LIMBAUGH COMMENTARY: NATO: WAR BY CONCENSUS

Leaders from more than 40 countries will meet in Washington Friday for an elaborate three-day celebration commemorating NATO's 50th anniversary. As NATO prepares for its self-congratulatory love fest, evidence is mounting that instead it should be engaging in critical self-evaluation.

This once noble and defense-oriented alliance, which for 40 years was instrumental in containing Soviet communist expansion, has gradually adopted an aggressive, pro-active posture that is both morally and strategically flawed.

NATO's original mission was quite clear by virtue of its simplicity: Each member nation was committed to the defense of any other member nation that was militarily attacked. Because it was defense-oriented, there was very little opportunity for disagreement.

Now that NATO has graduated to an offensive (pun intended) alliance, its military decisions have become much more difficult. The Kosovo intervention, NATO's first experiment in starting a war, illustrates the inherent difficulties in conducting military operations by leaderless consensus.

It is one thing to decide democratically whether to undertake military operations in the first place. It is another to invest a committee with the authority over the conduct of those military operations. Our Founding Fathers understood the difference, which is why they gave Congress the power to declare war but made the president the commander in chief to lead the military once a war is declared.

Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 74, observed that "of all the cares or concerns of government, the direction of war most peculiarly demands those qualities which distinguish the exercise of power by a single hand."

The Founders knew that it was absolutely unfeasible and frankly suicidal to grant an enormous political body, like Congress, the power to micromanage a war. The same principle applies to the new NATO, and the Kosovo debacle proves it.

NATO now contains 19 member nations, whose various post-Cold War strategic and political interests are as divergent as they are common. This divergence militates against a consensus on any NATO decision, which its charter requires as a condition precedent to NATO action. The United States should never surrender its sovereign decisions over matters that could affect the life and death of its people to a committee of other sovereign nations. Yet we have done just that with our Kosovo intervention.

The Washington Post reports that the 1998 National Intelligence Estimate, the last formal and broad assessment by the U.S. government prior to beginning air strikes against Serbia, concluded that the threat of sustained and decisive military power was NATO's only lever to budge Milosevic. But the constraints of alliance politics undermined the very goals the alliance was seeking to achieve.

This fact was made disturbingly clear in the course of Arizona Sen. John McCain's questioning of Henry Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Shelton allowed that the one thing worse than taking ground troops off the table was for Clinton to threaten action for which he did not have NATO consensus.

Specifically, Washington's main four European NATO partners, Britain, France, Germany and Italy, were unwilling to commit the use of ground troops even though U.S. officials were convinced that the only certain means of reaching our objectives was to have "ground troops prepared to invade." In order to assure allied support (and deflect congressional and popular opposition to his planned intervention), Clinton made the reckless announcement that "I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war." With that statement, Clinton essentially committed to a course of action that would embolden Milosevic and undermine the very intervention itself.

Another example further demonstrates the perils of conferring on NATO war-conduct decisions. On Oct. 13, 1998, NATO formally agreed to authorize the bombing of Yugoslavia. Incredibly, however, the governing authority approved only Phase I of the three-phase air campaign, amounting to only 50 air-defense targets. The Post notes that the "real punishment of Belgrade would come in Phase II, with `scores of targets,' and Phase III, with `hundreds and hundreds of targets,' according to a White House Official."

The new NATO is as ill suited for managing a war as the trigger-happy pacifists in charge of its primary member nations. The paralyzing pressures of politics, social concerns and conflicting, raging emotions render both unfit for the task.

As horrifying as is the prospect of having the current commander in chief in charge of the military, it is preferable to relinquishing that authority to his fellow travelers in NATO.

~David Limbaugh of Cape Girardeau is a columnist for Creators Syndicate.