Why Western powers must curtail executive capacity to make war

[tcaudilllg]

Current military outlays by the U.S. are about 1 trillion dollars annually. U.S. revenue is about 2.1 trillion... everything over that is deficit spending. This means that military expenditures now account for 50% of U.S. non-deficit spending, and the figure is rising. There is impetus in the U.S. to bring this spending down fast, or eventually we're going to have to choose between military funding and entitlements/basic social services.

Now some may argue that Obama is doing foreign intervention the right way (a claim that remains to be substantiated). Flash forward to a time when a Democrat is NOT in the White House. A Republican president is basically beholden to the cultish legacies of Reagan and Dubya, to get involved all over the damn place, overthrow enemy governments and dictatorships, yadda yadda. This if they don't buy into such idiot arguments OF THEIR OWN VOLITION....

The intervention in Libya represents a departure from tradition. It is an expansion of the Bush Doctrine which emphasized pre-emptive war when national interests appeared to possibly be at stake. Now we are experiencing the second conflict (after Somalia) in which we are intervening without a national interest. We will not get the money spent to "liberate" Libya back. The costs are real: the budget is being reduced, program by program, in chunks of several hundred million dollars. Such sums have already been spent on the venture in Libya.

Also worth noting is the increasing sense with which Americans are identifying with international institutions as superior regulating bodies above the constitution. It is arguable thus, that an essentially unrestrained presidency will make the United States subservient to these (unregulated) institutions in proportion with the beliefs of the serving individual.

The situation is basically similar in other MDCs with strong executives. As such, it is necessary for not only the U.S., but the entire developed world to consider constitutional amendments, not laws, to limit the power of the executive branch to initiate conflict.

[ProSense]

1. "It is an expansion of the Bush Doctrine which emphasized pre-emptive war"

Does that mean that the Bush Doctrine of "pre-emptive war" isn't really Bush's since Kosovo, the first Gulf War and the Korean War came before it?

Top Ten Ways that Libya 2011 is Not Iraq 2003

[RMBEBBP]

2. Agreed and recced

credas res praesentes esse bonas cum ibi sit ista potestas gerendo bellum.
Consider for now that things are going swimming with this ability to arbitrarily make war.

modo imagines, cum utraque bella, tamen resolvenda in Mesopotamia Bactriaque, atque cum istud factum hodie, et adjectas possibilitatem praesidentis republicani in futuro, modo sic quandam situationem malam omnino teneas, sinon permanentem etiam.
Now imagine, on top of the 2 unresolved wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus this latest 'whatever this is', and add a possible Republican presidential figure in the future, and you have...well, you have a pretty bad situation all-round, if not permanently too.

licet nos meditari de periculis positis non potestate abusa, sed etiam cum malfactores repositi sint peioribus.
We should think about the dangers posed not only when power is abused, but when abusers are replaced by even more uncouth ones.

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