hief to give orders to forces that were tantamount to sending them into combat. In the first phase of the Persian Gulf crisis, President George Bush indeed gave the order to send U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia without consulting Congress, or seeking any permission from it, though that deployment could have led to immediate war had the Iraqi army attempted to move on past Kuwait to invade Saudi Arabia itself as many observers thought it might do.
In the months that followed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the U.S. counter deployment, President Bush consistantly resisted consulting Congress.3 On November 8, 1990, he announced unilaterally, without consultation, his decision to reinforce the U.S. "Desert Shield" force, giving it an offensive capability that is, the capability (and by implication the mission) to make ________
1Congress' power to forbid particular deployments for example, its limitation on U.S. "advisors" to El Salvador in the 1980s is not explicit, but implicit in its power of the purse: Congress can forbid the expenditure of funds in a particular place or on a particular operation. The Iran Contra scandal grew out of an Executive attempt to circumvent this power in a context slightly different than the war making power. For practical limits on Congress' effective "power of the purse," see below and also Donald L. Robinson, "To the Best of My Ability:" The Presidency and the Constitution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 244.
2"A Reluctant Go Ahead," Time, 137 (January 21, 1991), 32 33.
3Ibid., 32. war at the discretion of the U.S., rather than simply to respond to an Iraqi attack. Subsequently President Bush sought, and received, authorization from the United Nations to undertake offensive operations to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait any time after January 15, 1991. This was a sort of "declaration of war," in effect, by the United Nations, yet no similar authorization was sought ...