A proposal to strengthen Congress' role in starting wars

Leslie Gelb and Anne-Marie Slaughter recently published a proposal for more stringent Congressional oversight of war powers: No More Blank-Check Wars Washington Post 11/08/05.  Leslie Gelb is the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and one of the co-authors of the Pentagon Papers.  His views carry a lot of weight in the foreign policy establishment.

Gelb and Slaughter argue that the War Powers Act, passed after the Vietnam War to reassert Congressional authority in authorizing war, has failed in that purpose.  They propose going back to an old-fashioned requirement of an actual declaration of war, as envisioned in the Constitution:

Requiring Congress to declare war, rather than just approve or authorize the president's decision to take troops into combat, would make it much harder for Congress to duck its responsibilities. The president would be required to give Congress an analysis of the threat, specific war aims with their rationale and feasibility, general strategy and potential costs. Congress would hold hearings, examine the information and conclude with a full floor debate and solemn vote. ...

Today Congress deliberates on transportation bills more carefully than it does on war resolutions. Our Founding Fathers wanted the declaration of war to concentrate minds. Returning to the Constitution's text and making it work through legislation requiring joint deliberate action may be the only way to give the decision to make war the care it deserves.

I'm sympathetic to the idea.

But this would not in itself address the problems that arose in the Iraq War.  Congress, including the president's own party, would have to have the will and the sense of responsibility to assert their war powers for a declaration or the War Powers Act to actually exercise restraint on ill-conceived military actions.  As long as Congress and our sad excuse for a press corps are willing to be herded by jingoistic hysteria and duped by phony intelligence claims, no structural solution will produce positive results in itself.