A New AUMF: Political Acrobatics, Slippery Slopes, and Endless War

Common dreams has an article outlining the Obama administration's bid for a new AUMF for their new military efforts in Iraq which they describe as a push for 'endless war.' That's the reality of the present re-involvement there - perpetual war - and given the politics that compelled this President to return to the country he withdrew all of our troops from just a short while ago, it's a sure bet that we will likely never leave Iraq without some U.S. military presence; at least in the next decade.

What this push for a new AUMF really represents is Pres. Obama's desire to shed the appearance that he's fighting Bush's wars. As his present military ambitions and actions stand, he's either bound to use Bush's AUMFs as 'authorization' for his warring in Iraq, or he's bound using his CiC authority which has limitations under the War Powers Act provisions which would trigger a time limitation and possible rejection of his mandate to continue.

It's telling that he increased his efforts to obtain a new AUMF with a majority republican Congress; undoubtedly aware that his support for perpetual warring in Iraq and opening a new front in Syria faced opposition from his own Democratic legislative caucus. To date, Obama has relied on slippery interpretations of 'boots on the ground' - characterizing special forces as 'trainers' or 'advisers' to avoid triggering a congressional responses under the WPA law. For now, he's been resigned to operate under unexpired Bush-era authorizations of force (mostly, the 2001 AUMF against al-Queda) and strained to associate the present ISIS leadership with the al-Qaeda organization they publicly split from years ago.

What a new AUMF would do for him is to release him from the political acrobatics he's had to engage in and allow him to place U.S. troops directly in harm's way without dancing around whether they are 'advisers' or any other euphemism used to obscure their direct role in the fighting he wants the U.S. to engage in.

This isn't about 'narrowing' the mission or any other limiting factor that supporters are justifying this ambition as; it's a direct appeal for an entirely new front in an obvious extension of Bush's 'pollyandish misadventure' in Iraq. It portends what this article correctly terms an 'endless' or self-perpetuating war which will never resolve itself or release the U.S. military from obligations to engage our troops or resources for any foreseeable future.

Even Obama's own leadership is insisting that this will be a 'long' endeavor, so, there's really no denying that this AUMF is intended to serve well beyond this presidency.

What proponents of this action, and their challenge to critics to formulate their own response to ISIS ignore is that U.S. military involvement in Iraq is a self-perpetuating morass which has had the effect of fueling and fostering even more individuals with the ambition of fighting our forces or our interests there than we are able to put down.

That was the sobering reality when Bush's own intelligence agencies collectively made that exact judgment during his own commitment of troops to Iraq, and it was the judgment earlier on in this present commitment of troops and resources by Obama's own intelligence agents that individuals were abandoning al-Qaeda to engage the forces he sent to Iraq.

Moreover, the U.S. has long ago forfeited any moral authority it had in Iraq with our opportunistic invasion and occupation. The expectation that a 'limited' force with 'targeted' airstrikes could resolve the civil conflict in Iraq, or anywhere else, is a myopic and ignorant disregard for the effect of Bush's deployments which, despite their number and activity, oversaw record numbers of massacres of Iraqis in spite of our massive troop presence, or in spite of any political solution we helped impose on Iraqis.

It's no accident that the leadership of ISIS includes former Baathists who our military insisted disband when we imposed our 'interim authority' headed by Chalabi, the man who lied us into Iraq. The Shiite government that we promoted and enabled into power's brutality and barbarism against the Sunni minority created the landscape for the forces we're engaged fighting today. And, so it goes. We never learn.

As Saigon became Ho Chi Min City after the U.S. bugged out, Iraq’s Baghdad was always destined to reflect the designs of those Bush had identified as our ‘enemies’ — more so than the captured, occupied, and overthrown capital city will ever resemble any of the grand designs that Bush hawked to the American people to get their initial approval to invade. It becomes more of a conundrum than anything akin to the democracy American troops are pledged to support and defend.

The Iraqi prisons became more efficient torture chambers to crush the new junta’s political opposition who they locked up indefinitely without charges or counsel. The police forces re-assumed their duty as deadly enforcers with the summary judgment of their U.S. supported violence. The military devolved into bands of death squad militias, complete with United States’ weapons and para-military training. As the Iraqi government drew closer to the main spoke of Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil,’ Iran — Iraq was set to rival any of our other purchased regimes in its brutality and oppression.

