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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Escalating the Illegal War in Iraq and Syria

The U.S. has deepened its involvement in Syria's civil war, and it is ludicrous for administration officials to pretend otherwise.
syria rebels

Gene Healy mocks the Obama administration’s absurd legal argument that the post-9/11 AUMF gives the president the authority to send troops into Syria:

In the Obama theory of constitutional war powers, Congress gets a vote, but it’s one Congress, one vote, one time. This is not how constitutional democracies are supposed to go to war. But it’s how we’ve drifted into a war that the Army chief of staff has said will last “10 to 20 years.” Sooner or later, we’ll have cause to regret the normalization of perpetual presidential war, but any congressional debate we get will occur only after the damage has already been done.

The White House maintains that there’s “no debating” its claim about the 2001 AUMF, but it would be more accurate to say that almost no one in Congress is prepared to challenge the president’s obviously nonsensical claim that the war on ISIS is covered by the old authorization. The administration’s legal argument is without merit, but very few members of Congress want to be bothered with pointing that out. The president continues to have no authority do what he’s been doing in the war on ISIS, but there are too many adherents of the cult of the presidency in Congress to keep him in check.

Another disturbing aspect of the decision to escalate the war is the disingenuous presentation of it by U.S. officials. Defending the president’s decision to deploy U.S. forces in Syria, Secretary Kerry offered up a typically slippery argument:

It is not a decision to enter into Syria’s civil war [bold mine-DL]. It is not an action focused on (Syrian President Bashar) Assad, it focused exclusively on Daesh [ISIS] and in augmenting our ability to rapidly attack Daesh,” Kerry told a news briefing during a visit to Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek.

Kerry talks about the Syrian civil war as if it were an entirely separate conflict from the one involving ISIS, and yet ISIS is a major belligerent in the Syrian civil war and U.S. forces will be cooperating with other belligerents in the same war. In fact, the U.S. directly entered the Syrian civil war as soon as it started dropping bombs on ISIS and Nusra targets last year, and it has been involved indirectly through its support for proxies for much longer than that. The decision to enter Syria’s civil war is one that the president made a while ago, which is why the U.S. has been waging an illegal war in Syria for months. The president’s decision means that the U.S. has deepened its involvement in Syria’s civil war, and it is ludicrous for administration officials to pretend otherwise.

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