On ISIS AUMF, Washington Post Strikes Out

On ISIS AUMF, Washington Post Strikes Out

The 2001 and 2002 AUMFs, which granted the president broad, if not unlimited, authority to wage war, are an aberration, not the rule.

Although it took over four months for the U.S. Congress to act, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee finally did their due diligence during the last week of the 113th Congress, passing an ISIL-specific authorization for the use of military force along a strict 10-8 party-line vote.  The resolution reported out of the committee—which establishes a 3-year time limit for President Obama and his successor to conduct combat operations against the terrorist group—is dead in the water and could possibly be replaced by a new authorization this month, now that Republicans are in full control of the Senate.

There is a lot to critique in the resolution, including whether it provides the commander-in-chief with enough resources and flexibility to take on ISIL.  U.S. ground troops, for instance, are prohibited except for very narrow missions and circumstances, such as the rescue of U.S. personnel, the collection of intelligence, “enabling kinetic strikes,” and presumably spotting U.S. airstrikes on ISIL targets.

Yet, like all legislation produced by a divided government, the AUMF is a compromise between Republicans like Senators John McCain and Marco Rubio who want virtually unlimited authority for the Commander-in-Chief, and Democrats like Robert Menendez and Tim Kaine who fear another open-ended resolution similar to the 2001 authorization against al-Qaeda.

The Washington Post editorial board is one of those entities complaining about the Foreign Relations Committee’s final product, and the paper is casting its lot with the McCain/Rubio camp.  Before rightly admonishing congressional Republicans and the Obama administration for battling each other over who should make the first move, last month’s editorial openly questions whether the Foreign Relations Committee tied the president’s hands behind his back.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), one of the few in Congress to push hard for an authorizing vote, argues that if U.S. troops were needed to head off an attack on the United States — the circumstance Mr. Obama has cited that would alter his own opposition to combat forces — the president could act under his constitutional authority. That dodges the more simple and sensible conclusion that Congress’s role is to authorize wars and their aims, not micromanage how they are waged.”

Hawkish Republicans would no doubt agree with this conclusion, particularly when the enemy that the United States is fighting has no compunction of rounding up and executing hundreds of people and selling young girls as sex slaves.  Yet, with that fact aside, is The Post accurate when they argue that Congress should simply authorize war, and not micromanage its conduct?  Contemporary history would suggest that it’s not: the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs, which essentially granted the president broad, if not unlimited, authority to wage an armed conflict are an aberration, not the rule.

Below is a short list of AUMFs that Congress has drafted and passed over the past thirty years.  Some were signed into law by the president at the time, others were passed through committee but not taken up by the full House and Senate, and another (in the case of Somalia in 1993) was passed by both houses of Congress but not signed into law.  As you will see, each of these authorizations contains conditions, restrictions, and limits on the president’s use of force, including how long force can be used and what the president can and cannot do with U.S. ground troops.  Congress, in other words, considers “micromanaging” part of the job description.

- Multinational Force in Lebanon Resolution (October 12, 1983): Acting under its Article I, Section 8 powers, Congress passed this resolution in order to authorize continued U.S. military involvement in the Multinational Force in Lebanon, which at the time was attempting to hold the tiny, coastal Arab country together amidst a raging ethnic and sectarian civil war.  Under the resolution, however, U.S. soldiers on Lebanese soil were prohibited from going beyond the peacekeeping and stabilization role requested by the Government of Lebanon.  And, like the 3-year timetable that the Foreign Relations Committee included in the ISIL AUMF last month—which The Post so vehemently disagrees with—the 1983 resolution cuts off U.S. involvement in Lebanon after 18 months.  Like all time restrictions, the 18-month provision assured that Congress would have the power to evaluate whether more U.S. involvement was required to complete the mission or whether the strategy needed to change in order to accomplish the objective.

- Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (January 14, 1991): The resolution that kicked off Operation Desert Storm, signed by President George H.W. Bush 48 hours before major coalition operations against Saddam Hussein began, was only two pages long.  But even this resolution placed limitations on the commander-in-chief:

The President is authorized, subject to subsection (b), to use United States Armed Forces pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 (1990) in order to achieve implementation of Security Council Resolutions 660, 661, 662, 664, 665, 666, 667, 669, 670, 674, and 677.”

In other words, President Bush was permitted to use the U.S. military to achieve a single, overarching objective: driving the Iraqi army out of Kuwait.  Anything beyond that narrow objective, such as overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s regime, was theoretically out of bounds.  Fortunately for Bush 41, regime change in Iraq was not in the cards.

- Authorization for the Use of United States Armed Forces in Somalia (1993): In the midst of a U.S.-led UN humanitarian aid mission in a chaotic Somalia, the Senate and House provided President Bill Clinton with the statutory authority to continue using U.S. military forces inside the country.  By the time the full Congress passed the document, however, President Clinton was already well on his way to withdrawing all U.S. troops from Somalia, which eventually occurred in March 1994.

-Authorization for the Use of United States Armed Forces in Support of the NATO Mission in Libya (June 21, 2011): On March 28, 2011, President Obama spoke to the American people in a prime-time address in an attempt to explain why he decided to deploy U.S. air power against Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi.  Obama framed his decision as a tough but morally sound choice to stave off a massacre in the city of Benghazi.  “We knew that if we…waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world,” Obama said in his address.  “It was not in our national interest to let that happen.  I refused to let that happen.”

Many in Congress, however, were upset about the Obama administration’s unwillingness to seek clear-cut statutory authorization.  Speaker John Boehner pushed through a House resolution condemning Obama’s sidestepping of Congress on the issue, which called the president’s campaign in Libya “unauthorized,” a sharp rebuke to the executive branch and a strong defense from the House of its congressional powers under Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution.  

Three weeks after Boehner’s resolution passed, Senator John Kerry—who at that time served as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—tried his best to codify the U.S. military mission in Libya into law.  The authorization cleared the committee, and if the full Senate ever took it up, the resolution would have made the heads of The Washington Post’s editorial board spin.  The president’s authority would have expired after one year and the resolution would have expressly oppose the deployment of U.S. armed forces inside Libya for any purposes other than rescuing U.S. or NATO personnel.   

-Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against the Government of Syria To Respond to Use of Chemical Weapons (September 6, 2013): President Obama’s policy on Syria has since been associated with the infamous red-line fiasco, but it’s important to note that before the White House backed down from striking the Assad regime in favor of a diplomatic settlement, Obama was serious enough about using military force to ask Congress for an authorization.  On August 31, 2013, Obama read a statement in the Rose Garden formally asking Congress to debate and approve the use of U.S. military force inside Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons attack on civilians outside of Damascus.  The Senate Foreign Relations Committee got to work immediately on the request, hammering out a resolution that is perhaps one of the most restrictive in the entire history of the AUMF process.

The president, according to the resolution, is authorized to use U.S. armed forces “in a limited and specified manner against legitimate military targets in Syria.”  That language is highly conditional and tailored to what the Foreign Relations Committee hoped would be a quick, multi-day military operation.  The language gets even more detailed, however, when you factor in other conditions: U.S. force is not to weaken the Assad regime, but to respond to Syria’s employment of chemical weapons.  The authorization also banned U.S. ground troops for combat operations, and would have expired after a total of 90 days, when the president would either have to stop operations altogether or come back to Congress and ask for an extension.

Why make a big deal over a resolution that will most likely be ignored and replaced by the new Republican-led Foreign Relations Committee?  Well, it’s simple: if we don’t understand how AUMFs have been constructed in the past, we won’t be able to evaluate whether Congress and the White House are playing their respective roles under the constitution.  The Washington Post would prefer that Congress simply authorize military force and get out of the way.  History, however, would beg to differ.

Daniel R. DePetris is an analyst at Wikistrat, Inc., a geostrategicconsulting firm, and a freelance researcher. He has also written for CNN.com, Small Wars Journal and The Diplomat. You can follow him on Twitter: @DanDePetris.

Image: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza