The American Conservative

Bruce Riedel reviews the situation in Yemen:

The losers in the war are of course the Yemeni people. More than half the twenty-five million people are malnourished. Many are dislocated. Children are at greatest risk. The war gets almost no mention in the American media, but it’s our war [bold mine-DL].

If anything, this understates the damage that has been done. The many displaced internally are well over two million people, and half of the people described as malnourished are on the brink of famine. Thousands and thousands of children are dying or will die from preventable diseases. The starvation of a huge part of the civilian population is largely due to the coalition blockade supported by the U.S., and the aid that does get into the country cannot be easily distributed because of fuel shortages and the devastation of the country’s infrastructure from the bombing campaign that our military facilitates. Just this past week, the coalition destroyed a vitally important bridge needed to bring food into the capital:

Sajjad Mohammad Sajid, Oxfam Yemen Country Director, said: “This road is the main supply route for Sanaa as it conveys 90% of World Food Program food coming from Hodeidah to the capital. Its destruction threatens to leave many more people unable to feed themselves, worsening an already catastrophic situation in the country.”

The Saudi-led, U.S.-backed intervention has created a humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen that is at least as severe as any other crisis in the world. The situation in Yemen is arguably much worse than any other comparable humanitarian crisis because it is being so badly neglected and the international response to Yemen’s dire need has been so paltry. Relatively few people outside the region are aware of the crisis, even fewer understand how severe it is, and even fewer are motivated to provide aid, and the lack of attention to the war and its effects reinforces this indifference. Millions of people are at very real risk of starving to death so that the Saudis and their allies can indulge their delusions about combating Iranian influence, and the Saudi-led coalition is encouraged and enabled to do this with U.S. weapons, fuel, and intelligence provided by the Obama administration. On the rare occasions when administration officials are pressed to explain why the U.S. is doing this, they simply lie about the conflict and almost no one notices.

I suppose one could call our policy in Yemen “committing war crimes from behind”: the U.S. doesn’t directly commit any of the crimes, but it wouldn’t be possible for the Saudis and their allies to keep waging the war and committing their war crimes without our government’s assistance. Hardly anyone here at home notices our government’s role in all this because it is so rarely reported, it is scarcely criticized in major media outlets when it is mentioned, and it seems to hold no interest for most of our representatives in Congress. That’s how our government can facilitate a disaster that threatens the lives of millions of people without paying even the smallest political price.

U.S. involvement in the war on Yemen illustrates much of what’s worst in our foreign policy. We see the usual reflexive deference to bad clients and the uncritical backing of their worst behavior. We recognize the dishonest spin that the clients’ aggressive actions are being taken in “self-defense” to ward off a threat that doesn’t exist or has been grossly exaggerated. We know only too well the irrepressible urge to take sides and interfere in a foreign conflict that has little or nothing to do with us, and we encounter the all-too-familiar overconfidence in military options to “solve” ingrained political disputes that we don’t really understand. Finally, we confront the callous, total indifference to the suffering of a civilian population when the people endangered by war are on the “wrong” side of a fight.

Kelley Vlahos reminds us why Clinton is likely to be very hawkish as president:

But every message coming from her surrogates in the media and in the Washington defense establishment has been that she will “lean in” harder in Syria, and whether you want to call it “added ground troops” or something else, everyone in her orbit is calling for expanded U.S. intervention—including personnel and firepower—in the region, even at the risk of confrontation with Russia.

We have good reason to believe this because Clinton and her supporters repeatedly keep saying that this is the kind of foreign policy her administration will have. Clinton has made no secret of her support for “no-fly” and safe zones in Syria, and she has chosen a running mate who shares her views on these issues. While Democrats overall might be divided on Syria policy, the Democratic ticket is not: both nominees favor a more aggressive, militarized U.S. role in the Syrian conflict. That is the policy a Clinton administration is very likely to start implementing next year if, as seems likely, she prevails in the fall. A vote for Clinton is almost certainly a vote for an expanded war in Syria, and the public needs to understand that this is what we will get by entrusting her with the presidency.

