Senator Rand Paul is to be commended for forcing his colleagues to address the endless wars in the Middle East and proposing that they sunset the 2001 and 2002 AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force). This past week, Senator Paul incisively observed in multiple addresses before the Senate body that lawmakers have not debated the topic of war for sixteen years, despite the fact the US constitution vests the war powers of the United States of America not in the president but in the US Congress, the legislative, not the executive branch of government. The Congress may have granted the president to take the nation to war in the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, but they never explicitly authorized five of the seven wars currently underway.
The 2002 AUMF, which passed in October 2002 and opened the way to a war waged on the false pretense of non-existent WMD (weapons of mass destruction) and an equally nonexistent connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, specifically granted the US president the liberty to take the United States to war in Iraq. Being country specific, the 2002 AUMF cannot be reasonably interpreted to provide authorization for the ongoing US military missions in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Pakistan. (Not to mention Nigeria or Cameroon, where US drones hover and Special Forces “advise” as well.)
One might with good reason wonder whether any AUMF should not be specific to the president to whom it was granted, but President Barack Obama repeatedly insisted that the 2001 AUMF provided him with all the authorization he needed to lob missiles where and when he pleased. It was in fact the primary basis for his expansion of the war on terror to include the use of lethal drones, or unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), to kill persons suspected of terrorism anywhere on the planet. Here is the text of the 2001 AUMF resolution:
The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
This Authorization of Military Force grants the executive the power to pursue anyone associated in anyway with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It does not, however, authorize the killing of persons who were small children or, in some cases, not even born at that time. Nonetheless, given how they have been used, the two AUMFs have proven to be tantamount to the relinquishment by lawmakers of any responsibility or duty to decide when and whether the United States should take the extreme measure of warfare, perpetrating acts of state homicide against persons located abroad. Throughout the Obama presidency, from 2009 through 2016, the 2001 AUMF was repeatedly invoked by the administration in defense of its expansion of the war on terror to include the virtually nonstop bombing of several countries and the erection of drone bases in support of a full-fledged drone killing machine used to eliminate thousands of suspects throughout the Middle East and Africa.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were of course started by the Bush administration, but Obama, despite having campaigned on the promise to end the “stupid” war in Iraq, presumed the validity of the AUMF granted to his predecessor as he stepped up the killing of terrorist suspects in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and carried out mass bombing in both Libya and Syria. Obama’s use of military force in Libya in 2011—which he remarkably claimed was not an act of war and therefore did not require congressional approval—effected a regime change no less than had Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
It has been obvious for some time that Obama’s primary legacy would be his ill-fated decision to normalize assassination by drone—rebranding it as an act of war, even outside areas of active hostilities—and opting to kill nearly all terrorist suspects identified as such in the Middle East, rather than throw them into Guantánamo Bay prison, which he promised to close but never did. The practices at GITMO and other prisons (including Abu Ghraib and Bagram) involved atrocious violations of human rights against the mostly innocent suspects, who found themselves in a Kafkaesque, justice-less labyrinth, but surely summary execution by drone of innocent men such as Shaker Aamer would have been even worse. Forty-one of the early GITMO detainees remain locked up without charges today, despite having been cleared for release years ago in some cases. Declining to add further detainees to the tally, Barack Obama opted instead to execute thousands of suspects never indicted or tried with any crimes and identified as suspects using the very same tools used to round up the detainees under Bush: HUMINT, or human intelligence (provided by bribed informants), and SIGINT, or signals intelligence (video footage from drones and metadata derived from cellphone and SIM card analysis).
