Day: March 26, 2024

Intense hostilities in Gaza continued on Tuesday between Hamas fighters and Israeli forces with a “double-digit number of children killed overnight” and ongoing aid delivery obstacles that are responsible for near-famine conditions, UN humanitarians said.

The continuing violence came despite an immediate ceasefire call for the remainder of Ramadan from the Security Council on Monday, prompting urgent appeals from UN aid agencies for the resolution to be respected immediately, to prevent more people dying.

Speaking from Rafah in southern Gaza, UN Children’s Fund spokesperson James Elder said that 13,750 children have now been killed according to Gaza’s health authorities, amid Israeli airstrikes and bombardment launched in response to Hamas-led terror attacks on Israel on 7 October.

Citing reports of “a double-digit number of children killed overnight”, Mr. Elder noted that this had happened “only hours after the (Security Council) resolution was passed”. 

Khan Younis flattened

The southern Gazan city of Khan Younis “barely exists anymore”, the UNICEF spokesperson added, before describing the “utter annihilation” of constant Israeli bombardment which has left an unreported number of children and families buried under the rubble of their homes. 

“In my 20 years with the UN I have never seen such devastation, it’s just chaos, ruin, debris and rubble every single direction, everywhere I look,” he said, reporting on his latest aid mission to the north.

Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis – “such a critical place for children with the wounds of war” – is now no longer even operational, the UNICEF official reported, adding that only one-third of Gaza’s hospitals are “partially functional” now. 

North in crisis 

Further north, where a UN World Food Programme (WFP) aid mission secured the passage of 96 trucks carrying relief supplies on Monday – for the first time in five days – Mr. Elder described seeing people making “that universal signal of hand to mouth, desperately asking and seeking for food”.

This is despite the fact that hundreds of trucks containing lifesaving humanitarian aid remain over the border in Egypt, UN agencies have pointed out.

Citing respected food insecurity analysis published recently warning of Gaza’s “catastrophic decline into imminent famine”, the UNICEF official also noted that the agency’s own data indicated that one in three children under two years old now suffer from acute malnutrition. Before the conflict, fewer than one in 100 children under five were malnourished, Mr. Elder said.

“This speaks to utter deprivation, this speaks to the devastation of things children rely on – water and health systems – but it also speaks to what the numbers speak to, which is a lethal lack of food and nutrition aid still not getting to the north.”

Before the war, around 500 commercial and humanitarian trucks reached the enclave every day, but the average today is around one-third of that number but there have also been periods of “weeks where nothing got into the north”, the UNICEF official added.

Health crisis

Echoing deep concerns about the desperate scenes unfolding in Gaza, UN World Health Organization (WHO) spokesperson Tarik Jazarevic reported that most patients at Al Amal hospital in the south have now left the facility.

Media reports indicated that an evacuation order for the facility was issued by the Israeli military, amid intense hostilities in the west of Khan Younis. The situation is also believed to be dire in northern Gaza’s Al Shifa Hospital which was also the target of an Israeli military raid, but WHO does not have access there, Mr. Jasarevic said.

“You have health workers dying, you have hospitals that are under siege, you have people who are looking for shelter in these places and if you can’t get a shelter at a hospital where else can you go?” he told journalists in Geneva.

Media reports indicated airstrikes overnight into Tuesday near the southernmost city of Rafah where some 1.5 million people now shelter, many after being uprooted from their homes elsewhere in the enclave.

The UN aid coordination, OCHA, also urged Israel to lift its ban on aid deliveries to the north by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, echoing earlier calls by the UN Secretary-General.

“We need to dispel this notion that their obligation of getting aid in somehow stops with getting a few trucks – a fraction of what is needed – across the border and then once it’s in there as I have seen reported, then it’s not our problem any more, it’s the UN humanitarian agencies’ problem. That is not correct.”

He added: “You cannot claim to adhere to these international provisions of law when you block UNRWA food convoys, when you just last week denied five missions to the north, when we have now reports of Israeli attacks on warehouses and the police that are supposed to help secure this aid inside Gaza.”

