FEIN: Obama's overlooked exit strategy

Osama ben Fein: are you wearing one of those tinfoil hats to keep out the alien rays? You should because they have burned out your brain cells. Does the phrase "Commander in Chief" register with you. I swear I thought it was satire until I got to the 3rd paragraph.

Don't bother reading this. It's yet another article claiming illegal actions by legal representatives. File suit and see what the courts say where you will have to actually prove misleading and incorrect statements. Michael Yon, an actually good journalist who has spent more time in Iraq than Obama has in the US Senate, claims the Iraq war has been won. The security agreement under review by the Iraqi parliament puts all this constitutional arguments into the "moot" category. The issue is no longer a Constitutional one but a political one. If Obama pulls foolishness as describe, then he and he alone will be hung with the consequences no matter how clever some may think their ideas are just to fuel their hatred for Bush.

Bruce Fine must be the slimest snake in journalism. As well as the dumbest. Announce to the world that the US carried on an illegal war for years. First, the war was perfectly legal and justified. Second, the dummy must not understand the court system - international and domestic - which would rake the US and its citizens over the coals with no defense.

The first three commentary postings to this article reflect such Constitutional ignorance and abject stupidity that they merit no consideration nor discussion.

What a great article. I especially liked the way Fein weaves in some of the Founding Fathers. Especially Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. There is a slight problem though. Has Mr. Fein never heard of the Barbary Pirates, the Barbary States and the two "wars" we fought with them? None other than Thomas Jefferson carried out a war with the Barbary States without a formal Congressional declaration from 1801-1805. And lo and behold, James Madison himself waged war on the the states again in 1815. In neither case did Congress issue a formal delcaration of war. In fact, like with Iraq, Congress issued resolutions supporting the conflicts and funded them both. Oddly enough the similarities with Iraq and the larger war on terror don't end there. The nations we fought were Muslim and guess how the war was justified on their part? Thomas Jefferson, who met the ambassador to Tripoli in 1786 to "negotiate" with the pirates asked what the justification for the piracy/attacks was. Jefferson reported the reply was: "It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise." The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. No where does it state that a war can be fought if and only if Congress delcares war. Even the actions of the very Founders cited by Fein contradict any such notion. "From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli".

FEIN: Obama's Overlooked Exit Strategy 11/25/08 As a lover of constitutional government in America, I agree with every point in Mr. Fein's piece, and I applaud his moral courage in laying out the hard conservative facts of life that so many people who call themselves "conservatives" don't want to hear. One of the basic flaws of human nature is that man cannot handle unlimited power; he will almost always misuse it. As Mr. Fein points out, that is why the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to permit only the Congress to declare war--not the president. But the Congress has now grown so namby-pamby, that twice in forty years it has agreed to go to war based upon what amounted to lies told to it by imperial presidents--first, the lie by LBJ about the activities of the U.S. destroyer "Madox" in Vietnam; and second, the lie by George W. Bush about the warmaking activities of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In neither case were the vital interests of the U.S. actually at stake, or the facts in accord with what those presidents told us--and both presidents had good reason at the time to know that what they said was most likely untrue. In the case of LBJ, he was engaged in the hard-fought 1964 election campaign against Republican Cold War warrior Barry Goldwater (who was then a general officer in the Air Force Reserve); and events have shown that LBJ believed he needed to demonstrate to the public that he was as tough as Goldwater. Many people believe that in the absence of a real threat, Bush wanted to finish what his father had begun in Iraq, and that his neocon advisers--whose primary allegiance was to Israel, which feared a future attack by Saddam Hussein--were egging him on. Those are not good reasons for waging wars that kill thousands of our people and deplete our treasury, and convince the rest of the world that we are attempting to build a global empire--and therefore are dangerous and untrustworthy. If President Obama were to declare the war a mistake and pull our troops out of Iraq, our country would initially be embarrassed; but that move would go a long way toward ending the disastrous American Empire; and it would also go a long way toward enabling us to establish honest relations with the rest of the world. We are no longer the sole superpower, because Bush's nonstop foreign-policy blunders ended that role for us; and now we badly need to stop pretending that we are one, and tend to our own affairs much more effectively.