722. What Do You Call A War That Isn't Called A War?

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. Today, I want to continue a conversation we had a bit ago about war. And if you remember, or you didn't listen to that episode, I'll give you a too long, didn't read version, I talked about war powers and who has the power in government to actually declare a war. And that, of course, is Congress. Only Congress can declare a war. The president, we call him the commander in chief, but he can't actually declare a war that has to come from

Congress. That is how the Constitution was set up. However, we have a lot of wars. And if you're not watching the video of this, I just said that in the scare quotes that aren't actually wars. So we've come to think of them in history books and we're taught that they're wars in school, but they're not actually wars. And the reason they aren't is because presidents got real sneaky and they got real clever and they started calling them something else so that they could get away with doing them. But guess what? It was still war. Okay, so we're going to talk about those

instances today. And I want to give a shout out to Reason TV who made a really funny video about this, which is what gave me this idea. It was like a Jeopardy type game show parody video. And they, you know, it was like, Oh, was this a war? And then no, it wasn't. So we're going to, I want to thank them for giving this idea to me, we're going to do something similar, but we're going to get into it to way more detail. So let's jump into it first. I want to give a little example. So I was a little bit sneaky when I was a kid. And I remember there was this one time that my mom

baked cookies for our neighbor. And of course, when you smell freshly baked cookies in your house, what do you want to do? You want to eat one? Of course. But my mom kept saying, no, Brittany, these are for the neighbors. These are not for you. You got to stay away from the cookies. Well, if you know me and you know, you've heard me talk about my sweet dude, that is very hard, especially for young Brittany to do. So my mom walks out of the room. And what do you think I did? I took a bite out of one of the cookies. And it's funny when you're a kid because you think like,

Oh, maybe my mom won't notice that there's a bite taken out of this cookie. So when my mom came back in the room, you know, and I'm like, like under the table, like trying to like sneak see if she can see me because I know that I'm going to get in trouble probably. And she says, you know, Brittany, why is there a bite taken out of this cookie? And I said, I see what you're saying. I observed that there is a bite taken out of this cookie. But I think you're seeing this the wrong way, mom. I think what you're seeing as a bite was actually me sampling. It was me tasting

the cookie to make sure the quality was good, right, to make sure that the neighbors were getting your best cookie. And who knows your cookies better than me? So it's not no, no, it wasn't me taking the bite out of your cookie. It was me tasting the cookie. It was quality assurance, right? Well, that, as you might imagine, did not go over well. But I still got scolded for eating the cookie, even though I'm pretty sure I saw my mom's smirk at my sneaky, my sneaky definition of what I have done. But the government does that with war. Okay, clearly, I took a bite out of the cookie. There's

no way of saying it was something else. But I tried to get sneaky and tricky with my words. And that's what the government does. They think, okay, I'm not allowed to do this thing like declare war. This is what the executive branch, the president, I'm not allowed to declare war without Congress. But what if I don't call it a war? And what if I say it's something else? And it might surprise you to know that the last time we had an actual declared war was World War II. That's crazy, right? Because we've had many a war since then. So what makes a war? When you think in your head

what makes a war, you know, we think of tanks, we think of bombs going off, we think of two different countries or many countries engaged in this conflict. But according to the government, no, that's not necessarily true. So let's jump into this and let's start with the Korean War. So the Korean War happened in 1950. And I feel like this is the war we collectively know less about than other wars. And maybe that's just me. Maybe you guys are sitting at home going, I know everything about the Korean War. I don't. And I feel like it was kind of just

glossed over very quickly in school. But the Korean War is 1950. So this was a major ground conflict. We had troops on the ground, 36,000 American soldiers died. When you look at these numbers, you think, Oh, clearly, that is a war, you know, and we hear today about how there's North and South Korea. That split came because of the Korean War. So this is a major defining moment for for geopolitics. But it was never actually a real war, because the executive said, no, no, I don't need Congress because this is police action, you see, not a war, not a war. Nope,

