Military Intervention Amendment (user search)
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  Military Intervention Amendment (search mode)
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Question: Do you agree with this amendment ?
#1
Yes
 
#2
No
 
#3
Don't Know
 
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Total Voters: 34

Author Topic: Military Intervention Amendment  (Read 7644 times)
Dereich
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« on: January 18, 2017, 06:46:08 PM »

Its never a good idea to overly tie the government's hand at foreign policy, especially in ways that every potential enemy would know about and could exploit. Plus, situations can develop very quickly in such a way as to make seeking congressional approval, which would require them to set aside time for the question or to come back into session and then set aside time for the issue, several days of debate and then possibly backroom trading and negotiating to get approval. In the first six weeks of the Rwandan genocide 800,000 people were killed. In a situation like that, adding I'd guess a minimum of a week on before even starting intervention could mean hundreds of thousands of lives.

Section one is ambiguous; do both requirements need to be fulfilled or only one? You might think its obvious but its something government lawyers would notice and exploit to its fullest. Is that 4/5ths of the Senate, the traditional foreign policy chamber? 4/5ths of the House? A joint session? What exactly constitutes a military intervention? Would the raid on Osama Bin Laden's Pakistani hideout itself constitute a separate intervention? How about the US providing mostly logistical support to another country as they intervene, such as with the French intervention in Mali a few years ago? And as for "any multilateral organization" you're just setting up an easy opportunity for the US to form some shell like the "US-Tuvalu civic association" or something to agree to any intervention the government wants.

As for section two, the use of the word "should" will lead the government to rightly say "these are just guidelines and are non-binding." Individual words in the constitution are given great weight and are all treated as being used intentionally by their framers. Again the specifics are ambiguous, but that's not your fault; its hard to encapsulate bright lines when reality is so diverse. Let's assume Russian hackers use cyberattacks to shut down US banks. Is that a "direct attack"? How about if China launched an invasion of Taiwan. We don't even have formal relations with them; would it count as an attack on an ally? Almost anything could be called a "humanitarian disaster": Bush could have argued he was intervening in Iraq in 2003 to stop suppression of Iraqi Kurds and there would be no authority to say he was definitively wrong. He could have also called the Iraqi government mass murderers; technically true. And I'm just not sure what "last resort" means. As I've pointed out in other threads, technically after Pearl Harbor war wasn't the "last resort" since we might have been able to avoid it had we ended the embargo and run with our tails between our legs.
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