Security Commitment to Iraq Posted by David Shorr

National Security Network, host of this bog, has a new paper about the status of forces and security framework agreements under negotiation with the Iraqi government. It makes a number of important points (a couple of which highlighted by Matt Yglesias), especially regarding provocations to Iraqi sensitivities over national sovereignty (and dignity) and the question of US security guarantees. There's a very important procedural issue regarding the latter, and something about the surrounding debate has been gnawing at me.

With just seven months until the inauguration of a new president, these negotiations have drawn much scrutiny to see exactly what commitments the current administration is making. The focus and the frame has thus been (understandably) an issue of our forthcoming transition of government and any associated reformulation of Iraq policy. The key distinction is drawn, including in the NSN piece, between the legal matter of the status of US forces and the strategic choice of a durable commitment to Iraq's security. It has also been noted that such security guarantees are properly a matter for a treaty, and therefore the advice and consent of the US Senate. If we talk about this purely as a question of the hand-off to the next administration, though, we're missing a critical Constitutional point about the separation of powers.

It's not just that security guarantees would tie the hands of the next president. More fundamentally, it would commit us as a nation. And that is the point about senate ratification; the Constitution requires the consent of the legislature (half of it, anyway) as a political mechanism to ensure that the country does not enter such commitments lightly. [For a couple of closely related 20th Century texts see: Walter Lippmann's definition of a solvency in his US Foreign Policy - Shield of the Republic and Sen. John Stennis' lecture in his 1971 AEI-sponsored debate on the role of Congress with Sen. William Fulbright.]

So whatever the proper connection between future Iraqi and American security, not only is it too large an issue to be handled in a SOFA agreement, it could be the next test of the overreach of executive powers. 

Comments

[Zathras]

Are we looking at executive overreach or Congressional (and especially Senatorial) abdication?

In a matter of this kind, you don't have one without the other. Perhaps after our recent history it should not surprise me as much as it does that neither the Senate as a whole or individual Senators have taken on the issue of submitting both an Iraq SOFA and an SFA for ratification. The substantive grounds for demanding this are evident; for those Democrats, and one or two Republicans, who have opposed the Bush administration's war policies in the past the political argument for demanding Senate ratification would seem to be compelling. Instead, most of the public criticism of what the administration is attempting to negotiate has dwelt on the fact that some Iraqis don't like it.

I don't lose much sleep worrying about what Iraqis think, but I am pretty concerned about the Congress not insisting on its prerogatives. These are, after all, fundamental to our system of government; they are spelled out in black and white in the Constitution, which devotes Article I to the Congress for a reason.

There is probably no sure way to know how a Senator's insistence that any agreement committing the American military to further fighting on behalf of the Iraqi government be submitted to the Senate for ratification would affect the election. This seems to be the only thing anyone in Washington really cares about any more. Checks and balances in government don't just happen; if one branch decides it does not want to do its job, the others would overreach even if initially they did it reluctantly. We are well past that point here.

[David Shorr]

Point taken, congress has indeed been complicit in the erosion of its role and powers. This is not (entirely) a story of executive overreach. Ever the optimist, I do hold out hope that legislators will press to rebalance power between the two branches and that this issue is prime for such self-assertion.

[Zathras]

Hope is overrated. Who will attempt this rebalancing, and how will they do it?

In an environment in which all elected officials are focused on their party's position in national campaign politics, the incentive for any of them to oppose executive authority disappears when their own party controls the White House. It also disappears for those who wish to avoid stepping on the message coming from their own party's candidate as he seeks to change partisan control of the White House. But there is an additional problem, one that incidentally has implications for many policy issues beyond this one.

Congress has evolved from a body with many dispersed power centers to one in which power is concentrated in the hands of the leadership of both parties. An individual committee chairman, who as recently as 20 years ago could be a major obstacle to any administration seeking to expand its authority in some way, has much less flexibility now to be any such thing -- he has less control over his committee, less authority to use his committee's authority to promote or block undesirable legislation on the floor.

Outside of Congress, this development gets more praise than criticism; Republicans have tended to praise party unity behind President Bush, while Democrats are thrilled when House and Senate Democrats unite behind Sen. Reid and Speaker Pelosi, respectively. But as Congress has evolved in this direction, issues that for some reason don't get the attention of the leadership get ignored. Committee chairmen are in a much weaker position to raise them independently. In this particular area, the campaign impact of a fight in Congress over a SFA with Iraq are unclear; that being so, timely resistance to the administration's course in Congress is unlikely to be forthcoming.

Unless the Obama campaign decides it should be, which only underscores the problem. For in that case, Congressional Democrats will not be acting to uphold Congressional prerogatives, but will simply be trying to help amplify the message of their party's Presidential candidate. Should Obama be elected, is it likely that they would not be just as accomodating of him on this subject as Congressional Republicans have been of Bush?

I have my doubts that it is even possible. I'll believe people in Congress are interested in redressing the decay of their branches strength in the government when I see it, and I haven't seen it yet.