RALEIGH – I’ve been in a constitutional frame of mind lately. The explanation is simple: piles of oak leaves.

I have several big oak trees in or abutting my lawn, resulting in copious amounts of fallen leaves around this time of the year. I used to spend hours raking and hauling, raking and hauling, swearing, raking and hauling. A couple of years ago, I basically gave up this “exercise” in favor of running my riding lawmaking back and forth, dumping the bagger every second pass or so, which probably takes even longer but spares my back and feeds my latent impulse towards wheeled masculinity.

Besides, I’ve learned to make effective use of the yard-work time by listening to selections from a library of audiotapes we maintain at the John Locke Foundation. Most of them acquired either from Tennessee-based Knowledge Products or the Virginia-based Teaching Company, the tapes offer a range of educational fare from politics and philosophy to the history of the Byzantine state (where you will learn all you ever wanted to know about that celebrated and talented monarch, Basil the Bulgar-Slayer).

Lately, my interests have turned back to an eight-part series of tapes narrated by Walter Cronkite on the history of the U.S. Constitution. In part because they were not written by Cronkite, the works are immensely valuable as a refresher course on the American founding. A recent segment dwelling on the enumerated powers of Congress in Article 1, Section 8 got me to thinking about the war in Iraq, the visceral opposition of some libertarians and paleoconservatives to it, and the general issue of how far a free republic should go in engaging in military action outside of its territory and immediate vicinity.

There’s a school of thought that the Framers of the Constitution feared the prospect of Americans getting entangled in the complex and squalid affairs of other countries. I share this view, to a point. President George Washington’s address did warn against “entangling alliances.” John Quincy Adams did state that while America wished the cause of freedom abroad well, it would not venture forth “in search of monsters to destroy.”

But that’s not the only strand you find n the foreign-policy thinking of the time. There are also plenty of cases in which early American presidents and lawmakers saw U.S. involvement in foreign disputes and events to be critically important. During the Tripolitan War, Thomas Jefferson famously deployed American forces against Barbary pirates (and their state sponsors) in the Mediterranean. U.S. forces finished the job and dictated terms to the North African states during James Madison’s otherwise addled presidency, which resulted in a permanent naval presence in the Mediterranean. James Monroe and Adams, his secretary of state, formulated the Monroe Doctrine not as a tenet of isolationism but quite the reverse, as Walter Russell Mead wrote in his indispensable guide to the history of American foreign policy, Special Providence. “The Monroe Doctrine was not only not isolationist, it was anti-isolationist,” Mead stated. “It amounted to a recognition that American safety depended on the balance of power in Europe,” with America clearly siding with Britain against attempts by France, Spain, or other powers to reestablish mercantilist colonial empires in the Americas (while also clearly warning Britain not to get its own financial hooks too far in fledging American nations). Decades later, America chose a similar course with regard to expanding trade in Asia, insisting on an “open door policy” in China and otherwise seeking to prevent one European power or power bloc from gaining the upper hand.

Nothing in the Constitution empowers Congress or the President to create an overseas empire, of course, and the excesses of the Spanish-American War were duly attacked by the isolationists. But their basic point – that what happens outside of the jurisdiction of the United States is none of the business of the federal government, even when Americans’ personal and economic interests are at stake – is contrary to the philosophy espoused by most of the Founders, who were certainly nervous about their little country getting in over its head (hence Washington’s warning) but not opposed in theory to robust intervention on behalf of principles of freedom.

The clause I have in mind today, class, is found in the previously mentioned Article 1, Section 8 enumeration of powers. The 10th power states that Congress shall have the power “to define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas and offenses against the laws of nations.”

Part of this language is unambiguous. Piracy was clearly understood at the time as an unmitigated evil against which federal action was warranted. Notice that this is very much a specific grant of power to the federal government to, well, engage in police activities around the world. The assumption is not that American travelers and merchants should expect to venture abroad only at their own risk, but rather than Americans have a natural right to travel and to trade, and that those who would violate that right should expect, when judged feasible, that the full force of American military will fall upon them.

The rest of the language is even more interesting. Congress should have the power to “define and punish” actions of foreign individuals or powers that constitute “felonies” and “offenses against the laws of nations.” I might offer, as one example of such a punishable crime, a foreign thug expropriating the property of American citizens or interfering with international commerce, both justifying (and frequently in American history leading to) a military response. Another violation of the “laws of nations,” it seems to me, would be to attempt to assassinate a duly elected official of the U.S. government or assaulting duly constituted U.S. embassies or diplomatic personnel. Still another “felony” against the laws of nations would be for a foreign power to act as a base, financier, supplier, or enabler of bloodthirsty terrorists intent on harming American citizens, property, and interests. Finally, I strongly believe that in today’s world, a felonious violation of the “laws of nations” would be to conduct research into weapons of mass destruction with an intent either to threaten their use against America and its allies or to arm terrorists with them.

Thus, I would argue that the U.S. Constitution provides Congress with the legal power to take action instead foreign miscreants, such as Saddam Hussein, and that in its 2002 vote Congress authorized President George W. Bush to take appropriate military action under this constitutional power.

He did so.

There may well be legitimate arguments to make against the Iraq war on prudential grounds, but I think it is impossible to argue that the action was contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution or that it lies outside of the scope of federal power envisioned by our Founders. Dissenting readers may attempt to do so, anyway, by emailing me and I’ll post their arguments and some responses in a subsequent column.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.