Coming out of the studios of Meet The Press today, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) said he expected President Bush to “describe a different Iraq than … most Americans understand and recognize” in Tuesday’s upcoming State of the Union address. He also said “the American people are entitled to require the President to come to Congress to get an authorization….”
Kennedy noted that the previous authorization of force was predicated on allegations of Hussein’s government violating UN resolutions, the alleged Iraqi possession of “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” and alleged links with Al Qaeda. The latter points being conditions now widely acknowledged not to have existed (although the Senator did not acknowledge that directly).
The Senator’s view that the lack of these conditions requires more congressional oversight of the war partly echoes the opinion of legal scholar Francis Boyle, who believes that the addition of inexcess of 20,000 troops to the approximately 140,000 alrady in Iraq constitutes substantially enlarging the force.
Boyle says this triggers the War Powers Act and quotes it: “In the absence of a declaration of war [which we do not have for Iraq], in any case in which United States Armed Forces are introduced … (3) in numbers which substantially enlarge United States Armed Forces equipped for combat already located in a foreign nation….”
Boyle goes further to assert that continuing the escalation beyond a 60 day limit without an authorization from Congress would be an impeachable offense. Kennedy’s view does not seem to go this far, as the Senator has not spoken of impeachment and introduced a new bill to require authorization, which the War Powers Act already seems to do.
After his comments, Senator Kennedy was asked by Sam Husseini (video of just this) on the latest developments of proposed Iraqi oil legislation, which seems to nominally keep control in the hands of the US-supported Iraqi government, but makes large profitable concessions to U.S. oil companies. In response, Kennedy asserted that “the objective for the oil distribution is … to be fair to different regions of the country,” and did not speak to the point about the role of US corporations.