Clinton is one of the few candidates in the last century to campaign explicitly on a very hawkish platform while still being favored to win the general election. Even Lyndon Johnson, the last Democratic nominee with foreign policy instincts as aggressive as Clinton’s, knew he needed to portray his opponent as a dangerous warmonger while presenting himself as the responsible alternative. By contrast, Clinton has done almost nothing to allay concerns that she is too ready to resort to using force, because she sees no need to do so. She attacks Trump for being ignorant and irresponsible, but she can’t credibly paint him as more likely to get the U.S. into a war when that is precisely what she has done and is ready to do again. She is also so confident of victory in November that she doesn’t think she has to make any concession to her critics on the left. She is winning the support of many prominent Republicans because they have confidence in her desire to exercise American “leadership” by bombing other countries and otherwise meddling in their affairs, and their confidence is not misplaced.

There aren’t many members of Congress that criticize the Obama administration’s support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen, but Rep. Ted Lieu has been one of the few to do so consistently over the last year. He issued a statement in response to the report of the bombing of the school in Haydan over the weekend. Lieu is calling on the U.S. to halt its assistance to the coalition:

A Democratic lawmaker called on the Obama administration to cut off assistance to Saudi Arabia amid the country’s ongoing bombing campaign in Yemen, saying “the United States is aiding and abetting what appears to be war crimes.”

He went on to say that “[t]he Administration must stop enabling this madness now.” I commend Rep. Lieu for this and his past efforts to pressure the administration over its support for the war. The war has received virtually no attention in Congress, and U.S. policy has received even less criticism, so Lieu is doing a real service in continuing to object to our involvement in this disgrace.

Following the bombing of the school in Haydan, a nearby MSF-supported hospital was struck by another coalition airstrike:

A Saudi-led coalition air strike hit a hospital in Yemen’s northern Hajja province on Monday, residents and local officials said, killing at least seven people and wounding 13.

A Reuters witness at the scene of the attack in the Abs district said medics could not immediately evacuate the wounded because war planes continued to fly over the area and first responders feared more bombings.

This is the fourth MSF-supported hospital that the coalition has bombed in the last year, and it just one of the many medical facilities that coalition planes have attacked. Medical facilities are obviously protected under international law, and the Saudis and their allies have been disregarding these protections routinely. When they are forced to account for their repeated bombings of hospitals and other civilian targets, the coalition response has always been to blame the victims of the attacks, but more often they simply deny all responsibility for the results of their bombing campaign.

The campaign has other longer-lasting, more insidious consequences as well. The use of cluster munitions by the coalition is doubly dangerous to the civilian population. They are inherently indiscriminate weapons that are more likely to kill noncombatants, and they also leave behind unexploded bombs that maim and kill unwitting civilians, often children, who don’t recognize them as a threat. The AP recently reported on one such instance:

Screams rang out through the hilltop village outside Yemen’s capital after 10-year-old Youssef al-Salmi set off a bomb he had found in a field, perhaps thinking it was a toy.

He became the latest of several Yemeni civilians to be killed by unexploded ordnance from the country’s ongoing civil war, which pits Saudi and U.S.-backed government forces against Shiite Houthi rebels.

Leftover parts of cluster bombs are just one of the many poisonous legacies of this war, and they underscore why most states around the world have banned the use of these weapons. Because of these cluster bombs, the Saudi-led, U.S.-backed bombing campaign will keep claiming innocent victims years and even decades after the current fighting ends. This is what the Saudis and their allies are doing with U.S. assistance, and it’s one of many reasons why all U.S. support for the war ought to end immediately.

The Saudi-led war on Yemen claimed more civilian lives this weekend:

Ten children died and 28 were injured in what Yemeni locals and officials described as an airstrike on a school in northern Yemen by a U.S.-backed Saudi-led coalition. The aid group Doctors Without Borders confirmed receiving casualties at its medical facility in the area.

The New York Times reported on the same attack:

Witnesses insisted that no Houthi military forces were present in either the principal’s house or the school.

“It’s a wanton aggression that can’t tell a civilian from a military target,” said Ismail Mufarih, a colleague of the principal, who helped rescue victims. “All were civilians. Their only sin was that they were Yemenis.

The school was located in the vicinity of Saada in northern Yemen. This is the Houthis’ stronghold, and it is also part of the region that the coalition illegally declared to be a military target last year. Indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets in Saada has been commonplace for well over a year since the coalition made that announcement last May. The coalition has indiscriminately bombed civilian areas in many parts of Yemen, but Saada is often where the worst damage has been done. Unfortunately, the bombings of schools and hospitals are not unusual occurrences in this war, but keep happening with alarming regularity. This is what the U.S. is helping the Saudis and their allies do in Yemen, and there are no signs that the war or U.S. support for it are likely to end anytime soon.

