Muzzling the Dogs of War
Should leaders take decisions regarding foreign military intervention to the people, as US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron did before backing away from military strikes on Syria? Though turning to the legislature may prove to be inconvenient, frustrating, or even counterproductive, it is the right thing to do.
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WASHINGTON, DC – Sitting in Paris as the United States’s first ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson reflected on how the new US government could avoid the errors of European “despots” who kept their people subjugated through war and debt. Writing to James Madison, he observed that the US Constitution had at least checked “the Dog of war,” by transferring “the power of letting him loose from the Executive to the Legislative body, from those who are to spend to those who are to pay.”