If George W. Bush loses the U.S. presidency this November he can blame James Madison. The Father of the Constitution grounded America’s government on the absolute necessity that governmental power must be checked and balanced. At a very deep level, most Americans agree with Madison.

When Bush was contemplating declaring war on Iraq, polls indicated overwhelming support for the President—but only if he first received United Nations approval. The majority of even Americans believed that the freedom of the most powerful nation in the history of the world to invade another country had to be checked and balanced.

In the end, without a second U.N. Security Council vote endorsing military action, Bush invaded Iraq. His argument for invasion began by overthrowing Madison. Bush declared in his June 2001 white paper on national security strategy that the United States would not recognize any check and balance to its decision to "take anticipatory action" against a possible "threat to our national security."

The country with the most powerful military in the history of the world would use its power to attack preemptively other countries, even if it had not yet attacked the United States or its allies. Bush could then appear logical when he applied his doctrine of preemption to the case of Iraq:

Major premise: To forestall or prevent hostile acts by its adversaries "the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively."

Minor premise: Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction pose a real and persistent threat to the United States.

Conclusion: To protect the United States from weapons of mass destruction, the United States is justified in invading Iraq before it attacks the United States or its allies.

Critics of Bush’s conclusion felt vindicated when David Kay, the U.S. government’s own arms inspector, pulled the rug out from under the second premise, declaring that "we were all wrong." There was no evidence, said Kay, that when America invaded Iraq Saddam Hussein actually had weapons of mass destruction.

The attention of critics turned to U.S. intelligence agencies and why they didn’t have information that supported the minor premise. But Bush and his policy makers must be held responsible for promulgating the major premise—preemption—as the necessary first step to the conclusion that Iraq must be invaded.

Certainly the intelligence community will have to answer for supplying the policy makers insufficient, even inaccurate information. But the administration’s appointment of yet another commission to study the intelligence community must not divert America’s attention from Bush formally asserting America’s unchecked power to declare a preemptive war.

James Madison never trusted any ruler, any institution with unchecked power. "If men were angels no government would be necessary" (Federalist no. 51). He thought that judges, legislators, and presidents of the United States must check each other’s power. Even the federal government, whose creation gave Madison his deepest satisfaction, continued to be checked by the power of the states.

Further, these governmental checks and balances worked best when they were subject to the competing influences of myriad groups active in a large, extended republic. The thrust of Madison’s political thought and action at the Constitutional Convention was to extend the arena of peaceful checks and balances to a republic ten times larger than any previous federation in history.

Madison did scoff at Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s proposed further step—a supranational council of deputies presiding over a confederation of sovereign states. But in his 1792 essay, "Universal Peace," Madison did think that America’s new republican government had made progress toward Rousseau’s ideal. He had some "benevolent enthusiasm" that "had Rousseau lived to see the rapid progress of reason and reformation, which the present day exhibits, the philanthropy which dictated his project would find rich enjoyment in the scene before him."

Americans were quite willing for the United States to respond to terrorism by proposing armed conflict with Iraq. But the majority wanted the "upper chamber" of the United Nations—the Security Council—to consent. Two hundred years after Madison, the majority of Americans wanted the most powerful executive in the world to wait for the consent of this worldwide, representative body, whatever its flaws. The majority of Americans had internationalized Madison’s beloved checks and balances; they had paraphrased Madison’s most famous phrase: If American Presidents were angels, no international consent would be necessary.

If Bush does not serve a second term it will not be because he got bad intelligence about Iraq. If Bush is not re-elected it will be because he opposed the Father of the Constitution and lost.

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