the United States to formally enter World War II.

That was it.  So far as the official record is concerned, every American military engagement since 1945—Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again—has been strictly off-book.

This is not to say that those conflicts (and plenty more besides) did not really happen, or that the United States has officially been in a state of peace for some 68 years.

Rather, it calls into question what terms like “war” and “peace” mean in the first place.  In point of fact, such definitions have never been clear since the founding of the American republic.

This is no small matter, both in theory and in practice.  As the current scuttlebutt surrounding Syria has reminded us, a great deal hinges on how the United States involves itself in foreign entanglements and, in particular, on who has the final say on whether to do so.

The U.S. Constitution states, in Article I, Section 8, that “Congress shall have power to […] declare War,” but offers no opinion as to precisely what war is or, indeed, what form such a declaration should take.  The president, as commander-in-chief, has the authority to conduct hostilities once they have commenced, but has no explicit license to commence them himself.

As a consequence of such constitutional vagary on this subject, it has been left to subsequent generations to fill in the blanks.

Two weeks ago, when President Barack Obama announced his desire to launch a series of strikes against the Syrian government, he said, “I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people’s representatives in Congress,” but also that “I believe I have the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorization.”

I could not have been the only one who felt slightly ill at ease by the contradiction between those two clauses.

The president said that he was taking his Syria case to Congress because he believes that in so doing, “the country will be stronger […] and our actions will be even more effective,” but would it not be more in the spirit of checks and balances if he were actually required to do so?

The fact is that, while the Constitution delegates the power to declare war to the Congress, the ambiguity with which the very notion of war is understood has allowed the executive branch extremely wide latitude on the actual employment of the U.S. Armed Forces.

In practice, chief executive after chief executive has managed to sneak America into a large-scale armed conflict simply by not calling it a war.  While the president himself may well intend a limited military action not to escalate into a full-blown commitment, history has demonstrated a clear pattern of the former giving way to the latter.

In 1964, for instance, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—based on false information, it turned out—which authorized President Lyndon Johnson “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States” and “to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.”

The words “declaration” and “war” did not appear in the resolution, yet the document unmistakably gave the president permission to do whatever the heck he wanted vis-à-vis the conflict in Southeast Asia, which he and his successor, Richard Nixon, unmistakably did.  Their combined policies in and around Vietnam, licensed by the Tonkin Resolution, led to the deaths of some 58,000 American soldiers and several hundred thousand Vietnamese civilians.

If that isn’t war, what is?

And so I humbly ask:  With the prospect of a fresh new American-sponsored military thingamabob in the Middle East, should we not clarify America’s war-making laws once and for all?

Can the president send American troops into harm’s way of his own accord, or not?  If he can, does it not infringe upon Congress’s prerogative to declare war?  Can the president do whatever he wants so long as he does not call it war?  Or is any deployment of the U.S. Armed Forces axiomatically an act of war, period?

Or:  In today’s world, where the United States and others can inflict great damage without proverbial “boots on the ground” and in which violent conflicts are not nearly as linear as they used to be, have these sorts of questions become obsolete?  And if that is the case, of what use is our 226-year-old Constitution in the first place?