The AUMF: Stop the bickering and get it done

The U.S. Armed Forces have been deeply engaged in the battle against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant for the past five months.  The U.S. Air Force has single-handedly destroyed thousands of ISIL targets in Syria and Iraq, helped Iraqi peshmerga and Iraqi Government forces retake critical terrain that was lost during the summer, and have kept ISIL leaders and foot-soldiers alike on their toes.  Yet, five months into the conflict, President Barack Obama continues to rely on the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for the Use of Military Force as the statutory foundation for U.S. involvement.

No one disputes that the nihilism of the Islamic State needs to be confronted, degraded, and defeated, as President Obama has repeatedly stated since air operations began last August.  There is also no dispute that U.S. military force must be an integral component of that strategy: bombing the smithereens out of ISIL is a bipartisan policy that Republicans and Democrats can support, and rightly so.  But there is a fundamental disagreement on whether a new AUMF is needed. 

{mosads}Five months in, the majority of lawmakers on Capitol Hill have come to the conclusion that new statutory authority is, in fact, needed.  Even the White House, which once batted away a new AUMF as an unnecessary and time-consuming endeavor, has come around to the belief that Congress needs to pass a new authorization geared specifically to the fight against ISIL.  As the president himself said during the State of the Union Address last Tuesday, “I call on this Congress to show the world that we are united in this mission by passing a resolution to authorize the use of force against ISIL.  We need that authority.”

So, if both a Democratic president and a Republican Congress can agree that a freshly drafted AUMF is now a necessity, what is taking so long to write one?  Why is the process still languishing, five months after senators from both parties first brought the subject up?

Inevitably and understandably, part of the delay is substance.  What should and should not be included in a new ISIL-specific AUMF is a bone of contention that not only divides Democrats from Republicans, but Democrats from Democrats and Republicans from Republicans.  Before the U.S. Senate left town for the holiday recess last December, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee attempted to kick off the debate by passing an AUMF draft.  That resolution, drafted by then-Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), passed along partisan lines due to strong opposition from Republicans on the 3-year time constraint for the authorization.  It also came so late in the session that the resolution had zero chance of being debated in both houses of Congress.

It is not just substance that is causing unneeded delay.  There is something far more sinister at play here: a failure from the White House and the Congress to do the job that they were elected to do.  Discussions over an AUMF are being dragged out because people on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, from both parties, have been unwilling to make the first move.  

Considering that the decision to launch a war is the biggest decision that Congress and a president can make, this is disturbing.  Indeed, the back-and-forth between lawmakers and the Obama administration over who should start the debate or who should write the first draft has gotten so bad that it has overshadowed what should be the main question: how should the AUMF be written, how long should the authority last, and should the use of U.S. ground troops be an option.

Instead, Americans get complaints from members of Congress, including Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), that Obama is failing to send over a draft sketching out what he would like in an any authorization.  And Obama returns those complaints with complaints of his own: if Congress wants to authorize the air war, he argues, then it should pass something.

It’s time for both the president and members of Congress to stop the bickering over who is responsible.  Either the president should send over a draft to Congress by the end of this month, or the peoples’ representatives should be proactive and write something on their own.

Get it done.

DePetris is a Middle East analyst for Wikistrat, Inc., a geostrategic consulting firm, and a contributor to The National Interest.  The views expressed in this article are his alone and do not represent the views of any organization.