A 10-year effort to end the Iraq War

Tim Kaine: Getting the President to Vote on the War Crime in the U.S.-to-Iraq War

Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, after trying for 10 years, is on the cusp of getting Congress to repeal the authorizations that led the US into war against Iraq in the early ’90s and again in the early ‘00s.

The White House and a coalition of Democrats and Republicans back the man who is a Republican. He and Young told CNN’s Jake Tapper about their proposal on “The Lead” on Thursday.

I had more questions for Kaine – the most important of which is what repealing these authorizations would actually accomplish since both have fallen into disuse.

One of the reasons it was so carefully debated was that they were doing something intentionally very different from other nations, which had tended to make initiation of war a matter for the king, the emperor, the monarch, the executive.

The debates made a claim that the commander in chief has the right to act without Congress because of an imminent attack. Defense can always be done by the executive, but if you want to go into offensive military action, you need a congressional vote.

The reason for it was stated in the debates. The notion is you’d want to have the people’s elected representatives debate, in front of the public, whether a war was in the national interest, where you commit troops into harm’s way, where they risk life and limb.

Whigs and Federalists and then Republicans and Democrats in Congress have often deferred the power to presidents of all parties. That’s a very sloppy trend that I was intent upon trying to reverse when I came into the Senate 10 years ago.

The War Powers Resolution: George H. W. Bush and the History of the Middle East, and how the Barbary Coast pirates confronted Jefferson

WOLF: We’ve had peace treaties end wars. Technically, I suppose, the Korean War is still going on. Is this important to doing this with regard to Iraq right now?

We both think that congress needs to return the power to declare war, but also to do the same thing when a war is over.

In the case of Iraq, we declared war against the nation of Iraq first in 1991 to expel Iraq from Kuwait, and then in 2002, to topple the government of Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party.

Obviously, the Gulf War was over pretty quickly, and Iraq was expelled from Kuwait. The government of Saddam Hussein was overthrown. And so our war against Iraq is no longer ongoing.

Iraq is no longer an enemy. Iraq is now a security partner. Iraq has invited us to work with them to battle terrorism, and we are also working with them to counter the influence of Iran in the region.

If you have a war authorization that isn’t really needed, you can use it to get into trouble with Congress, which has the authority to do this.

It is possible that a president will have to return to us if there is military action needed as a result of the war being over.

George H.W Bush and George W. Bush both said something to the effect of, “thanks for passing the resolution, but I don’t actually need it.”

George H.W. Bush in 1991: “As I made clear to congressional leaders at the outset, my request for congressional support did not, and my signing this resolution does not, constitute any change in the long-standing positions of the executive branch on either the President’s constitutional authority to use the Armed Forces to defend vital U.S. interests or the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution.”

But there is a fine line sometimes between what is an action taken in defense – and presidents do have the power to defend the nation from an imminent threat, ongoing attack or an imminent threat of attack – and what is an offensive action.

This was confronted by Jefferson as president from the very beginning. The Barbary Coast pirates, who were connected to the nations of North Africa, were invading American shipping in the Mediterranean. Jefferson believed that as commander inchief, he could order his naval ships to defend themselves from these attacks.

But he then was like, well, do I want to just defend repeated attacks or would I like to send the Navy into the ports to basically destroy the ships that are attacking us? And Jefferson said, look, in that instance I need to have Congress. The line between what is defense against an imminent attack versus what is an offensive action – that can be a little subjective. It can be difficult to know.

I was highly critical of the Iraq war authorization in terms of the timing. This was brought to congress in October of 2002, right before the election.

First, I will say the Biden administration is the first presidential administration that has said we would gladly sign this. The Obama administration was unclear. The Trump administration fought it very hard and would not agree that we should repeal this authorization.

TheWOLF: The US military has not been using this authorization to justify military action since 2009. But the US military has been very active in Iraq, just with a different authorization or with the agreement of the Iraqi government.

The White House tells Congress about the military’s use of military force in the preceding year. In 2021, the unclassified version of the report lists actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Somalia. The 2001 authorization for use of military force was used to justify all of them.

