US President Barack Obama’s request for congressional approval of military action against Daesh (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) ought to have been a significant national moment. The fact that it was not said a lot about this particular conflict and America’s role in it.
Some of this was a matter of optics. Presidents who want to impress Americans with the gravity of their request address the nation from the Oval Office during the evening hours, rather than making a statement at 3:30 on a weekday afternoon. More telling, however, was the White House’s blase reaction when it became clear that Congress will spend at least a month, and possibly a lot longer, debating the president’s request. The lack of urgency made it hard to avoid the conclusion that the entire debate has a lot more to do with politics than with military matters.
Under the US Constitution, Congress alone has the power to declare war. That has not actually happened since Second World War. Instead, the trend has been for the legislative branch to pass resolutions granting presidents the power to do some specific military thing.
Legislatively speaking this is not always wise. The legal framework of the entire Vietnam War rested on a Congressional resolution hastily passed in the wake of a North Vietnamese attack on a single US warship. In later years, it emerged that most of the details given to Congress were wrong and the entire incident may never have happened (even now, half a century later, the details remain fuzzy). Even if everything had happened exactly the way president Lyndon Johnson said it did to build a decade of war involving, over time, nearly three million American troops, on the back of that one incident (in which no American sailors were killed or injured) seems, to put it mildly, excessive.
The term in use today is AUMF — short for ‘Authorisation for the Use of Military Force’ — and the history of these is mixed. George H.W. Bush sought one before launching the Gulf War. When sending Nato to war over Kosovo, Bill Clinton did not. George W. Bush wrangled an AUMF from Congress ahead of his invasion of Iraq, while contending publicly that he did not need it since the resolution passed a few days after 9/11 applied to pretty much anyone he said it did.
This backstory is important as Obama confronts Daesh. The strongest bit of evidence that his request is essentially political, rather than military, is the fact that Obama also claims that he does not really need it. This is because the legislation Obama’s request repeals the 2002 resolution that authorized the Iraq War but leaves its 2001 counterpart in place.
One need be neither a Republican nor a cynic to believe that this fact makes Obama’s current request an essentially political move. Put bluntly, the president has asked Congress for permission to do something he is already doing (bombing Daesh and training its opponents), for which he claims he does not actually need their permission and which he is given no indication he will pause pending a vote or cease if that vote fails. That makes it look a lot more like an exercise in holding Congress’ feet to the fire than a serious policy-based request.
All that said, there is a counter-argument to be made. First, and foremost: Obama’s request, flawed though it is, sets a good precedent. Not only has he gone to the trouble of asking, by setting limits on the powers granted by the resolution, he is forcing himself to come back to Congress should he want to deploy significant ground troops to the Middle East.
Depending on one’s point of view, the phrase “the authority granted ... does not authorise the use of the United States Armed Forces in enduring offensive ground combat operations” is either too vague and open-ended, or too specific in tying the hands of Obama and his successor, who (in theory) will need to get the AUMF renewed in 2018 (its three-year expiration date being another first for an AUMF).
At the simplest level, the administration just wants to be able to keep bombing Daesh without worrying much about Congress. On an only slightly more subtle political level, it wants to get members of Congress — Democrats and Republicans alike — on record in support of anti-Daesh operations now, so that it will not be alone, politically, if the whole thing goes sour a year or two down the line. At some level, the high-minded ‘we-are-asking-for-permission-and-limiting-the-powers-we’re-requesting’ approach is important, but since Obama also contends that he does not really need Congressional authorisation at all, that aspect is, to put it mildly, weak.
The question over the next month (or two) is how seriously the Congress is going to take this debate. It is one thing to say that the administration is mainly seeking legislative cover for what it plans to do either way. It is another thing entirely for the legislature to give it to them without a serious discussion.
Gordon Robison, a longtime Middle East journalist and US political analyst, teaches political science at the University of Vermont.