nope, that's just this is like me taking the bite of the cookie. I see how you could think it was a war, but no, no, no, police action, it's different. And we weren't trying to wage war. We were trying to wage peace. So it's a different thing entirely and plus and plus it wasn't necessarily the United States. It was the United Nations thing. We just got involved. Okay, so these were the excuses that President Truman, who was the president of time, was giving to say no, not a war. And it was so he didn't have to go to Congress and get permission. But again, this is a major conflict. We have US

soldiers dying. This is a war, right? Again, me taking the bite of the cookie saying it was taste testing. It's still a war. But President Truman knew he didn't have to go through Congress if he called it something else. So it was police action. So next we have the Vietnam War. That's going to happen in the 60s. And the Vietnam War was also guess what? Not a declared war. No, no, not at all. Even though we had I think at its peak 500,000 boots on the ground in Vietnam, there was no American interest in this war. We we actually had gotten involved with putting a leader in in

Vietnam and we had helped the we had meddled and we had helped prop up a Catholic president in a country that was Buddhist that wasn't Catholic at all. And so there was all this conflict until the Civil War. So then we go over there. Lots of Americans died. I mean, if you talk to your grandparents, maybe even your great grandparents, because that makes me fold. But maybe even great grandparents, they remember they probably had friends that went over there. They remember how awful this war was. It was the first war that we saw. We I wasn't allowed. I wasn't alive. It

wasn't that old. But it was the first war that Americans saw on their TV screen. So this is this is very jarring to the American public. They're seeing images of of this distant land and things going on over there that were just horrible. But Lyndon B. Johnson says, no, no, no, not actually a war knows because you see this is limited action. We're not going to be here very long. Spoiler alert. They were there for several years. And Johnson said, you know, we have to act quickly. We have to act quickly. And so, you know, it's not it's I don't need congressional approval

because this is something we got to act on. And there was this whole thing called the Gulf of Tonkin that we'll get into this in another episode. The it was it's kind of viewed now as a false flag. Basically, there was some fabrication of some instance of some things that happened where it was used as the thing that got us into this quote, a war that wasn't actually a war. So there's never any declared action. This ends up being just a horrible, horrible situation. So many young boys are lost. And this is particularly just just so gruesome because the draft was open.

And you know, I my dad just barely missed the draft. He was just a teeny bit too young, but he remembers friends and and neighbors getting sent off to die in this war that remember, wasn't actually a war because Linda Mee Johnson, who's the president of the time, didn't want to get congressional approval. Okay, so another non-war war. Now another one before I get on to the war on terror, because that's it's its own thing. I'm going to talk about something that happened in Libya in 2011. And this is something I remember

so clearly, and I keep forgetting that this was so long ago. This happens when you're old guys, you forget time. You think, Oh, that was yesterday. No, actually, it was many, many years ago. But so in 2011, Obama engaged in some, some missile strikes we intervened in Libya. And people like me who are very anti war said, hold up. We do not have a congressional, a congressional declaration of war. What is going on here? So basically Obama says, you got you got this all wrong, guys, this is not war. This is kinetic military action. Okay,

so not war, kinetic military action. And I got to hand it to the government for coming up with all these different phrases that make war seem like something else, right? This is again, me taste testing the cookie. So basically the argument was there were no boots on the ground, because now we have different technology. Now we can launch missiles from thousands of miles away. Now we have like drones, there's so many things now that don't involve boots on the ground. And so Obama says, no, no, this isn't, this isn't a war. We're not actually there. There's

no boots on the ground. So yeah, you might see things exploding. We might be in another country, but nana, it's not where it's cool. It's fine. I don't need Congress. You can't, if you're not watching the video, you can't see me giving a side eye right now, but if you want to see me give a lot of side eye, you can watch this episode online, because that's just silly. You can't just make up a new word and say, oh, it's not war because of this. There's still military intervention on behalf of us, the US, and they're going to