It is not easy to analyze this tragic event. But there are some elements that stand out. Let’s start with emotions. Regardless of how one feels or perceives the conflict in Ukraine, we must sympathize with the Russian victims and refrain from judging them. This is a horrible attack and the victims are all civilians. They gathered in a cultural venue to see a performance that has nothing to do with the Ukrainian theater of war. When examining this tragedy, we must also take into account the tactics employed by the Islamic State Organization (ISO). Terrorists break into a concert hall, weapons in hand, to kill as many people as possible in a cold, cowardly, highly organized, indiscriminate manner.

And yet, there are many people who have doubts about this line of inquiry. With the memory of the Kremlin’s many lies, false flag operations, and Vladimir Putin’s manipulations still fresh in their minds, many Ukrainians don’t buy the Russian version of events. They recall that as soon as Putin came to power in the late 1990s, he organized attacks, particularly in Moscow and nearby towns, that killed hundreds of innocent Russian civilians. Investigations later revealed that Russia’s own intelligence services (FSB) had planted the bombs in apartment blocks, but quickly blamed Chechens for the bombings. These were fake attacks to create a need for a strongman in the Kremlin and revenge against the North Caucasian people, as well as to respond in kind by waging a bloody war against Chechnya. 

In the minds of many Ukrainians, the March 22 attack in Moscow is part of the same logic, and the mode of operation is similar. They anticipate that Ukraine will bear the same blame as Chechnya did in the 1990s. This will allow the Kremlin to justify further mobilization of the population. What better way to attract young Russian men to defend the homeland in what the Russian government is now willing to call a war rather than a “special military operation”? However, the Islamic State Organization has never claimed responsibility for an attack it did not carry out. The ISO doesn’t usually bluff when it comes to terrorist attacks. This marks its bloody return to the forefront of the international stage. And we can expect more communiqués about its rampage in Moscow.

How Will Putin Deal with this Situation?

There are a few factors that explain Putin’s long silence about the perpetrators and the aftermath. First, this attack is another failure of his intelligence services. These same intelligence services promised him that Ukraine would fall into his lap in a week and failed to warn him that Yevgeny Prigogine, the leader of the Wagner militia, was planning to move his troops toward Moscow in June 2023. Putin will seize the opportunity to turn this failure into a national cause and an argument for war mobilization. But against whom? That’s the challenge facing the man who has focused all his attention and resources on Ukraine. Russia thought it had bloodily wiped out the Caucasian jihadists, especially the Chechens, Ingush and Dagestanis, who joined the ranks of the Islamic State organization and consequently left Russia. Now they’re back. And some of them apparently even managed to escape after carrying out the deadliest attack in Russia in over twenty years. 

Second, an embarrassing fact for the Russian autocrat is that the United States had publicly warned that the risk of an attack in Russia was high. Putin and his regime, as usual, dismissed this as blackmail and intimidation. He has already publicly refused to see the hand of the jihadists. He’s talking about a plot hatched by what he calls the “Kyiv regime.” Unless one is a dreamer, no one can expect a reliable, independent investigation from the Russian judiciary, which is at the service of a government that kills with impunity and rarely cares about facts and truth. In Russian public opinion, yesterday’s attack will become whatever Putin wants it to be. But one thing is certain: Given the seriousness of the crime and its particularly gruesome nature, Russia’s response will be harsh, very harsh.

Putin Has a Lot to Lose

But blaming Ukraine is a very risky gamble because the evidence is mounting by the hour. None of it supports Vladimir Putin’s claims. Putin stated in a televised address that they had detained 11 people, including the four gunmen. “They tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared on the Ukrainian side for them to cross the state border,” he said.

So far, President Putin’s allegations of Ukrainian complicity have relied on only two publicly disclosed elements. According to Russian reports, the vehicle that fled the scene after the terrorist attack stopped near Bryansk, a Russian city about 170 kilometers from the Ukrainian border. It is also about 220 kilometers from the Belarusian border. This proximity does not make the destination of the vehicle a foregone conclusion. The other element is the interrogations of the captured terrorists broadcast by the Russian authorities. It should be obvious that, under duress, they are going to say what the Russian security forces want them to say. The Kremlin will undoubtedly further distill their testimony to support its thesis. This will take place during an investigation whose findings will already be known to the lead investigator, the Russian president himself.

