Bruce Fein writes
full article in Washington Times
Excerpts:
The president, i.e., the Commander in Chief under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, should prohibit offensive use of the military not in self-defense unless two conditions are satisfied.
First, victory must be defined with mathematical exactness including the month and year of accomplishment. The prevailing practice, appropriately borrowed from Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio, is to define victory as “We’ll know it when we see it.” Thus, neither President Obama nor his national security team can describe what victory will look like or when it will be achieved in the many Middle East, Asian and North Africa nations in which we are militarily engaged.
Presidential candidates for 2016 are equally criminally clueless. One defines victory over ISIS as making the “sand glow in the dark.” Another boasts of a “secret plan” to defeat ISIS like Richard Nixon’s “secret plan” for victory in Vietnam during his 1968 campaign. He did not dispute Sarah Palin’s characterization of his secret plan as “kick ISIS’ ass.” A third candidate amateurishly described victory over ISIS as doing “whatever it takes,” including terrifying the organization by prohibiting Syrian refugees from entering the United States and expanding the intelligence capabilities of the agency that detected mythical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.