another country. That sounds like war to me. Now the war on terror. This is before Libya, but the reason I wanted to save it for last is because it's so ridiculous. So the war on terror was interesting because there was no war on terror. Okay, this war on terror was kind of like how you hear people say, there's a war on Christmas or there's a war on this. It was an ideological war. Okay, there's not, the war on terror was not a war against one particular country. It was just this war on this idea of terrorism. And that's even scarier,

because when you have a president saying there's a war on an idea, what does that mean? There's no clear objective. You don't really know who the enemy is because the enemy is going to be whoever the president decides is lumped in with this war on terror. And that's how we got this war in Iraq that wasn't really related to the war on terror was supposed to be a response to the 9-11 attacks. But Iraq wasn't involved in that, but it was part of this war on terror and they have weapons of mass destruction. And so it became this thing where pretty much anybody could be drawn into the

war on terror because it wasn't an idea. It wasn't even an actual declared war. So Afghanistan 2001 to 2021, guys, it was a 20 year war. They did have an authorization, Congress could have an authorization for military action. But again, there was never a formally declared war. And this is a 20 year conflict that resulted in many deaths, many mental illness issues from veterans coming back from war. And they had to see all these horrible things and do horrible things because having to take a life, even if you're a member of the military and that's what you sign up for,

that's very hard. It takes a toll on you. You still have to take a life, even if it's a quote unquote bad guy, that's still very hard. And it kind of hurts your soul, it damages you a little bit. And so they came back and there was all sorts of casualties. This again, it's just part of this big war on terror, but it's not an actual declared war. And it was argued that a formal declaration of war wasn't needed again because it wasn't against a specific country. No, it was against the idea of terrorism. That guys will a dangerous, dangerous precedent,

because now you're saying we don't even have to have a country we're with, I can be a war with an idea that could be anybody that could be literally anybody. And so there's not these clear defined rules. It kind of reminds me of, you know, how warrants we've talked about that when the police officer has a warrant for your arrest, it has or a warrant search. It has to say what is being searched and what they're looking for, you have to have very clear objectives and war when you have a declaration of war has those very clear objectives. When there's not even a place to go or a person

you're fighting against, that's very, very scary. That's a very dangerous precedent. So you'll notice this is not new. Okay, this is an ongoing thing. It is a thing, it is a pattern that the executive branch will often do to get away with not going to Congress and getting that full approval. And we see that today. In fact, today we hear government say or hear the executive branch say, well, this is not a war. We're actually doing this intervention to avoid a war. Therefore, it's not me. While bombs are going up and you're like, wait a second,

it feels kind of like war, you know? And so it's really tricky. And this is a big part of government trickery or propaganda. We've talked about that before, where governments try to change what words mean or mix words and be tricky with their language so that you don't know what's going on. And so we have to be very aware of what's going on just because someone slaps the term war on something does not mean that it's an actual war. Only Congress can declare war. That's it. The president should not be able to circumvent, which means get around Congress, find loopholes

to say, not a war, kinetic military action, not a war. It's police action. It's always like, no, this is clearly a war. So watch out for that guys. And when you're learning about these different wars in history, remind yourself, wait a second, is that a war or was this just a president trying to get away with having this military action? And why? What do they have to gain? And we can get into that on another episode. There's a lot of reasons that not only executives like war, but also other interests, what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex, and we can get

into that in more detail later. But we will leave it there. But I want to just leave you with the message of, again, a war has to be declared and it has to be declared by Congress and the president years and years. I mean, this isn't just this president. It's not even the last president. Presidents have always found a way to get away with this by calling it something else. And it's really quite silly. But people fall for it. And we got to be vigilant. We got to remember that it's Congress's job to declare a war. So I will leave it there as always. Don't forget to like

and subscribe. Until next time, guys, I will talk to you later.