The hallmark of any autocracy is to impose its narrative when everything in the real world contradicts it. The Ukrainians are Nazis, even though they elected a Jewish president. When Russia attacks or assaults its neighbors, it becomes the victim. Regarding the attack on Moscow, Vladimir Putin attributes it to Ukraine, despite the evidence pointing towards the North Caucasus, which is thousands of kilometers away from Ukraine. To make people overlook this colossal security failure, the head of the Kremlin wants to make the Ukrainians pay. But what more or worse can he do? There have already been the massacres in Bucha, the teenagers tortured in the basements of Kherson, the rockets fired at Ukrainian civilians, the villages razed to the ground in Donbass, and many other crimes. Vladimir Putin is taking a big risk. He does not have the means to deal with a real problem, jihadism on Russian soil, which has just manifested itself once again. The security services have concentrated their resources on Ukrainian territory and on ridiculous missions, such as hunting down LGBT culture in Russia. This situation represents an opportunity for Islamists to strike at the heart of an enemy, Russia, which has also waged brutal wars against them on African and Syrian soil.

By Sushant Sareen

If bombing by fighter aircraft and drones, covert targeted killing operations, and hit-and-run raids on jihadist bases in Afghanistan worked, the United States (US) wouldn’t have been defeated.

Similarly, if the Pakistan Army top brass and the nominal civilian regime think that they will be able to control, or deter, the huge uptick in terror attacks inside Pakistan by striking at suspected militant camps/bases inside Afghanistan, they really need to rethink their policy on tackling the terrorism threat that is becoming more menacing with every passing day. But a national security strategy run by high-school pass generals who either think a lot and don’t act enough, or are heavy on action but don’t think things through, will always swing between masterly inactivity and an aggressive forward policy towards Afghanistan.

Even so, to be fair to Pakistan, it doesn’t have too many options—all of them bad—to choose from. Worse, no matter what option it exercises—aggressively taking the fight into Afghanistan, adopting a defensive approach by fighting a war of attrition within its borders, making peace with the Pakistani Taliban, or some combination of these three options—there is no stopping Pakistan’s inexorable slide into the Afghan vortex, which ironically is of Pakistan’s own making.

Strikes & counterattacks

In the wee hours of March 18, Pakistan carried out airstrikes in Paktika and Khost provinces of Afghanistan against targets linked to one of the most formidable and dreaded jihadist groups led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur. The air attack was in retaliation to a complex terror attack two days earlier on a Pakistan Army camp in Mir Ali in which seven soldiers, including two officers, were killed. Hafiz Gul Bahadur’s group had claimed responsibility for that attack.

This wasn’t the first time that Pakistan had struck inside Afghanistan. In April 2022, after a series of devastating attacks on the Pakistan Army, the Pakistanis launched drone strikesagainst Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) targets in Khost and Kunar provinces. The Pakistanis are also believed to have carried out covert operations targeting TTP and other jihadist commanders based in Afghanistan. There have been suspected drone strikes, mysterious IED blasts, and targeted assassinations.

But far from deterring the terror attacks, or making the Taliban act against the TTP and other allied groups, it has led to a relentless ratcheting up of attacks inside Pakistan. The only thing that changed has been that, instead of the TTP, many of the big attacks inside Pakistan have been claimed by front organisations like Tehrik-e-Jihad Pakistan. Often times, after the Pakistanis showed anger, the Taliban would hold out assurances to Pakistan but never really put any fetters on the TTP. 

When Pakistan first decided to strike inside Afghanistan in 2022, it did not officially admit to the strikes even though the Afghans publicly protested against the violation of their airspace. The Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid had even warned Pakistan to not test the patience of Afghans. But the latest strikes have been owned up to by Pakistan. The Pakistan foreign ministry while defending the action, left open a window by calling for “finding joint solutions in countering terrorism and to prevent any terrorist organisation from sabotaging bilateral relations with Afghanistan”.

