Legislative ploys limited U.S. role in earlier conflicts

WASHINGTON — Since the early 1970s, Congress has intervened in at least five foreign conflicts on three continents by dictating what U.S. forces should do or how long they should stay.

In the most dramatic — and provocative — cases, including during the latter years of the Vietnam War, lawmakers used their power over the federal budget to dramatically restrict operations they opposed.

At other times, lawmakers passed laws that specified where U.S. forces would operate in Central America in the 1980s and that set a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Somalia in the 1990s.

In the late 1970s, Congress barred the CIA from participating in a civil war in Angola.

Nevertheless, Congress has historically shown discomfort with challenging the commander in chief over how to conduct a war.

"Congress is very sensitive of being accused of not supporting the troops," said Louis Fisher, a Library of Congress constitutional-law specialist who has written extensively about struggles between the White House and Congress over war powers.

Even when popular opinion was turning against the Vietnam War, it was years before congressional war opponents mustered the majorities necessary to begin imposing restrictions on the conflict.

But after President Nixon's 1970 expansion of the war into Cambodia, the tide began to turn.

That year, Sens. John Sherman Cooper, R-Ky., and Frank Church, D-Idaho, overcame months of legislative opposition and attached an amendment to a foreign-aid package that barred the use of U.S. troops in Cambodia and Laos.

The next year, Congress went further, approving a measure sponsored by Sen. Mike Mansfield, D-Mont., that required Nixon to set a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam.

Only after U.S. forces had withdrawn, after the 1973 peace accords, did Congress cut funding for assistance to South Vietnam. Two years later, after more congressional funding cuts, the country succumbed to a massive North Vietnamese invasion.

The fall of Saigon in 1975 fed accusations that Congress had undermined the U.S. war effort in Southeast Asia.

Within a year, lawmakers on Capitol Hill imposed new limits on U.S. intervention in another foreign conflict.

In 1976, Congress prohibited the CIA from conducting military operations in Angola, which was in the middle of a fierce civil war that pitted a Soviet-backed government against rebels supported by U.S. allies.

Less than a decade after the end of the Vietnam War, Congress faced off against the White House over another controversial foreign war, this time in Central America.

In the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration was trying to overthrow the Marxist government of Nicaragua and to prop up a U.S.-backed government in El Salvador against communist-backed rebels.

Amid reports of atrocities committed by U.S. allies, Democrats on Capitol Hill grew wary of U.S. involvement.

In 1984, Rep. Edward Boland, D-Mass., led a congressional effort to prohibit the use of funding from the CIA, the Defense Department or any other federal agency in support of the contras in Nicaragua.

Two years later, lawmakers went further, restricting U.S. forces — which at the time were still advising the contras — from operating in Nicaragua and within 20 miles of the Nicaraguan border in Honduras and Costa Rica.

Those limits would become central to the Iran-contra scandal in which Reagan administration officials sought to fund the contras by using the proceeds of arms sales to Iran.

Congressional intervention in Southeast Asia and Central America proved politically controversial for Democrats. Wariness over being accused again of abandoning America's allies diminished congressional interest in limiting support for the government of El Salvador, Arnson said.

Yet, even into the 1990s, lawmakers continued to place limits on U.S. military action abroad. In 1991, Congress authorized President George H.W. Bush to use military force only to liberate Kuwait rather than fight on into Iraq.

After 18 U.S. soldiers were killed in a firefight in Mogadishu in 1993, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., led a successful effort to set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Somalia.

Democrats now are challenging another administration over a war. But, so far, those advocating legislation to require the withdrawal of U.S. troops — such as Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis. — remain a minority.