Bill Press: A powerless Congress

For a smart people, we do some pretty dumb things. And nothing could be dumber, more risky or more uncertain, than the Obama administration’s strategy for dealing with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Somebody explain this to me: We spent several years and millions of dollars building and training the largest native fighting force the Middle East has ever seen. The Iraqi Army was 250,000 strong, equipped with all the latest and most powerful American-made weapons of war, and its one mission was to prevent Islamic jihadists like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria from creating a foothold in the region.

{mosads}And what happened? The first time they met ISIS on the battlefield, Iraqi soldiers dropped their guns and ran for the hills, handing all that expensive weaponry to the enemy without a fight. Yet now, we’re about to spend millions more retraining and rearming that same Iraqi military. Why do we think it’s going to turn out any better the second time around? 

That’s just one of four legs of the president’s proposed strategy. He’s also counting on a new, unified Iraqi government, which is barely two weeks old; on ground forces from regional allies Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, which have never stepped up to the plate before, for fear of alienating other Arab nations; and on arming and training the moderate Syrian opposition, which we’ve been counting on for the last three years inside Syria — with no results. 

Each of those four legs is iffy, which can only mean the entire strategy’s iffy. But what’s most troubling is that Congress is sitting there and letting President Obama launch another ground war in the Middle East, no matter how just or necessary, without first obtaining congressional authorization. And let’s not play word games: if American pilots are bombing military targets from the air, and American special forces are directing airstrikes from the ground while assisting Iraqi and Syrian military units, this is not a “police action” or “counter-terrorism operation.” This is war.

Obama says he has no plans for seeking authorization by Congress, because he has all the power he needs to start a new war under the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001. That’s clearly debatable. But the real question is not whether the president should seek approval of Congress. The real question is: Why doesn’t Congress DEMAND that the president seek its approval? After all, it’s their job — which they haven’t exercised since World War II. 

Last week, instead of doing their job as defined by the Constitution, members of Congress went home. Before leaving town, afraid of having to take a tough vote before the midterm elections, they not only refused to debate whether to authorize Obama’s new war in the Middle East, they approved arming and training the Syrian opposition — without providing any funding to do so. It was hailed as a historic vote. But it was actually a cowardly vote. Even for a do-nothing Congress, this was the essence of “do-nothingness.”  

Press is host of “The Bill Press Show” on Free Speech TV and author of The Obama Hate Machine.