The Pakistan Army, however, took a more strident line. It squarely blamed the Taliban for being hand in glove with the terrorists, signalling a hard-line approach based on kinetic retaliation in the future as well. For their part, the Taliban reacted with fury, both verbally through strong statements and militarily by targeting Pakistani border posts with artillery and mortars.

Breaking shackles of dependence 

Clearly, relations between the Taliban and Pakistan are seriously damaged. There is a total trust deficit on both sides, and a lot of mutual recriminations and hostility, which will only increase with mounting attacks from both sides. While chances of any kind of open war breaking out are extremely low, the Af-Pak region is likely to remain disturbed for the foreseeable future.

The Taliban are not going to forsake the TTP, though they may try and calibrate their operations for tactical reasons. The TTP gives the Taliban leverage over the Punjabi-dominated Pakistani state, which the Pashtuns see as treacherous and unreliable. There are also ethnic and ideological affinities that bind them together; a bond further strengthened by the fact that the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban have been brothers in arms for nearly three decades. Add to this Afghan claims on the Pashtun territories of Pakistan and their refusal to accept the Durand line as the border between the two countries. 

Politically, also, it is an imperative for the Taliban to demonstrate that they are not Pakistani proxies; that they have agency of their own. They need to prove this not only to their own people who abhor the Pakistanis, but to other potential partners (India, for example) who have no love lost for Pakistan, or to those who feel that they need to deal with Taliban through Pakistan.

The Taliban strategy is clear: They will blow hot and cold; they will make tactical retreats to assuage the Pakistanis, but will not give in to any big Pakistani ask; and they will keep stringing the Pakistanis along, denying Pakistani accusations—they claim TTP operations are all conducted from inside Pakistan, and even the latest UN Monitoring Team report seems to partially endorse this. At the same time, the Taliban are quick to mouth sweet nothings to the Pakistanis—basically doing to Pakistan what Pakistan did to the US.

Meanwhile, they are actively exploring and operationalising options and alternatives to “break the shackles” of dependence on Pakistan. Already, there are reports of the Taliban investing in the Chabahar port in Iran to shift their trade from Pakistan. There is also a railway link that is being developed with Uzbekistan, which connects Afghanistan to Central Asia and beyond. 

Pakistan’s predicament

The Pakistanis have clearly run out of patience. Within weeks of the Taliban capturing power in Afghanistan, the Pakistani euphoria over the Taliban victory started to evaporate. Far from the Taliban securing Pakistan’s western flank, the Pakistanis now face the prospect of a long, grinding war of attrition on their western front.

Over the last two and a half years, the Pakistanis have tried everything from dialogue and diplomacy to theological influence and kinetic operations to control the situation. It has all come a cropper. The latest airstrikes suggest that Pakistan has now decided to rely more on hard power to raise the costs for Taliban (sounds so familiar to analysts in India).

The new template is to use kinetic operations—ground and air—to force compellence on the Taliban. This is going to be the new normal going forward, at least under the current Pakistan Army leadership, which has rejected any dialogue with TTP. It has also pulled no punches in getting its loyalists, like the former caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar, to label the Taliban “enablers of terrorism”.

If the initial public and media reaction inside Pakistan to the airstrikes against the militants is anything to go by, the Pakistanis are quite gung-ho about this new aggressive policy to rein in the Islamist insurgents. Politically, it works rather well for the Pakistan Army because it has rallied the people, even if temporarily, behind the otherwise quite unpopular military.

The civilian leadership is doing its own grandstanding on this issue, hoping to burnish its credentials not just with the Army brass but also with the jingoistic Punjabi public opinion. The Pakistanis are also now lobbying at the international level to portray TTP as a global threat. The aim is to win the support of the international community in its fight against TTP, with the hope that some financial benefits also flow Pakistan’s way. 

Fuzzy strategy

But have the Pakistanis thought through the long-term implications of what appears to be their new policy? This question is critical given the country’s precarious financial situation, and very disturbed, even unstable, political environment. Unlike the Americans who could afford to cut and run, the Pakistanis do not have that luxury, living as they are next door to Afghanistan.

