Editor's note: Today, Yoo and Bruce Ackerman of Yale University discuss the hypocrisy of the left and the right on the issue of war powers. Previously, they debated the ongoing use-of-force resolution and the war powers language of the constitution. Later this week, they'll debate the questionable relevance of declaring war in the 21st century, and the possibility that there may be more important issues here than constitutional language.

Visiting Fellow John Yoo

In the Sherlock Holmes story, "Silver Blaze," the master detective deduces a murderer's identity because a guard dog failed to bark at the time of the crime. Silence revealed that the killer was the dog's master.

While deafeningly loud today, critics of presidential power failed to make a peep when President Clinton unilaterally waged war in the Balkans. Their silence speaks volumes.

In the 1980s and 1990s, leading scholars and Democratic politicians sharply challenged Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush for wars from Nicaragua to the Persian Gulf. They testified before Congress, hit the airwaves, and even brought a federal lawsuit to block the 1991 Persian Gulf War until it received congressional authorization.

American intervention in the Balkans should have provided an easy target for these critics of presidential power. In 1995, President Clinton dispatched 20,000 troops to Bosnia and then launched a 1999 air war against Serbia to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Clinton never received any authorization from Congress. In fact, the war against Serbia arguably was the first presidential use of force to violate the War Powers Resolution's 60-day clock on interventions abroad. Congress rejected a proposal to declare war or to authorize the conflict.

But when it came to Clinton, the dog did not bark. Bruce, I am pleased to learn of your effort to publish an op-ed. Unfortunately, yours appears to have been a lonely effort. I do not recall any outpouring of criticism from the editorial pages of our nation's great newspapers. There were no lawsuits by the same academics who sued Reagan and Bush.

Federal legislators who had joined those lawsuits, like Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), and Rep John Conyers (D-Ohio), did not file any cases against Clinton or demand his impeachment. Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) did not deliver one of his thundering orations against Kosovo. This is the same Biden who voted against Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court, because he would not affirmatively agree with his view that President Bush would need Congress's permission to attack Iran.

Supporters of presidential power have been far more consistent. In 1995, a Republican Congress attempted to repeal the war powers resolution, and in 1999 it fully funded the Kosovo war. To add my own adventures in punditry, I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on March 15, 1999, supporting the constitutionality of the Kosovo war.

In 2001 and 2002, the Bush administration went to Congress for approval for the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Critics give it absolutely no credit for ensuring that the wars of this decade were on surer constitutional and political footing that those of the last.

It seems obvious that the academics (you excepted) and congressional Democrats on the ramparts against presidential power today are doing so because they disagree with the Iraq war. They did not raise any constitutional objections when they agreed with Clinton's foreign policy. I doubt this was out of any special love for Clinton, and I like to think it was not out of pure partisan politics.

Instead, congressional Democrats and their academic allies opposed what they saw as Republican presidents' hawkish uses of force to end the Cold War. They wanted a more accommodating approach to the Soviet Union, one that thankfully did not prevail. But when it came to 1990s efforts at nation-building and peacekeeping, in which the United States' national interests were weaker (or in some cases nonexistent) and were submerged within a multinational force, they were only too happy to look the other way.

By failing to bark then, today's critics have lost their bite.

John Yoo is a visiting scholar at AEI.