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The final act before the bombs could fall was a move by the White House to line up congressional support. The Administration acted at about the last imaginable moment to fulfill even theoretically the requirement of the 1973 War Powers Act that "the President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States armed forces into hostilities." At 4 p.m. on Monday, when the already airborne F-111s were only three hours from the attack, nine House and Senate leaders of both parties were summoned to the Old Executive Office Building for "consultation" with a pride of Administration lions: Vice President George Bush, Shultz, Weinberger, CIA Director William Casey, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral William Crowe. Reagan came in ten minutes later, read briefly from typewritten notes describing the operation, then turned the presentation over to National Security Adviser John Poindexter, who gave a detailed rundown of the evidence linking Libya to the Berlin disco bombing and the wave of new terrorist acts that the Administration said was imminent. All the congressional leaders found the evidence sufficiently convincing to justify the raid, but several remarked that they were being notified, not consulted. One of the Reagan officials replied that there was still time to call off the attack--if the legislators objected "unanimously" and strongly. House Republican Leader Robert Michel thought, "If I had some serious objection, how could I make it now?"
No one objected, but no one expressed any enthusiasm either. Michel, playing devil's advocate, asked if the Administration had considered waiting for the next terrorist provocation. Poindexter replied that the case against Gaddafi was so strong that there was no point in waiting. Several legislators ventured worried what-next questions: in effect, how ready was the Administration to use military force against future terrorist acts? Democratic Senate Leader Robert Byrd of West Virginia asked, "What are we playing, tit for tat? Suppose the trail leads to Syria or Iran. Are we going to send in the bombers?" Shultz replied that the Administration would consider the problem on a case-by-case basis, deciding on a military or other response as the circumstances of each terrorist outburst appeared to dictate. That did not satisfy Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, the leading Democratic expert on defense. While continuing to defend the Libya raid as justified, Nunn re- marked later, "I don't sense any long-range strategy in dealing with terrorism. I think it's still ad-hocism."