If someone told you that the United States is not, and never has been, at war with Iraq and Afghanistan, you might be inclined to dismiss that person as an idiot.

As proof, you might point to the thousands upon thousands of news sources referencing “the wars,” or maybe the various election campaigns that spoke openly about these conflicts as “wars.”

More convincing still, you could mention all those dead American soldiers; where did they die, if not at war?

The mind revolts at the idea that, as this hypothetical person would claim, the U.S. has not fought a war since 1945. The logic behind such an assertion would be that Congress, solely endowed with the power to declare war, has not declared one since the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

So, rather than “wars,” these conflicts of the 21st Century have actually been “operations.”

Unfortunately, the difference is more than semantic.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 gives the president the ability to notify Congress of a military excursion of his choosing, and provides 60 days to get the job done. This is so the president may respond to emergencies with appropriate swiftness.

The problem is, “operations” have not always lived up to surgical precision implied by their title.

When we send our troops to topple regimes, we sometimes find ourselves biting off more than we can finish chewing in two month’s time; particularly when we are left with no officials on the other side with whom to communicate. The enemy becomes vague, and the mission becomes vaguer.

Congress, arbiter of the national purse, can decide to cut funding to an expired operation, but that raises a nasty problem: at election time, political ads seeking to unseat incumbents gloat that certain members of Congress “voted to take funding away from our troops.”

The rhetoric tends to stick, and since nobody likes a politician who refuses to support the troops, these presidential excursions have the potential to go on indefinitely.

The purpose for which the War Powers Resolution of 1973 was intended, the possibly imminent threat of a nuclear attack, has no real context in the year 2011. The red menace of Soviet Communism is no more, and the green menace of Muslim Radicalism does not resemble our former foe.

In the event of a nuclear strike on the U.S., effective deterrence mandated a capability to respond quickly and decisively; in the age of non state-sanctioned terrorism, the decision to roll out the bombers requires precisely the sort of slow, deliberative treatment that the congressional process would afford it.

Given these evolutionary leaps of the last 38 years in the natures of both global military conflict and our national political atmosphere, perhaps it is time to give ask ourselves whether the War Powers Resolution presents an institutional dilemma by placing in one person’s hands the power to engage the country in an open-ended military commitment.

The founders had a great deal of good reasons for assigning Congress alone the power to declare wars; what do you imagine they would have to say about this presidential power to declare “operations”?