Indeed, no more evidence is needed to demonstrate U.S. responsibility in creating this latest terror group — which President Obama has opportunistically conflated with our number one nemesis, al-Qaida — than Izzat Ibrahim. A Baathist leaders in the ISIS forces, Ibrahim was deposed in the initial invasion and occupation of Iraq along with other Baathist supporters of Saddam Hussein, and has been in active warfare with the Shiite-dominated Iraqi regime ever since they were enabled into power and began using their U.S.-supplied weapons to stage barbaric attacks against the Sunni minority population.

None of that, of course, is an excuse for any of the craven, power-driven violence on either side; it’s certainly not an excuse for the senseless displays of savage terror that ISIS has used as its tactic of intimidation. Yet, to Iraqis, the violence from U.S. cluster bombs and drones — or from the U.S.-protected Iraqi regime — is virtually indistinguishable from any other attack on their population.

There is no country in the world which threatens democratic progress in Iraq more than the United States. The Iraqi regime has been under siege from resistance forces in Iraq since the U.S. first pulled out its troops — forces whose cause has been fostered, inflamed and aggravated by previous American military activity in the country.

Sadly, the calculation by Pres. Obama that he could apply a limited number of troops with a flurry of airstrikes to contain the self-perpetuating folly has our forces destroying armaments left from the last engagement, while shoveling even more into Iraq in the vain hope that more war will translate into peace.

Bush’s equation for troops in Iraq went like this: More violence = need for more troops. That’s the same equation President Obama has acquiesced to with his campaign of airstrikes and steadily escalating military presence and activity today. With that prescription, we will leave Iraq by … never. Iraq’s forces will always be challenged by some militarized resistance, even more so as they remain aligned with our aggravating military presence.

President Obama will never be able to encircle Baghdad with enough air power to crush the resistance to the U.S.-enabled Iraqi rule. The best he can hope for as he lobs missiles against what he identifies as our ‘enemy’ is an artificial prop of an unpopular junta. So why bother?

Possibly, the answer lies in the political pressure from his opponents to ‘do something.’ The chickenhawk-infested Republican majority have meshed the sacrifices of our soldiers into their ‘smear and fear’ campaigns to make themselves look like they’re the ones defending our security, and Democrats like the ones preventing us from ‘winning’ in Iraq. It’s a cynical mission, a shameful one.

What Republican critics fail to understand and acknowledge is that U.S. military activity in Iraq greatly heightened the violence instead of reducing it. It’s ludicrous to expect that more bombings, and the introduction of more weapons into Iraq will bring about any different result, no matter which Iraqis we identify and attack as enemies of our compromised and threatened junta.

Now we have a new U.S. warlord fomenting his own politically-driven violence in Iraq; mindless of the conflating consequences and blind to the legacy of perpetual war he once decried in his pushback against Bush policies to assume the presidency.

from the article:

In his opening remarks, Kerry said, "It will be years, not months, before [ISIL] is defeated."

"We’re determined to work with you, first and foremost to develop an approach that can generate broad bipartisan support, while ensuring that the President has the flexibility to successfully prosecute this effort," he said.

"We do not think an AUMF should include a geographic limitation," he said, adding that "we would not want an AUMF to constrain our ability to use appropriate force against ISIL in those locations if necessary. In our view, it would be a mistake to advertise to ISIL that there are safe havens for them outside of Iraq or Syria."

That's a bid for 'endless war,' a war hopelessly perpetuated by our own military's aggravating influence, as demonstrated by Bush's own folly. Such a stark change from what Pres. Obama said on the eve of his order to end that sad Bush war:

"What we will not do is let the pursuit of the perfect stand in the way of achievable goals. We cannot rid Iraq of all who oppose America or sympathize with our adversaries. We cannot police Iraq’s streets until they are completely safe, nor stay until Iraq’s union is perfected. We cannot sustain indefinitely a commitment that has put a strain on our military, and will cost the American people nearly a trillion dollars. America’s men and women in uniform have fought block by block, province by province, year after year..." Pres. Obama had said.

Now comes an appeal for a war without time limitation or boundaries against yet another ideological enemy. We never learn.





ron fullwood @ronfullwood