How are we now, in 2017, to understand what has transmogrified into the perpetual motion US war machine, encompassing not only recognizable acts of war against armed combatants but also acts of assassination against persons outside areas of active hostilities who are not armed and therefore not threatening anyone with harm at the time of their incineration by missile in their own civil societies? Something did change since September 11, 2001, but something even more dramatic took place with the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
For Obama was granted an unprecedented amount of interpretive charity by leftists, who wished for various reasons to give him the benefit of the doubt. At the same time, Obama managed to avoid criticism also from many on the right, perhaps because he surprised them with his willingness to kill rather than capture Osama bin Laden in 2011 and proved to be much friendlier toward the military industrial complex (MIC) than anyone might ever have imagined from the eloquent antiwar rhetoric of his 2008 election campaign.
It seems fair to say that Obama’s normalization of assassination by drone was a gift to everyone involved in the killing machine, including the firms privately contracted to produce the analysis used to construct kill lists, such as The Analysis Corporation, whose former president and CEO was none other than John Brennan himself, whom Obama promoted to be the director of the CIA in 2013. Of course the companies who produce the drones and the missiles launched from them against suspects have also been enriched enormously by Obama’s embracement of the drone as a primary counterterrorism tool.
But Obama’s war-friendly policies did not stop with the drone killing machine. Instead, the assassination industry proved to be his first step onto a rather slippery slope, leading ultimately to the mass bombing of seven different countries simultaneously, only two of which, Afghanistan and Iraq, were wars instigated by George W. Bush. Under Obama’s authority (again, he presumed with no effective protest from Congress the validity of the AUMF), more than 25K US bombs were dropped on the Middle East in 2015, and more than 26K in 2016.
In 2012, Obama exported record numbers of weapons to the government of Saudi Arabia, which proceeded to prosecute a horrific war in Yemen, still underway to this day, and has been further aided and abetted by the United States through refuelling and help with analysis. The tons of US weapons furnished to the Saudis have been used to devastate large swaths of Yemen, directly causing a humanitarian crisis including both mass starvation and a cholera epidemic. Interestingly enough, in early 2017, some leftists finally began to complain about US weapons exports when they saw that Trump was selling billions of dollars of weapons to the Saudis. Yet the deals he oversaw had been in the works under Obama and likely would have received little criticism from Democrats, had they been completed during his presidency.
This brings us, at last, to a vexing question:
Predictably enough, the Senators called to vote on the possibility of debate over the AUMFs rallied to keep the perpetual motion war machine up and running with no pause for reflection about such questions as:
- Is the war in Afghanistan winnable? What would victory look like?
- Why are US soldiers still being killed in Iraq? Isn’t it time to let Iraq determine its own destiny?
- Why is the US government aiding and abetting a vicious civil war in Yemen? What is our national interest in that conflict supposed to be?
- Should we not reflect upon and learn from the consequences of disastrous intervention in Libya in 2011? Does it make any sense to repeat the same mistake in Syria?
- Why are there more radical jihadist terrorists, including the ISIS franchise in both Syria and Iraq, than there were in 2001?
In fact, the list of debate questions could go on and on. But instead of addressing these pressing matters of national security, the Senate once again kicked the can down the road, evading responsibility for whatever the president may do by letting him do whatever he wants. I am puzzled, however, as should anyone who has been watching the news since November 2016. I still cannot help wondering what in the world could motivate a group of Democratic senators, who claim vehemently to oppose the Trump agenda, to grant him unlimited, essentially monarchic, war powers.
Perhaps the senators who voted to table Senator Rand’s resolution are on the take. Some Democratic senators, like many of their Republican colleagues, may receive hefty campaign funding from one or more of the many tentacles of the MIC, which in the 21st century has become the military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics complex. Many parties today stand to profit from US government-inflicted homicide abroad, so the answer to my question may be as simple as that. In states whose economic well-being derives from companies with military contracts and subcontracts, senators may also fear that they will be electorally ousted if they do not unequivocally support war at every turn.
