President Obama has sent Congress a formal request to authorize military force against the Islamic State six months after the U.S. began bombing Iraq and Syria. The resolution imposes a three-year limit on U.S. operations, but does not put any geographic constraints. It also opens the door for ground combat operations in limited circumstances. The resolution’s broad language covers military action against the Islamic State as well as “individuals and organizations fighting for, on behalf of, or alongside [ISIS] or any closely-related successor entity in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.” The resolution also leaves in place the open-ended Authorization for Use of Military Force Congress enacted one week after the Sept. 11, 2001, which has been used to justify U.S. action in Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen and beyond, and which Obama had previously called for repealing.
Norman Solomon talking:
The latest effort by Obama to get war authorization represents a sort of repetition compulsion disorder, back to the future from an administration that came in saying it was going to dispense with the concept—or at least the phraseology—of a war on terror, an administration that even today, through the president’s statement, is again asserting that it’s against endless war, and yet both the statement from the president yesterday and the resolution—and, for that matter, the White House policy—is explicitly endless, perpetual war. And that’s the kind of policy we’re getting.
Three-year limit on U.S. operations is Window dressing, just a scam, just a way to give a sort of a fig leaf to the people called antiwar Democrats or some libertarian Republicans. But it’s just a way of sort of rowing the boat with a little bit of a deference to the right and left in Congress, that what it boils down to is kicking the war can down the road—a very bloody one, to put it mildly—and absolutely running a manipulative public relations campaign.
Historically, and in the present day, there is no way to verify whatsoever. You could depend on some inflation, to put it mildly. We also heard from the president yesterday that there were 2,000 airstrikes by the United States in the region, in the Middle East, in the last six months, but we don’t know if that’s true at all. And in tandem with its war on whistleblowers and true investigative journalism, this administration is operating in overdrive as sort of a fog machine to try to keep from the American people realities of the war policy, because clearly this White House prefers the uninformed consent of the governed.
these terrible atrocities by the so-called Islamic State really provide fuel for the machinery of propaganda from the executive branch of the United States, clearly chomping at the bit to drag this country further into war. And I think it’s very symbolic that—and literally significant, as well—that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force is not being challenged or proposed for ending by this administration. So, that very open-ended authorization right after 9/11 is one that the administration is embracing and trying to ride for all it can, essentially, in search of enemies. And if there are no geographical or conceptual or state boundaries that will define this war coming out of the U.S. government, then the search for enemies is open-ended and infinite.
not only a search for enemies that’s infinite, but the creation of enemies, because this administration not only preaches against endless war while doing more than any other presidency to make endless war policy, but this administration is second to none in creating enemies of the United States around the world. And so the spin cycle, the war cycle, the destructive cycle continues.
Kofi Annan could have been much stronger in his post at the United Nations in opposing it. And frankly, there are all too many people in Washington, as well, who in retrospect say what terrible tragedies are or have unfolded, but at the time, they don’t have a whole lot of backbone, they don’t challenge the administration. And years from now, we’re going to have people who were in Congress right now who will say what a terrible tragedy yesterday’s statement and offered resolution from the Obama White House was. But right now, we’re not hearing them speaking out very strongly. And it’s incumbent on all of us to speak out and stop this despicable push towards escalation of yet more war from the Obama White House.
— source democracynow.org
Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, co-founder of RootsAction.org, and author of many books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.