President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and blockaded Southern ports, without congressional authorization. President Wilson locked up Eugene V. Debs in World War I and never let him out. FDR interned 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans in relocation camps, in a wartime act of racial profiling approved by the Supreme Court. Truman dropped atom bombs on defenseless cities, killing 100,000 women and children. Yet all are judged by liberal historians to be great or near-great presidents.
I guess Buchanan's point, not suprisingly, is that presidents should have the leeway to do whatever it takes to defeat an enemy, whether it is symbolically or literally. Surely it can be said that a center left president, JFK prevented nuclear holocaust by suppressing his imperial urges. Or maybe historians of all political persuasions look at these presidents through the prism of domestic policy as well as foreign.
Then the question must be asked, is the WOT (War on Terror) really a war? All of the examples that Buchanan referenced are concrete military conflicts, have we been fighting the WOT since 1979?
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