DECLARATIONS.(congressional approval of war declarations)

Last Tuesday was Constitution Day, the anniversary of the wrap party of the original Constitutional Convention, when the thirty-nine delegates still in Philadelphia, before saddling up to disperse to their homes up and down the Eastern Seaboard, got together one last time to sign the document they had just spent four months hashing out. Constitution Day, like Flag Day and Armed Forces Day, is one of those would-be holidays that never quite achieved escape velocity. It's just another day at the office. But Joyce Appleby, a busy and eminent professor emerita of American history at U.C.L.A., took it off anyway. She spent it in Washington, where she presented members of Congress with a petition, signed by nearly thirteen hundred of her professional colleagues. "We, the undersigned American historians, urge our members of Congress to assume their Constitutional responsibility to debate and vote on whether or not to declare war on Iraq," the petition began. "We ask our senators and representatives to do this because Congress has not asserted its authority to declare war for over half a century, leaving the president solely in control of war powers to the detriment of our democracy and in clear violation of the Constitution."

Just how many wars the United States has fought since that first Constitution Day, ten score and fifteen years ago, is a hard number to pin down. How does a couple of hundred sound? There have been eight or nine that were big enough so that most reasonably attentive college students could probably name them, from the War of 1812 to the Persian Gulf War. There have been a dozen other conflicts that involved the accoutrements of big-time warfare, such as pitched battles or naval engagements. And if you count the many so-called Indian wars, the various Latin-American adventures, and all the military episodes that, to their participants at least, felt an awful lot like war (from the forays against the Barbarypirate states of North Africa at the outset of the nineteenth century, to the Balkan interventions at the close of the twentieth), the numbers begin to mount up.

Formal declarations of war, however, are as rare as the thing itself is common. There have been only five: for the War of 1812, the Mexican War (1846), the Spanish-American War (1898), and the two World Wars. The idea that there was once a time when American soldiers never went into battle without a declaration of war is an Edenic fantasy--an exercise in nostalgia for a past that never was, like the idea that the government used to belong to "the people" and now serves "the special interests." Anyway, a formal declaration is hardly a necessary condition for a war to be, so to speak, constitutional. Our bloodiest undeclared war was not Vietnam; it was the Civil War, which killed more Americans than all the nation's wars put together except the Second World War, and which the national imagination has sacralized. In 1861, the government of the United States viewed itself as suppressing a lawless rebellion, not as fighting the armies of a sovereign state. For Congress to have declared war on the Confederacy would have been to bestow upon the Slave Power a kind of backhanded diplomatic recognition. (The same difficulty would attend a declaration of war on Al Qaeda and, more broadly, bedevils the whole metaphor of the "war on terrorism": it affords the enemy a status and dignity he doesn't deserve.)

Still, the fact that it has been a record sixty-one years since Congress formally declared war has to mean something, and it obviously doesn't mean that the nation has beat its swords into plowshares. Nor is the omission purely a product of Presidential usurpation. During the first half of the twentieth century, declared war came to mean world war, total war, war to the finish--exactly what everyone on earth ...