Anti-war stance is right, not left.(THE LAST WORD)

According to the wisdom of the day, the left is against the war in Iraq while the right supports the war. So why do The John Birch Society and its affiliated magazine THE NEW AMERICAN support the withdrawal of our troops from Iraq? Isn't that the position of the hard left?

In actuality, there are fundamental differences between the left and us regarding the question of war.

Unlike the left, we do not believe any one man should ever be entrusted with the awesome power of deciding when to go to war. It makes no difference if the president is a Republican or a Democrat, a con servative or a liberal. The Constitution assigns to Congress, not the president, the power "to declare war." If America needs to go to war, Congress should declare it.

Democrat presidents were wrong when they claimed that the decision to go to war was theirs to make, and President Bush is wrong when he makes the same claim. Mr. Bush's acknowledgement of last December that "as President, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq," overlooks the fact that this decision was not his to make.

Unlike the left, we recognize that the president's powers as commander-in-chief are limited, as well they should be. Under our system of government, we have a president entrusted with certain specified powers; we do not have an elected dictator or a king. As Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist Papers (No. 69), the president's authority as commander-in-chief amounts "to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first general and admiral ... while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies--all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature."

Unlike the left, we do not want to send our troops to war to enforce United Nations Security Council resolutions. Yet this is exactly what President Bush did in the case of Iraq, by his own repeated admissions. For instance, on November 8, 2002, the day the Security Council passed its Resolution 1441 insisting that Iraq eliminate its reputed weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Bush declared: "America will be making only one determination: is Iraq meeting the terms of the Security Council resolution or not? ... If Iraq fails to fully comply, the United States and other nations will disarm Saddam Hussein."

Even though the left supports intervening militarily on behalf of the UN, it opposed Bush's intervention in Iraq because the Security Council did not pass a new resolution explicitly authorizing a military invasion to enforce Resolution 1441 and other Security Council ...