Re-asserting "the legislature's constitutional prerogatives on war and peace" as a check and balance against the near monopoly of the "imperial presidency" on the use of force is thus her most important recommendation.
Congress's constitutional prerogative to declare war has routinely been ignored.
It "amounted to a complete evisceration of the Congressional prerogative to declare war," he wrote in "Losing America".
Having learned nothing from the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, Congress once again abdicated one of its main responsibilities delineated by the Constitution: the prerogative to declare war.
Now, with Gordon Brown's Governance of Britain agenda (pdf), the executive's prerogative powers on war and treaties are rightly to be replaced by parliamentary powers, the role of the civil service will be legislated by parliament, and we will soon be consulting with the public on the development of a British bill of rights and responsibilities.
"Were we a body that cared about our prerogative to declare war, we would take that power back," he said.
At the same time, scarcely a whisper can be heard about renouncing the prerogative to launch aggressive war.
The old Brody would have considered it his prerogative, as an accidental war hero with a screaming case of PTSD, to interpret this mandate pretty broadly.
For the Islamic republic, Iranian history is, on the contrary, the gradual assumption by a hereditary clergy of the prerogatives (leading prayer, holy war, government) of the Hidden Imam, the 12th descendant of the Prophet through his daughter Fatemeh.
Its war-prerogative is jealously guarded, so that soldiers' sacrifice, rather than cause for national commemoration, is politically inconvenient.
