Democratic lawmakers are pushing to finally take away the president’s blank check for war in Iraq — something that the Obama and Trump administrations had both tried to prevent.
Congress passed two authorizations for the use of military force, or AUMFs, in the wake of 9/11. The 2001 AUMF authorized war against al-Qaida, while the 2002 AUMF green-lit military action to stop “the threat posed by Iraq.” Two decades later, those laws have been stretched beyond recognition to justify dozens of military operations around the world.
The 2002 AUMF remains on the books, despite the fact that the occupation of Iraq has been over for a decade. Congress came close to repealing the law twice, only to be stopped by the Obama and Trump administrations. But the Biden administration may take a different approach.
“President Biden is committed to working with Congress to review and, as appropriate, to repeal outdated statutory authorizations for use of military force and to replace them with updated statutes,” Department of Defense spokeswoman Jessica Maxwell told Responsible Statecraft. “DoD will work closely with the White House and Congress in conducting this review.”
Biden is also expected to sign an executive order calling for a review of “forever war” counterterrorism operations this month.
Rep. Barbara Lee (D–Calif.) sent a letter to President Biden a day after his inauguration calling for the immediate repeal of the 2002 AUMF and serious reforms to the 2001 AUMF. Several prominent Democrats — including House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff (D–Calif.) and the new House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Gregory Meeks (D–N.Y.) — signed on.
Meeks privately told committee members that AUMF reform would be among his “top priorities,” according to three Democratic staffers who were not authorized to go on the record. One staffer says that Meeks’s broader priority is to “build consensus about how to reassert congressional authority over war powers.”
“You can't just repeal and have no authorization, because there are real threats and missions that need to be done to protect our homeland and our interests abroad,” says Michèle Flournoy, a former Obama administration official and co-founder of West Exec Advisors. “If you wanted to get it right, you would look at both of [AUMFs] together and update it with a single, new, revised AUMF that is appropriate to where we are today and where we anticipate being in the next five years or so.”
However, activists are focused on an immediate repeal of the 2002 AUMF. Taking the authorization for the Iraq War off the books would not disrupt any ongoing military operations — but it could prevent future wars.
Stephen Miles, executive director of the progressive group Win Without War, calls it “the easiest slam dunk for Democrats.”
Last year, the Trump administration used the 2002 AUMF to justify the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, as the Iranian commander was in Iraq at the time. In the months leading up to Soleimani’s death, the Trump administration had lobbied Congress against repealing the 2002 AUMF, both publicly and privately.
Killing an Iranian general was “so far beyond what Congress intended when it authorized” the war against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein that there is now a “a real effort and an increasing bipartisan push, in particular to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF,” according to Heather Brandon-Smith, legislative director of the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
Former President Donald Trump may have pulled the trigger on Solemani, but his predecessor Barack Obama gave him the proverbial loaded gun. In theory, Obama supported reforming the AUMFs, but in practice, his administration and Democrats in Congress were unable to relinquish those war powers.
“The administration came to believe that there needed to be a re-examination and a tightening of the authorization for the use of military force” but “found an inability or unwillingness on [Capitol] Hill to wrestle this issue to the ground and pass new legislation,” says Flournoy, who served as under secretary of defense for policy at the time.
The unwillingness ran both ways, however. When a bipartisan group of senators tried to reform the president’s war powers, the executive branch balked.
U.S. troops were leaving Iraq in 2011, presenting an opportunity to take the 2002 AUMF off the books. After all, the war it authorized was supposedly over.
“It seemed like a real, true no-brainer at the time. We were a couple weeks away from all the troops being out of Iraq,” says Miles, who was then Win Without War’s advocacy director. “You didn't need a war authorization if there were no troops in the country.”
In November 2011, Sens. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, that would take the authorization for war in Iraq off the books. The NDAA is a massive annual legislative package that includes authorization for the military budget, and so any amendment, should it be included in the final bill, is guaranteed to pass.
“There was a notion” that a Republican could win the upcoming 2012 presidential election and “undo what Barack Obama had done, which was to bring all the troops out," Miles says. Not only did anti-war groups want to prevent that possibility, but they also saw the 2002 AUMF as the first step towards taking on the broader 2001 AUMF, according to Miles.
Then the Pentagon intervened.
General Martin Dempsey, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent a letter to late Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) arguing that the U.S. military still needed the 2002 AUMF for “any limited windup activities normally associated with ending a war.”
Flournoy interprets the letter as a concern with the “retrograde” being “the most dangerous point” in a military mission. U.S. military leaders feared that Iraqi militias could attack retreating U.S. forces, she says.
Joseph McMillan, who served as a principal deputy assistant secretary of defense under Obama, has a slightly different view.
“You don’t like to foreclose on options when you can keep them open,” he explains. “Things in 2011 had wound down in Iraq — or so we thought — but there was an aversion to getting rid of a tool that we might need to take out of the toolbox again.”
Still, McMillan says, “it wouldn’t have been a big deal at the time if the AUMF was repealed.”