And while they definitely have much better ground level intelligence than the Americans, they have certain leverages with Taliban whose families stay in Pakistan, and they enjoy a level of military superiority over the Taliban. This will be a very, very long war that will sap whatever strength remains in the Pakistani state. That Pakistan remains engaged on its eastern front, where it is hell bent on keeping alive its hostility with India, only adds to the complexity of the challenge and threat it confronts.  

The Americans could bring enormous economic and diplomatic resources and military capabilities into play in Afghanistan. They also managed to eliminate many terror targets. And yet, after 20 years of endless fighting, they had to make an ignominious withdrawal. The Pakistanis have a fraction of US resources and their capabilities—military, economic and technological—are nowhere close to that of the Americans, or even the Russians before them.

If, still, the Pakistanis think they can force compellence on the Taliban using the tactics of the Americans, then they might well be becoming victims of their own hubris. Perhaps, if the military high command in Rawalpindi had thought things through, they might have desisted from carrying out airstrikes inside Afghanistan against suspected Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) bases. But the Pakistan Army has an unenviable track record of being tactically smart but strategically stupid. It tends to trap itself in situations of its own making.

Unless the Taliban stop being Taliban, Pakistan will have to fight on two contiguous fronts: Inside its own territory as well as inside Afghanistan. In such a fight, there are generally only two possible outcomes: A pyrrhic victory, or a crippling defeat. Neither of these Pakistan can afford.

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• About the author: Sushant Sareen is a Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.
• Source: This article was published by the Observer Research Foundation

By Jon Miltimore

John Joseph Mearsheimer recently summed up in a single sentence why Julian Assange should go free.

“Journalists don’t go to jail for publishing classified information in the United States,” Mr. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, said in a recent video.

There has been endless ink spilled on Mr. Assange, whose lawyers on Feb. 20 made an eleventh-hour attempt to kill an effort to extradite the Australian journalist to the United States.

Since 2019, the WikiLeaks founder has been held in Belmarsh Prison in Britain and faces 17 charges of espionage and a single charge of computer misuse.

One item WikiLeaks published titled “Collateral Murder” was video footage of a U.S. military airstrike in Baghdad from July 12, 2007. The classified footage shows an Apache helicopter firing a 30 mm cannon into a group of people that included two Reuters journalists. Around a dozen people were killed, and two children were injured.

Mr. Assange’s decision to publish the footage, which he received from U.S. intelligence analyst Bradley Manning (now Chelsea Manning), is why he is today in prison.

As the government’s indictment against Mr. Assange states, the WikiLeaks founder didn’t have a security clearance, which is why he “conspired” with Mr. Manning to obtain the footage and other records, including U.S. State Department cables.

Mr. Manning was convicted of 20 charges in 2013 and was sentenced to 35 years behind bars at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, a sentence that was commuted in January 2017 by President Barack Obama.

Mr. Assange, whose hearing at the British High Court in London concluded on Feb. 21, will likely find out this month whether he’ll be extradited to the United States.

State Secrets and the Pentagon Papers

Publishing state secrets is no small matter, but as Mr. Mearsheimer points out, it’s also an old game with a rich legal history.

In 1971, the New York Times published a cache of classified documents that became known as the Pentagon Papers. The Papers, which showed that the U.S. government was lying about the Vietnam War, led to the landmark legal case New York Times Co. v. United States.

The case is well known, one most college students learn about in introductory classes to media and government. And just like the Assange case, it involves an insider delivering state secrets to a journalist.

Daniel Ellsberg (1931–2023) was a U.S. military analyst who in the early 1970s, while working for the RAND Corporation, gained access to an internal government study that showed the U.S. government’s foothold in Vietnam was far less secure than the Johnson administration had led the public to believe when it began escalating the war there.

Ellsberg leaked the study to the New York Times and other media in 1971, causing great embarrassment to the Nixon administration, which responded by leveling an array of charges against Ellsberg that carried a maximum sentence of more than a hundred years behind bars.

The charges against Ellsberg were eventually dropped, but what’s important to understand is that the New York Times was not the party charged. Ellsberg was.

