It’s in his best interest to push war-making powers back to Congress, where they belong.
It’s in his best interest to push war-making powers back to Congress, where they belong.
L ast Thursday the House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced a measure that would repeal the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against Iraq and the 1991 measure authorizing the same, and another from 1957 — that’s not a typo. The authorization dates back to Dwight Eisenhower’s administration.
The reason to do so is obvious. Our previous two presidents invoked these authorizations as their legal mandate to send the American military on missions that the Congress that passed them never contemplated. President Barack Obama used the post-9/11 2001 AUMF, and the 2002 AUMF, as his mandate for dealing with the Islamic State. His successor Donald Trump used long-ago AUMFs to justify a strike on Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani. This effectively cuts Congress out of its constitutional role of declaring war. Perhaps because presidents in both parties have been recent violators, congressmen from both parties have been willing to sponsor this measure.
However, there’s one major problem. Representative Gregory Meeks, a Democrat of New York, explained some of the thinking behind this effort to Politico: “There are continuing threats from Iranian-backed militants. There are threats from ISIS and al Qaeda. That said, the 2002 AUMF doesn’t help us deal with any of these threats.” He added, “Our forces would stay under Iraq under the 2001 AUMF, and the president can always defend America and our forces under Article II [of the U.S. Constitution].”
There’s a problem, however. The reason Congress has cited for repealing the AUMFs from 2002, 1991, or 1957 apply equally to the 2001 authorization of force, which lawmakers will leave untouched. That act of Congress authorizes strikes only against al-Qaeda and those who helped plan the September 11 attacks on the United States, not ISIS, nor the many other groups of terrorists the United States is confronting in half a dozen countries. We are not fighting al-Qaeda in Yemen. We weren’t fighting al-Qaeda in Somalia before pulling out earlier this year. Many of the fighters in these wars were born after the September 11 attacks, or consider al-Qaeda apostates of some kind.
Most perversely, at various times in the Syrian civil war, where U.S. forces were acting under the legal authority to destroy al-Qaeda, they were inadvertently equipping the Syrian outfit of that group. Worse still, those missions were expanded after Congress declined to vote to authorize a more serious intervention in Syria. Congress demurred from this after a similar vote failed in the United Kingdom, and public opinion in the United States turned sharply against it.
And this really does come to the heart of the matter. The reason our Framers put the power of war in the hands of Congress is because war necessarily involves the very blood of the people. It calls their sons (and now their daughters) from their own work and their families, into the nation’s service. It implicates the people’s honor. So it must be authorized by those who are elected closest to the people. And the Framers knew well that in Europe, war launched by a sovereign may primarily involve that executive’s private interests. Some war powers were in the hands of unelected kings whose family relations were sitting on other thrones and benefices of power. They could send men to die to rescue a second cousin. Other, powerful administrators, born to power, could have in mind the protection of lands and rents — interests that may be totally at odds with the national interest.
The repeal of these authorizations is welcome. But most Americans hardly realize that men wearing their uniform are involved in conflicts in Niger and Yemen. They hardly understand the ins and outs of what is happening now in Iraq and Afghanistan. And leaving the 2001 authorization to cover all these actions still allows the White House and its lawyers to send the military out under new emanations and penumbra of an act of Congress passed nearly a generation ago. Congress will not be taking responsibility in any real way.
Stephen Walt, writing at Foreign Policy, notes that this state of affairs allows members of Congress to look like they are taking some responsibility back, but none has transferred into their hands. “Doves can complain that presidents are misusing their authority and leading us into pointless quagmires, and hawks can express their outrage whenever a president fails to take some military action they favor,” Walt writes.
We need to go much further. President Biden has asked for further AUMF reform, something “narrow and specific.” That’s exactly as it should be. It also serves his interest to do so. As it is now, Biden inherits half a dozen conflicts. Any one of them could produce a Mogadishu moment, which Bill Clinton faced in his first term — an enormity that the president cannot explain to the public. A new AUMF to replace 2001’s would push the debates back into Congress. It would relieve the president of sole responsibility for military decisions. Done correctly, it would provide him and his successors room to confront D.C.’s foreign-policy “blob,” a class of people, much like their predecessors in Europe, who move from sinecure to benefice, launching foreign-policy crusades while in office, and then profiting as financial consultants when out of it.