The latest installment of U.S. support for the Saudis comes in the form of a $1.15 billion sale of military equipment and weapons that was approved last week. The Senate’s only public critics of U.S. support for the war, Rand Paul and Chris Murphy, are trying to block the sale. John Hudson reports:

Citing concerns over Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, Republican Senator Rand Paul says he’s looking for ways to stop a $1.15 billion weapons deal with Riyadh that would include the sale of 130 Abrams battle tanks, 20 armored vehicles, and other military equipment.

The State Department has offered this lame defense:

The State Department defended the proposed deal, saying it did not amount to an endorsement of Saudi Arabia’s activities in Yemen.

This is not remotely credible. The sale of tanks and armored vehicles is helping the Saudis to replace their losses in the war, and by providing them with more military hardware the U.S. is making it easier for the Saudis to wage a longer campaign. At the very least, it reflects Washington’s uncritical support for Riyadh as the Saudis pummels and starves their neighbor. Hudson quotes Scott Paul from Oxfam on this:

A sale of major arms to Saudi Arabia signals the opposite — that the U.S. is instead all-in on a senseless war that has created one of the world’s largest humanitarian emergencies.

The U.S. is endorsing the Saudi-led coalition’s activities in Yemen every day by helping to make them possible with refueling and weapons, and the latest arms sale just confirms this. The administration wants to get credit for “reassuring” the Saudis by showering them with weapons and diplomatic backing without being held responsible for what the Saudis and their allies do or what the U.S. is actively doing to support them. Even if Paul and Murphy’s efforts aren’t successful, they may at least draw attention to U.S. support for the indefensible Saudi-led war.

Brazil’s little platoons. Catherine Addington reviews on the history of Rio’s favelas.

Armenia in crisis. Michael Cecire describes recent political upheaval in Armenia and the ongoing tensions with Azerbaijan.

Diplomacy at its finest. Allen Weiner and Duncan Pickard explain the history of the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal and its role in settling outstanding disputes between the two states, including the recent $400 million payment to Iran.

Bridging the foreign policy elite-Main Street divide. Sean Kay and Patrick Cronin offer some proposals for closing the widening gap between the public and foreign policy elites in Washington.

Nick Kristof repeats a standard complaint against Obama:

I admire Obama for expanding health care and averting a nuclear crisis with Iran, but allowing Syria’s civil war and suffering to drag on unchallenged has been his worst mistake, casting a shadow over his legacy.

Obama’s Syria policy has certainly been a muddled mess for years, but it has never made sense to me to fault him for “allowing” a foreign civil war to continue. To say that Obama “allowed” this assumes that the U.S. could have put an end to it at an acceptable cost, and I don’t see how anyone believes that to be the case. This takes for granted a degree of control over events on the other side of the world that no government–not even one as powerful as ours–can ever hope to have. Talk of “allowing” a foreign civil war to continue also presupposes that the U.S. has the right to interfere and force a settlement in another country’s internal conflict, but it has no such right. Further, it assumes that the U.S. knows how to bring an end to a multi-sided war in a fragmented country that it poorly understands, and I submit that our experience in the region over the last fifteen years proves that we do not.

I am often struck by how absurd it is that Obama is so often faulted on Syria for what he hasn’t done rather than what he has. We are repeatedly told that he erred because he didn’t illegally bomb Syria in 2013, or because he didn’t throw weapons at the problem earlier on. He receives much less criticism for arming opposition forces that are in league with jihadists (and then having those weapons seized by jihadists) or expanding the anti-ISIS bombing campaign into Syria on his own authority. That’s not because these other policies have been particularly effective or successful, but because they mean that the U.S. is “doing something” in Syria, and that is all that seems to matter for interventionist critics. “At least we’re not standing idly by,” they say. That’s right. Instead, we’re needlessly contributing to the mayhem.

Of course, the people most upset with Obama on Syria are those hawks that have wanted him to do much more, and so they blame him for the actions that other states and groups have taken when he has no control over what these other actors do. Meanwhile, when the Obama administration directly and actively participates in creating one of the gravest humanitarian crises of this century, as it has in Yemen, the same people that berate him over Syria have nothing to say about that. Obama’s sin of commission in Yemen is clearly more blameworthy than his “failure” in Syria, not least because the former is indefensible, and yet he usually gets a pass on the one while being excoriated for the other. The point here is not just that Obama has been let off the hook for a terrible decision to back the Saudi-led war on Yemen, but that our foreign policy pundits and professionals are much more willing to blame a president for the consequences of so-called “inaction” than they are willing to hold him accountable for the things that he actually does.