As Mr. Mearsheimer explains, Mr. Assange is not the equivalent of Daniel Ellsberg, who broke the law by sharing state secrets. He’s the equivalent of the New York Times, which published them.

“Manning was caught and punished because she was a government employee, and she broke the law by leaking material that was classified to Assange,” Mr. Mearsheimer explains. “But Assange is a journalist, and he did not break the law, as it is commonplace for journalists to publish classified information that is passed on to them by government insiders.”

‘The Number One Principle of Bureaucracy’

The parallels between the Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks are stunning, and Mr. Mearsheimer is not the only person to see them.

Ellsberg, who died last year, discussed the similarities between the cases during a Harvard Law School address in 2011. Though the government stated that both Ellsberg and Mr. Assange’s actions were unlawful because they jeopardized national security, Ellsberg argued that the prosecutions stemmed from the fact that in both instances the secrets shared were deeply embarrassing to the U.S. government.

“Nothing is more secret than evidence that later, retrospectively, would lead to accountability, which would lead to embarrassment, which would be a basis for blame, possibly for culpability [or] criminal prosecution,” Ellsberg said. “Avoiding blame is sort of the major number one principle of a bureaucracy or a politician.”

For anyone who doubts Ellsberg, there are Oval Office recordings of a discussion between President Richard Nixon and aide H.R. Haldeman that suggest that the government’s actions related to the Pentagon Papers were motivated not by national security, but by concerns about the government’s reputation.

“To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook,” Halderman said to President Nixon. “But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing. You can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say….”

The Collateral Murder video is even more problematic to the government than the Pentagon Papers.

The video didn’t just confirm that government officials had reportedly lied to Reuters about what happened in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. It showed a potential war crime, one many believed the government had covered up.

Dean Yates, a former Reuters journalist who was their Baghdad bureau chief at the time of the killings, said the government’s prosecution of Mr. Assange was retribution for exposing the truth.

“What [Assange] did was 100% an act of truth-telling, exposing to the world what the war in Iraq looks like and how the U.S. military lied,” Mr. Yates told the Guardian in 2020. “The U.S. knows how embarrassing Collateral Murder is, how shameful it is to the military—they know that there’s potential war crimes on that tape.”

What Mr. Yates is describing is an action and cover-up that could lead to the very kind of criminal culpability Ellsberg described.

‘A Principal Pillar of a Free Government’

Viewers can view the Collateral Murder video footage and decide for themselves whether they’re watching a war crime or questionable rules of engagement that resulted in many innocent, unarmed people being killed.

What’s undeniable is that Mr. Assange was a journalist sharing secrets leaked to him by a government employee.

For that reason, Mr. Assange deserves the constitutional protections of the First Amendment, which explicitly states that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

In their wisdom, America’s Founding Fathers carved out these protections because they saw free speech and a free press as fundamental to a free people, and an essential check on government power.

“Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government,” Benjamin Franklin once observed. “When this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins.”

This is why, as Mr. Mearsheimer says, reporters don’t go to prison in the United States for publishing state secrets. Let’s hope he’s still right.

• About the author: Jonathan Miltimore is the Editor at Large of FEE.org at the Foundation for Economic Education. 
• Source: This article was published by FEE and originally appeared in The Epoch Times.

Although many instances of U.S. military assistance, deployments, and operations overseas are controversial—for example, military aid to support indiscriminate Israeli bombing of Gaza, assistance to Ukraine to beat back the Russian invasion, and continued deployment and activities by U.S. forces that remain in Syria and Iraq—one that heretofore has been less controversial than the others is U.S. military jousting with the Houthis, who are launching missile and drone attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea to show support for Gazans.

Yet now a bipartisan group of two Democratic and two Republican senators has sent a letter to the Biden administration, asking it to enunciate the scope and limits of what the president could do without congressional authorization of military action against the Houthis. Nevertheless, the senators said they supported that mission.

Since it has not sought congressional approval for planned offensive strikes on Houthi command centers and weapons storage bunkers on land, the administration is violating the Constitution and the War Powers Act of 1973. The defense of U.S. warships and commercial shipping may pass as self-defense. Still, a strict textualist or originalist interpretation of the Constitution clearly requires some form of congressional approval for offensive actions, regardless of how limited, against the territory of another country.

According to James Madison’s copious notes of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the framers foresaw that the president might need to use the military to defend the country while the Congress was out of session. In the eighteenth century, with the agricultural economy and slow methods of transportation and communication, members of Congress were often out of session and incommunicado. Thus, the convention delegates granted Congress the power to “declare” rather than “make” war. Madison’s notes indicated that this change allowed the chief executive to take unilateral defensive action, anticipating that Congress would declare war or authorize offensive action against the enemy when it reassembled.

In 1801, Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, dispatched U.S. warships to defend American commerce in the Mediterranean Sea against the Barbary pirates when Congress was out of session. Even this deployment stretched the Constitution’s framers’ original intent of unilateral self-defense of U.S. territory and territorial waters. However, when Jefferson wanted to order attacks on the pirates’ ports, he obtained congressional approval. This historical episode best parallels the current situation with the Houthis and clearly required congressional approval before the first offensive strike on Houthi assets onshore on January 11, 2024.

Unfortunately, over time, the original constitutional interpretation was eroded. The final straw occurred during the Vietnam War when Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon took advantage of an open-ended congressional Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to escalate the Vietnam War and expand it into neighboring Laos and Cambodia. In response, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which requires that sixty days after the president “introduces” U.S. forces into imminent or actual “hostilities,” he or she must withdraw them if Congress has not authorized their presence. On March 12, 2024, the conflict with the Houthis reached the sixty-day deadline, not only without congressional approval but without the administration even requesting one.

Like many other administrations since the resolution’s inception in 1973, the Biden administration has claimed it respected the Constitution and the resolution through clever wordsmithing. According to the New York Times, an administration official asserted that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel claimed the administration could offensively attack the Houthis without going to Congress because the strikes “served a significant national interest and their scope and risk did not rise to what was ‘war’ in the constitutional sense.” However, one of the framers’ primary purposes in requiring congressional approval of military action was that one person—the chief executive—could not determine the national interest or create a situation that could escalate into a major war.

Biden administration officials claimed it did not “introduce” the naval forces attacking Houthi assets because the U.S. Navy already had a presence in the Red Sea. However, the law says the resolution’s clock starts when U.S. forces are introduced into imminent or actual hostilities and has nothing to do with the mere U.S. force presence in the area (after all, there are hundreds of U.S. military bases around the world). Finally, the administration official argued that the anti-Houthi strikes did not rise to the level of risk or combat tempo of “hostilities” needed to start the clock, citing the episodes of Ronald Reagan’s guarding oil tankers in the lethal Persian Gulf tanker war of 1987 and Barack Obama’s air war over Libya in 2011—both of which the Congress allowed to escape the sixty-day clock.

Yet, just because Congress failed to enforce the Constitution and War Powers Act in the past doesn’t mean it should not start now. This episode is an easier call than most because Biden’s military actions to ensure freedom of navigation on a major international shipping route have bipartisan and international support. If Congress cannot reassert its constitutional duty to approve consequential U.S. military actions now, will it ever?

This article was also published in The National Interest

The UK Government is clear that Azerbaijan must create the conditions for a safe and secure return of ethnic Armenians who were displaced during September’s military operation and want to return, Leo Docherty, Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office), said in response to a question by MP Andrew Bridgen.

He was asked to comment on the diplomatic steps the UK Government is taking to help ensure the right of return to Nagorno-Karabakh of Christian Armenians.

“Ministers and officials have discussed these issues with the Azerbaijani Government and encourage Azerbaijan to be proactive in enabling the return of those who wish to do so,” Leo Docherty said.

The @FBI has deployed its dive, laboratory, and evidence recovery teams in response to the bridge collapse. No signs of any foul play. https://t.co/7nZRaNtwi1

— Frank Figliuzzi (@FrankFigliuzzi1) March 26, 2024

Байден: расходы по восстановлению моста в Балтиморе оплатит федеральное правительство https://t.co/3GsbFUGnxy

— Голос Америки (@GolosAmeriki) March 26, 2024