The Biden administration agrees this (the 1991 and 2002 Iraq authorizations) are outdated and, as indicated, they would sign and repeal. Let’s repeal them. Then we can approach the question of narrowing and rewriting the 2001 authorization after 20-plus years.

The 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force would more narrowly specify what terrorist groups the US can and cannot attack, as well as what circumstances the US could use military action against them. I don’t have a bipartisan consensus yet but I’m still working on it.

My last goal is to change the War Powers Resolution of 1974 so that it more closely reflects the views of the two branches of congress and has a more robust consultative process between them regarding any questions on war.

What you’re doing right here with the Iraq resolutions in one way takes power away from the president, but he has vast power that we’re not even talking about. How would you fit him in?

Kaie: The 2001 authorization doesn’t clearly define the enemy. And it imposes no geographic or temporal restrictions on the war authorization. It is an absolutely open-ended, 60-word authorization.

Its definition of the enemy is still being worked out. The suggestion is that there may be a connection between the 9/11 attack and a non-state terrorist organization. You have al Qaeda. The Taliban has all these splinter groups.

It has been used against organizations that may claim an allegiance to al Qaeda but that had never engaged in any hostile activity against the United States.

I have introduced earlier versions that looked at temporal and geographic restrictions. More of a notice to Congress was required if the State Department could designate Foreign Terrorist Organizations. If the administration believes that this particular terrorist group poses threat – some opportunity for congressional engagement either to approve or disapprove, if such notice is given.

I did not pull up previous drafts on this because I was in a car. But it would basically be a tighter definition of who the group is, with more notice to Congress and temporal and geographic restrictions, and probably an AUMF that would sunset periodically unless Congress authorizes it.

Wolf, you have been working on this for a decade. It doesn’t make sense since this has not been used since you were in the Senate. Why has it taken so long? Is it inertia? Is it a fear of taking power from the president?

So having President Biden, who was on the Foreign Relations Committee for 36 years, who wants to be robust in Article 2 power but also understands Article 1 power, that’s really helpful.

That should be probably the most jealously guarded thing we do. Twenty two senators have co-sponsored this, and a number of House members have also co-sponsored it.

I would not have imagined that when I started on this. Some of this power needs to be taken back by Congress.

The Senate will vote Tuesday to repeal the congressional authorization used to justify the war in Iraq.

“Repealing this [Authorization for Use of Military Force] is a necessary step towards putting the final remnants of the Iraq War squarely behind us,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said last week after the Senate cleared a key procedural hurdle to move toward debate.

The vote is largely symbolic — combat operations in the war ended over a decade ago — but Senate supporters say it is important for Congress to reassert its constitutional power to declare and end wars.

Reauthorising the U.S. War Power in the Middle East: Sensitivity to ‘America First’ and a Reply to the Senate

There are some 2,500 U.S. forces in Iraq. NPR has learned that just last month the U.S. took part in nearly three dozen partnered raids with Iraqi counterterrorism forces against ISIS, and 200 raids last year.

Democrats are united in support of the legislation, but the debate could highlight a rift inside the Republican Party between traditional foreign policy conservatives and the small but growing force of “America First” lawmakers who are more ideologically aligned with former President Donald Trump’s non-interventionist views.

McConnell is receiving in-patient rehabilitation as he undergoes treatment for a recent fall at a Washington, D.C. hotel.

Young told reporters that it was more than just reauthorising congressional war authority, and that it was sending a message to past and future troops.

“We will not incentivize the next generation to step up and fill that necessary breach to defend our way of life so that the rest of us can sleep safely at night if they don’t regard our actions here in Washington as responsible and consistent with the desires of the American people,” he said.

“I do have a problem when trying to be able to speak in to the Middle East right now and to say, ‘We’re leaving, we’re backing away, we’re not going to be as engaged,’ when we certainly need to be,” he said. “It’s not just terrorism that we’re dealing with in the region — though that’s the dominant piece of what’s actually happening from Iran right now in their promotion of terrorism in the region — but we still have very real threats that are there.”

A similar measure passed the Democratic-led House in 2021 with bipartisan support, but it’s unclear if House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., will bring it up for a vote again. The lead Republican sponsors in the House are from Texas and Oklahoma.