The example of Yemen’s exacerbated suffering should also make us wary of claims that the U.S. could have somehow forced an end to the civil war in Syria without causing even more harm. Outside intervention in Yemen obviously hasn’t hastened the end of conflict there, but instead propped up the weaker side while significantly escalating the war at enormous cost to the civilian population. The U.S.-backed, Saudi-led intervention made the existing conflict much worse and inflicted far more destruction on the country than would have otherwise happened. As terrible as Syria’s civil war has been, there is just as much reason to believe that direct intervention by the U.S. and its allies would have caused far more destruction and more loss of life to the detriment of the people of Syria.

I missed Ross Douthat’s column on Paul Ryan last week while moving. There are some fair points in it, but this seemed a bit off:

But more than most politicians Ryan has always laid claim to a mix of moral and substantive authority; more than most he has sold himself to the right’s intelligentsia and the centrist media as one of Washington’s men of principle. And both that authority and that brand are being laid waste in this campaign.

It’s true that Ryan has often presented himself this way, but it’s never been clear to me why others have accepted it. Ryan’s reputation for “moral and substantive authority” has always been overblown, and believing in it has required ignoring or explaining away a large part of his record in the House before 2011. He was a reliable vote for extremely fiscally irresponsible administration policies during the Bush years, so his “moral and substantive authority” on fiscal issues in particular was never that great. Ryan has claimed that he was “miserable” casting some of those votes, but it didn’t stop him from casting them. His turn as a post-crash debt scold marked a complete reversal from being a supporter of a new, entirely unfunded entitlement when that was what a Republican president wanted. Like many of his colleagues, Ryan has wanted credit for fiscal conservatism when his party didn’t control the White House, but was perfectly content to cast that aside under a Republican president. He is hardly alone in doing this, but that is what he’s done.

What the present campaign has done is to force many of Ryan’s fans to acknowledge that he isn’t the deeply principled wonk that they want him to be, but rather a more compromising Republican politician not so different from the rest. Ryan has backed many bad policies out of political calculation in the past, and now he is halfheartedly supporting a bad nominee out of a different calculation, but the willingness to go along with party leadership remains unchanged. No doubt his reliability as a party man is a major reason that he is in the Speaker’s office now, but there should never have been any illusions about how he got there. That is nothing to boast about, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Ryan’s record. If anyone was expecting “a steeliness in the face of challenges and threats and foes” from Ryan, I can only assume that he forgot the first decade of Ryan’s political career.

Jeremy Shapiro and Richard Sokolsky think Clinton won’t be as hawkish as president as many expect her to be. Their argument isn’t persuasive, and this strikes me as its weakest part:

The most important reason that a President Hillary Clinton is unlikely to have a hawkish foreign policy is that she will no longer be a senator, or the secretary of state, or a presidential candidate. She will be president. And that means that her priorities will be very different.

Presidents with less hawkish records than Clinton have ended up launching new wars and intervening in foreign conflicts far more often than their campaign rhetoric would have suggested. Bush campaigned on conducting a “humble” foreign policy to distinguish himself from the frequent interventions of the Clinton administration, but as president presided over the most hubristic and reckless foreign policy in decades. Obama was never as dovish as some of his fans and detractors wanted to believe, but he was supposed to be the less hawkish candidate in the primaries and the general election. Despite that, Obama has been a war president for every day he has been in office, and that includes two wars that he initiated illegally on his own authority. As a senator, Obama argued against starting wars without Congressional approval, but as president has done the very thing that he previously denounced.

The pressures and powers that come with the presidency encourage and allow a candidate to become even more hawkish once in office, and Clinton won’t be immune to those effects. More to the point, she won’t want to be immune to them. It’s not at all clear why being president would make Clinton less hawkish than she has been in other positions. There is good reason to assume that being in the office and being subjected to the endless demands to “do something” about each new conflict that comes along will exacerbate her tendency to favor more aggressive measures.