There is another possibility. Perhaps by acknowledging that the AUMFs of 2001 and 2002 do not provide the needed authorization for five of the seven wars currently underway, the Democratic senators fear that they would be admitting, too, that Barack Obama prosecuted illegal wars and assassinated suspects in violation, not only of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Charter, but also the US constitution. Perhaps the decision to side with most Republicans against Senator Paul and in favor of the assumption of monarchic war powers on the part of the president, was their latest unfortunate effort to give Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt. For to deny that Trump has the right and authority to bomb Yemen, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, and Somalia, would be to assert that Obama also lacked that right and authority. Would such an admission not immediately open Obama to charges of having committed war crimes?
Whether any of these ideas surfaced to consciousness as the thirteen Democratic senators cast their vote, it cannot be denied that Barack Obama has ended up bestowing upon President Trump the gift that keeps on giving: unlimited, endless, monarchic war powers. Bravo.
Maybe I am overthinking all of this. Perhaps the thirteen Democratic senators who voted not to sunset the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs in six months so that Congress could properly debate the seven wars underway—plus whatever wars the Trump administration may decide to add to the list—North Korea, Iran, Venezuela,… the sky is the limit!—did so for the simple reason that they do not believe the anti-Trump media. They do not believe that Trump is Hitler, as antifas have been screaming since the election. They do not believe that Trump is a Russian agent, a theory which Rachel Maddow of MSNBC appears to continue to embrace. They do not believe that Trump is unhinged and ultimately unfit to be the president of the United States. In fact, if actions betray beliefs, then these Democratic senators truly believe that, far from needing to be impeached, Trump should be King!
Whatever their contorted and possibly incoherent rationalizations may have been, the Democratic senators who voted to table Senator Paul’s resolution are simple cowards who doubtless believe that they will escape blame in the event of foreign policy catastrophes authorized not by them but by the president. That certainly seems like a sound explanation for Republican Senator Marco Rubio’s abstention. But if these senators’ vote (or refusal to vote) was a simple matter of shirking responsibility, I am afraid that those who abstained, and the thirteen Democrats who sided with Republicans to defeat Senator Paul’s resolution, are all dead wrong. Refusing to debate war, a Congressional responsibility written into the US Constitution, is the same as tacit assent. The senators who effectively agreed to leave the AUMFs in place will now be directly responsible for every dead US soldier henceforth, and for every terrorist attack instigated in retaliation to US war crimes abroad.
The Vote Breakdown on the Motion to Table Senator Rand’s Amendment
YEAs —61: These senators voted to table Senator Paul’s amendment, in other words, not to debate the AUMFs during a six-month period before they would expire without positive Congressional action Alexander (R-TN) Barrasso (R-WY) Blunt (R-MO) Boozman (R-AR) Burr (R-NC) Capito (R-WV)
Carper (D-DE)
Casey (D-PA) Cassidy (R-LA) Cochran (R-MS) Collins (R-ME) Corker (R-TN) Cornyn (R-TX)
Cortez Masto (D-NV)
Cotton (R-AR) Crapo (R-ID) Cruz (R-TX) Daines (R-MT)
Donnelly (D-IN)
Enzi (R-WY) Ernst (R-IA) Fischer (R-NE) Flake (R-AZ) Gardner (R-CO) Graham (R-SC) Grassley (R-IA)
Hassan (D-NH)
Hatch (R-UT) Hoeven (R-ND) Inhofe (R-OK) Isakson (R-GA) Johnson (R-WI) Kennedy (R-LA) Lankford (R-OK)
Manchin (D-WV)
McCain (R-AZ)
McCaskill (D-MO)
McConnell (R-KY) Moran (R-KS) Murkowski (R-AK) Perdue (R-GA) Portman (R-OH)
Reed (D-RI)
Risch (R-ID) Roberts (R-KS) Rounds (R-SD) Sasse (R-NE)
Schatz (D-HI)
Scott (R-SC)
Shaheen (D-NH)
Shelby (R-AL)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Strange (R-AL) Sullivan (R-AK) Thune (R-SD) Tillis (R-NC) Toomey (R-PA)
Warner (D-VA)
Whitehouse (D-RI) Wicker (R-MS)
Young (R-IN)
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