In particular, should we trust the president when it comes to the question of whether or not to go to war? The Founding Fathers said no, and that’s why they delegated the awesome power to declare war to Congress, not the president. Yet beginning with the Korean War presidents have operated as if they possess the power to declare war, and both Congress and the American people have acquiesced to if not embraced this presidential usurpation of power.

Put simply, we’ve trusted our presidents to wield the power of the sword wisely. And that trust has caused us — many of us, anyway — to suspend any doubts we might have had and to get behind the president’s decision once his decision was made.

The Iraq War is no exception, and in recent weeks both Washington and the media have been talking a lot about former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan’s best-seller What Happened, which says that our trust in the Bush administration was misplaced. But McClellan did not always feel that way. In fact, in his book he describes how he too trusted the president and suspended his own doubts.

In McClellan’s own words: “Like many Americans at the time, I was uncertain about the necessity for war and the new doctrine of preemption that was being used to push us toward it. I wondered why we needed to move so fast toward military confrontation. But I trusted the president and the policymakers on his national security team…. After all, they had full access to the intelligence and an intimate knowledge of Saddam Hussein and his regime. I did not. So, also like most Americans, I was inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt unless and until they proved unworthy of it.”

At another point in the book, McClellan says that “subsequent events have showed that our willingness to trust the judgments of Bush and his team was misplaced.” Indeed, subsequent events have shown this to be the case. Yet despite what McClellan has learned — or should have learned — from his years in the White House, he cannot bring himself to say that the Bush White House deliberately deceived us into war. According to McClellan, the path chosen by the Bush administration for getting us into war was “not employing out-and-out deception but shading the truth.” McClellan also writes: “I still like and admire George W. Bush. I consider him a fundamentally decent person, and I do not believe he or his White House deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people.”

Really? How about Bush’s famous 16-word assertion from his 2003 State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”? We now know that there is no evidence Saddam Hussein had done so and that this assertion should never have appeared in a presidential address. Yet according McClellan and others, the White House was misinformed by the CIA, which supposedly came to the same conclusion as the British. Not quite. The CIA had merely agreed (in the words of then-CIA Director George Tenet) that the “the text in the speech was factually correct — i.e. that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa.” But the CIA was unwilling to itself assert that Saddam had “recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” which is why the Bush State of the Union address referred to what the British government had reported instead of what U.S. intelligence had discovered.

If McClellan’s supposedly tell-all book can be viewed as his honest rendering of what he knows, or thinks he knows, including his false understanding that the decision to go to war is the president’s to make, then he still has a lot to learn. Unfortunately, so do many Americans. 

Regardless of how trustworthy or untrustworthy our presidents may be, we should never trust them, or any other governmental office holders, when it comes to the exercise of power. As Thomas Jefferson warned:

In questions of power then let no more be heard of confidence in man; but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

That warning is particularly important when it comes to the power to declare war. In our system of government, that power is assigned to Congress for the simple reason that the Founding Fathers did not want a single person to make this decision. They wanted a president, not a king. We ignore Jefferson’s warning, and the Constitution’s limitation on presidential power, at our own peril.

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