Shapiro and Sokolsky gamely try to make the case for Clinton as a supporter of diplomatic engagement, but the evidence is not as strong as they suggest. Clinton carried out administration policy on Russia in the first term, but like most first-term policies this one was run out of the White House and she wasn’t particularly interested in pursuing better relations with Moscow. She presided over the start of negotiations with Iran, but by all accounts didn’t think they would succeed, and once she was out of office favored more coercive measures to impose additional pressure on Iran that likely would have derailed negotiations if new sanctions had been put in place. Most of the time, Clinton tends to be the one arguing against accommodation and negotiation and in favor of using coercion. When she was running against Obama 2008, she derided his interest in diplomatic engagement as proof of his naivete, and I suspect that contempt for making the effort to engage pariah and rival states remains. More often than not, her preferred approach involves threatening or using force. Shapiro and Sokolsky tout her enthusiasm for “smart power,” but neglect to mention that she thinks the Libyan war was “smart power at its best.”

There will also be unexpected events over the next four years, and a candidate who believes in the importance of American “leadership” as Clinton does isn’t going to know how to leave well enough alone. When a candidate assumes that the U.S. has both the right and responsibility to interfere all over the world (and Clinton obviously takes this for granted), we should assume that she will get the U.S. involved in crises and conflicts that have not yet begun because she thinks that’s what international “leadership” requires.

They also claim that Clinton will be constrained by public opinion to a much greater extent as president than she has been before, but that’s a questionable assumption. With the notable exception of the public backlash against the proposed bombing of Syria in 2013, recent presidents have not encountered strong opposition at the start of a new intervention. There is certainly no appetite for more interventions, but as we have seen over the last seven years there is also not much of an antiwar movement to speak of when a Democratic president is in power. I assume Clinton will launch Kosovo- or Libya-style air wars when the opportunities present themselves, and she will be quicker to take sides in foreign conflicts than her predecessor and will back the side she takes more aggressively. She probably won’t commit the U.S. to a major ground war, but then her judgment on foreign policy is reliably bad so there are no guarantees that she won’t. Based on her record, it is very difficult to imagine that she would resist demands for “action” when they inevitably come, and that is why her consistent support for each new military intervention is so worrisome.

The Saudi-led war on Yemen has now lasted over 500 days. These were some of the latest civilian casualties of the bombing campaign:

A pharmacist, Sadam al-Othari, had a firsthand look at the results of the collapse in peace talks in Yemen between the Saudi-led military coalition and Yemeni militias over the weekend when a bomb exploded outside his drugstore, killing a customer and his young son and wounding Mr. Othari.

The customer and his son were among 18 Yemeni civilians killed when coalition warplanes bombed Al Madeed marketplace in the district of Nehm, about 35 miles northeast of Sana, the capital, on Sunday, said Tamim al-Shami, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health.

“They targeted only civilians,” Mr. Othari said. “There wasn’t a single gunman or military vehicle around.”

The coalition bombing of civilian targets has unfortunately been commonplace since the intervention began in March 2015. Human rights organizations have documented numerous instances of coalition attacks on civilian targets throughout the war, and they have found evidence of the repeated use of inherently indiscriminate cluster munitions in civilian areas. All parties to the conflict are responsible for serious war crimes, but the Saudi-led coalition has caused most of the civilian deaths and it is also responsible for the crippling blockade that continues to starve Yemen of basic necessities.

Half of the country’s population–approximately 14 million people–is on the verge of famine or suffering from extreme food insecurity. Three million people are displaced from their homes, thousands have been killed, and tens of thousands injured. The health care system has been wrecked and overwhelmed, and the country’s infrastructure has been devastated. Yemen is listed by the U.N. as one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world today, and in terms of the sheer number of lives at risk of starvation I think it is fair to say that it is the most severe in the entire world. Even if the fighting stopped immediately (and it obviously won’t), Yemen will be recovering from this war for decades. To make matters worse, the Saudi-led intervention wasn’t necessary for the security of the coalition states, but has been a reckless, irresponsible war of choice from the start. This is what the U.S. has enabled with its military support and diplomatic cover.

The U.S. has not been a bystander in all of this, but has been an active participant by providing weapons, refueling, and intelligence to the Saudi-led coalition from the beginning. U.S. support for the war has not diminished at all in response to evidence of war crimes committed by the Saudis and their allies, but on the contrary has increased in 2016. U.S. support for the war has also extended to aiding the Saudis in their efforts to cover up the coalition’s crimes at the U.N. Last fall, the U.S. sided with the Saudis as they squashed a proposal for an independent investigation into crimes committed by all sides, and instead backed a Saudi proposal to have the Yemeni government they support to conduct the investigation. Samuel Oakford has written an important article on Saudi efforts to stymie international scrutiny of their war with the help of U.S. and other Western governments, and remarks on the U.S. role here:

Using their oil wealth as a weapon—and tacitly encouraged by their most powerful ally, Washington, which has supplied Riyadh with targeting assistance, logistical support and daily aerial refueling of coalition jets in Yemen—the Saudis have refused to moderate their stance. “The U.S. silence has been deafening in the face of aggressive Saudi bullying to prevent the U.N. from condemning a horrendously abusive military campaign that has killed and maimed hundreds of children,” said Philippe Bolopion, deputy director for global advocacy and former U.N. director at Human Rights Watch.

The Obama administration’s backing for this atrocious war has been unstinting, and it has never made any serious public criticism of the coalition’s conduct in Yemen, but I doubt most Americans are even aware of the U.S. role in the conflict. Adam Baron remarked on this earlier today:

US is currently engaged in two wars (1-against AQAP 2-as part of anti-Houthi coalition) in Yemen. How many Americans are even aware of this?

— Adam Baron (@adammbaron) August 9, 2016

Very few would know much about this, and that isn’t all that surprising when we consider how little attention the conflict has received in media coverage. One of the reasons why I keep writing about the war and emphasizing the U.S. role in it is that both have mostly been ignored for the last sixteen months. There is almost no one in Washington talking about U.S. involvement there, and the conflict has never been touched on in any presidential debate throughout our very long election season.

The Democratic ticket is all in favor of U.S. support for the Saudis and their allies, and there is no reason to think that the Republican ticket disagrees. Tim Kaine specifically “urged” the administration to continue providing logistical and intelligence support to the coalition on the day that the bombing began, but you would never know that from any of the stories written about him since he was named as Clinton’s running mate. With the notable and honorable exceptions of Chris Murphy and Rand Paul, almost no one in elected office has objected to what the U.S. is helping the Saudis and their allies to do to Yemen.

All of that neglect and indifference have suited the administration just fine. The only way that administration officials can defend U.S. involvement is to recycle Saudi propaganda or blatantly lie about how the war started, and so they mostly avoid saying anything about it. The Saudi-led war on Yemen is indefensible, and even its enablers in Washington must know that by now.

Tim Kaine isn’t giving up on his demand for a new authorization for the war on ISIS:

Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine said he didn’t believe the U.S. had legal authority to carry out airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Libya this week, underscoring differences over the issue with his running mate, Hillary Clinton.

Kaine has been one of the few members of Congress to challenge the administration line that the 2001 AUMF gives the president the authority to bomb ISIS targets. His criticism of the administration’s specious legal arguments has distinguished him from the vast majority of his colleagues, who either don’t take Congressional responsibilities seriously or share the overly broad view of executive power that Obama holds. Congress has been delinquent in its constitutional duties regarding this war for two years, and I doubt that will change anytime soon, but Kaine deserves credit for continuing to draw attention to Congress’ failure and the illegality of the war on ISIS.

Daniel DePetris comments on the implications of allowing presidents to initiate wars on their own:

The net result is that the president ignores the law, and Congress refuses to hold him accountable to it. The lethargy of inaction has effectively amended the Constitution so that Congressional approval is no longer required for war and peace decisions. It now resides exclusively in the hands of a single individual: the president.

The very thin silver lining of having Kaine on the Democratic ticket is that one of the top members of the next administration might be committed to challenging this drift towards unchecked presidential warmaking, but with Clinton as president it seems unlikely that these concerns would be taken seriously. While it is interesting that Kaine hasn’t stopped talking about this issue, he is still just the vice presidential nominee and won’t be the one making decisions in a Democratic administration. Clinton will be happy to abuse the 2001 AUMF just as Obama has to expand the war on ISIS to three countries (and counting), and she will do so knowing that one of the few critics of this practice won’t be in the Senate to complain about it any longer.

The debate over legal authorization obscures the fact that there still has never been a meaningful debate over the merits of the policy (or lack thereof). Virtually no one in Congress opposes the ever-expanding war on ISIS, and yet it is a prime example of an avoidable war of choice. There is little doubt that if Congress did vote on a new resolution that they would overwhelmingly approve a war that they have tacitly accepted for years, but it remains as unclear today as it was two years ago how the war makes the U.S. or its allies more secure.