{"id":5216,"date":"2015-11-04T22:25:34","date_gmt":"2015-11-04T22:25:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=5216"},"modified":"2015-11-04T22:25:34","modified_gmt":"2015-11-04T22:25:34","slug":"more-mission-creep-illegal-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2015\/11\/more-mission-creep-illegal-war\/","title":{"rendered":"More Mission Creep in an Illegal War – Article by Gene Healy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"The<\/a>Gene Healy
\n<\/big><\/big><\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
November 4, 2015<\/span>
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******************************<\/div>\n
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In the 15 months since the president unilaterally launched our latest war in the Middle East, he\u2019s repeatedly pledged<\/a> that he wouldn\u2019t put U.S. \u201cboots on the ground\u201d in Syria. As he told congressional leaders on September 3, 2014, \u201cthe military plan that has been developed\u201d is limited, and doesn\u2019t require ground forces.<\/p>\n

Alas, if you liked that plan, you can\u2019t keep it.\u00a0Earlier today, the Obama administration announced the deployment of U.S. Special Forces to Northern Syria<\/a> to assist Kurdish troops in the fight against ISIS. U.S. forces will number \u201cfewer than 50,\u201d in an \u201cadvise and assist\u201d capacity; they \u201cdo not have a combat mission,\u201d according to White House press secretary Josh Earnest. Granted, when \u201cadvise and assist\u201d missions look like this<\/a>, it can be hard for us civilians to tell the difference.<\/p>\n

Asked about the legal authorization for the deployment,\u00a0Earnest insisted<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cCongress in 2001 did give the executive branch the authority to take this action. There\u2019s no debating that.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that there hasn\u2019t been anything resembling a genuine congressional debate<\/a> over America\u2019s war against ISIS. But the administration\u2019s legal claim is eminently debatable. It\u2019s based on the 2001 authorization<\/a> for the use of military force, or AUMF, the Congress passed\u00a0three days after 9\/11, targeting those who \u201cplanned, authorized, [or] committed\u201d the attacks (Al Qaeda) and those who \u201caided\u201d or \u201charbored\u201d them (the Taliban).<\/p>\n

In 2013, Obama administration officials told the Washington Post<\/em> that they were \u201cincreasingly concerned the law is being stretched to its legal breaking point.<\/a>\u201d That was before they\u2019d stretched it still further, 15 months later, to justify war against ISIS, a group that\u2019s been denounced and excommunicated by Al Qaeda<\/a> and is engaged in open warfare with them.\u00a0Headlines like \u201cISIS Beheads Leader of Al Qaeda Offshoot Nusra Front<\/a>,\u201d or \u201cPetraeus: Use Al Qaeda Fighters to Beat ISIS\u201d<\/a>\u00a0might give you cause to wonder\u2013or even debate!\u2013whether this is the same enemy Congress authorized President Bush to wage war against, back before Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPod<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the Obama theory of constitutional war powers, Congress gets a vote, but it\u2019s one Congress, one vote, one time. This is not how constitutional democracies are supposed to go to war. But it\u2019s how we\u2019ve drifted into a war that the Army chief of staff has said will last \u201c10 to 20 years.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Sooner or later, we\u2019ll have cause to regret the normalization of perpetual presidential war, but any congressional debate we get will occur only after the damage has already been done.<\/p>\n

Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute. His research interests include executive power and the role of the presidency, as well as federalism and overcriminalization. He is the author of False Idol: Barack Obama and the Continuing Cult of the Presidency<\/em>; The Cult of the Presidency: America\u2019s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power<\/em>; and editor of Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Healy has appeared on PBS\u2019s Newshour with Jim Lehrer<\/em> and NPR\u2019s Talk of the Nation,<\/em> and his work has been published in the Los Angeles Times,<\/em> the New York Times, <\/em>the Chicago Tribune,<\/em> the Legal Times, <\/em>and elsewhere.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Healy holds a BA from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This work by Cato Institute<\/a> is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gene Healy November 4, 2015 ****************************** In the 15 months since the president unilaterally launched our latest war in the Middle East, he\u2019s repeatedly pledged that he wouldn\u2019t put U.S. \u201cboots on the ground\u201d in Syria. As he told congressional leaders on September 3, 2014, \u201cthe military plan that has been developed\u201d is limited, and doesn\u2019t require ground forces. Alas, if you liked that plan, you can\u2019t keep it.\u00a0Earlier today, the Obama administration announced the deployment of U.S. Special Forces…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4388,76,444,4387,49,4386,3046,4389,62,937,4339,2224,25,43],"class_list":["post-5216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-al-qaeda","tag-barack-obama","tag-congress","tag-constitutional-war-powers","tag-foreign-policy","tag-gene-healy","tag-isis","tag-national-security","tag-peace","tag-syria","tag-syrian-revolution","tag-taliban","tag-united-states","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5217,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5216\/revisions\/5217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}