Where Is the Voice of Dissent?

As prominent senators consider the wisdom of making war on Iraq, truly independent thinking seems to stop at the water's edge. But I keep recalling a very different scene: On Feb. 27, 1968, I sat in a small room on Capitol Hill. Around a long table, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was in session, taking testimony from an administration official. I remember a man with a push-broom mustache and a voice like sandpaper, raspy and urgent.

Wayne Morse, the senior senator from Oregon, did not resort to euphemism. He spoke of the "tyranny that American boys are being killed in South Vietnam to maintain in power." Moments before the hearing adjourned, Morse said he did not "intend to put the blood of this war on my hands."

It's hard to imagine the late senator going along with claims today that the U.S. government has a right to attack Iraq because of the doctrine of "anticipatory self-defense."

A fierce advocate of international law, Morse had no patience for double standards. In 1964 he told a national TV audience: "I don't know why we think, just because we're mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might for right. And that's the American policy in Southeast Asia--just as unsound when we do it as when Russia does it."

Nor was Morse at all tolerant of pronouncements about the necessity of saving face. He bristled at the kind of logic advanced the other day by a top Pentagon advisor, James R. Schlesinger, who asserted that "given all we have said as a leading world power about the necessity of regime change in Iraq ... our credibility would be badly damaged if that regime change did not take place."

Members of Congress are apt to focus on the efficacy of taking military action, the hazards of getting bogged down, the need for a clear exit strategy. But such discussions did not preoccupy Morse. He directly challenged the morality--not just the "winnability"--of the war in Vietnam. And from the outset he insisted that democracy requires substantial public knowledge and real congressional oversight rather than acquiescence to presidential manipulation.