Last week, 19 years after its original enactment, the House overwhelmingly voted on a bipartisan basis to repeal the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force.
President Joe Biden voted for the 2002 AUMF before it was signed by President George W. Bush. It originally permitted the invasion of Iraq, but its broad language has been cited again and again to justify U.S. military action.
In fact, this AUMF and its 2001 sister authorization have been the gifts that keep on giving. They have justified every U.S. military adventure from Libya to Pakistan and from Syria to Somalia. Beginning with the actions of terrorists now long dead, these acts have been used to put U.S. troops in harm’s way for reasons that have little to do with the original attacks on the American homeland.
The wars of the 21st century have, over time, demonstrated their futility. As of 2021, U.S. involvement is a classic illustration of the fallacy of sunk costs.
After the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s government in 2003, a large U.S. military presence was maintained in Iraq far too long on the dubious theory terrorists could be lured into battle wherever Americans are deployed.
In the name of these AUMFs, presidents such as Bush and Barack Obama destabilized foreign governments. They committed the peoples of entire regions of the world to a hellish fate, giving up many American lives and trillions of dollars in the process.
This year, as the United States quits the longest war in its history, the Afghan War, it is time to take stock of what went right and what went wrong with our reaction to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
It was appropriate at that time to attack the government hosting the perpetrators. But decades on, al Qaeda has been smothered and subsumed by entirely new and different terrorist threats. Meanwhile, the old form of Islamic terrorism has taken a back seat to the former Islamic State and the nuclear threat of Shiite Iran. And all of these threats have been trumped by the aggressive, totalitarian, global threat posed by actual nuclear power, the People’s Republic of China, and Russia, an annoyingly aggressive former superpower now dwelling in its national demographic twilight.
If Congress wants to wage further war, it should be forced to find real justifications, not the original and by now obviously obsolete congressional resolutions that authorized force at the turn of the century.
It is long past time to repeal both authorizations. The House began the process with its vote last week. The Senate should follow through by passing the bipartisan resolution proposed by Sens. Tim Kaine of Virginia and Todd Young of Indiana.