Either way, Dempsey’s letter was the nail in the coffin for the effort to pull back those war powers. After McCain read the letter on the Senate floor, the Senate voted 67-30 to maintain the 2002 AUMF.
McMillan and Flournoy both say that they have no firsthand knowledge of who authorized Dempsey’s letter.
Flournoy emphasizes that Dempsey had the authority to advise Congress independently of the administration, and notes that the secretary of defense did not sign onto his letter.
But McMillan is sure that Dempsey would not have acted alone or advised Congress against the wishes of the administration “on a subject like this…except in the most extraordinary circumstances.” He believes that Dempsey was likely serving as a “messenger” for the Obama administration’s position.
Most importantly, the Obama administration did not publicly push back on Dempsey’s letter.
Dempsey did not respond to an email request for comment. Neither did Jeh Johnson, who was the top lawyer in the Department of Defense during the Obama administration.
“At the time, it wasn’t a huge deal,” Miles says. “I don’t think anybody foresaw a future president using [the 2002 AUMF] as a legal authority to kill Iranians.”
However, Obama soon began to test the limits of both AUMFs. The Islamic State, or ISIS, split off from al-Qaida and swept through Iraq and Syria in mid-2014. The militant group nearly took down the Iraqi government — committing mass atrocities along the way — and political pressure was building to act.
Obama began U.S. military operations against ISIS in August 2014.
The Obama administration took a strange position justifying its action. Officials argued that the war against ISIS was authorized by both the 2001 AUMF against al-Qaida and the 2002 AUMF against “the threat posed by Iraq.” At the same time, they claimed that the administration would like Congress to repeal the 2002 AUMF and pass a more specific anti-ISIS law.
The administration and different members of Congress and the administration proposed various replacement AUMFs. Some in Congress wanted much narrower war powers, while others tried to give the president a veritable blank check to fight Islamist militants. The issue went nowhere, and the war continued on decade-old legal grounds.
Bipartisan momentum began building again after Trump’s election. The war against ISIS wound down in early 2019. Around the same time, the Trump administration began to dramatically escalate economic pressure and military threats against Iran.
The AUMFs began to look like a dangerous blank check. Congress was particularly worried about the 2001 AUMF against al-Qaida, as Trump administration officials had tried to tie Iran to the terrorist group. But lawmakers were also nervous about the 2002 AUMF, which had already been stretched to authorize war against third parties on Iraqi soil.
Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee wrote a letter to the State Department in June 2019 asking whether the Trump administration considered either AUMF permission for war against Iran. The administration responded, ominously, that it had not “interpreted” the law that way “to date.”
Lawmakers then set their sights on taking the 2002 AUMF out of Trump’s hands.
An initial attempt by Sens. Tim Kaine (D–Va.) and Todd Young (R–Ind.) to wipe out the 2002 law went nowhere. Then, Rep. Lee wrote an amendment to that year’s NDAA that would repeal the 2002 AUMF. Her proposal passed the House of Representatives on July 19, 2019.
In response, the Trump administration sprung into action to keep its war making authority intact. In a July 24 hearing, State Department officials reassured senators that the AUMFs did not currently authorize a war with Iran, and asked that the Senate keep both laws on the books.
At least one Republican was suspicious of the administration’s logic.
“The current government [of Iraq] is indeed a strong partner, and we need to do what we can to defend them,” Sen. Young said. “I don't think we need to be prepared to wage war against them, and yet we have this 2002 AUMF on the books.”
Marik String, then the State Department’s top lawyer, responded that the U.S. government was using the law as “extra authority” for anti-ISIS operations, in particular as a defense in lawsuits over detaining suspected ISIS fighters without trial.
Young did not seem convinced.
In September 2019, the long process of NDAA reconciliation began. Negotiators from both parties would have to come to a compromise between the House version — which included Rep. Lee’s amendment — and the Senate’s own draft.
A group of both left- and right-leaning organizations lobbied negotiators to keep Rep. Lee’s amendment repealing the 2002 AUMF. Even the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation, which was arguing against any move to “limit the options of the executive branch” towards Iran, called it “good policy” to repeal the 2002 AUMF.
Meanwhile, the military was quietly pushing back.
Department of Defense attorneys raised the issue of the 2002 AUMF in meetings with the highest-ranking members of Congress’s armed services committees: Jim Inhofe (R–Okla.) and Jack Reed (D–R.I.) on the Senate side, and Adam Smith (D–Wash.) and Mac Thornberry (R–TX) in the House of Representatives.
The military lawyers told lawmakers that they needed to keep the 2002 AUMF in order to “preserve flexibility,” claims FCNL’s Brandon-Smith.
“It's our understanding that this weigh-in from the Pentagon was basically what killed it,” she says. “We had heard that prior to that there was a general consensus that it was a good idea to repeal this law.”
Maxwell, the Department of Defense spokeswoman, declined to comment on “discussions that occurred during the last Administration.”
Spokespeople for Reed, Smith, and Inhofe did not respond to a request for comment. Thornberry left Congress after declining to run for re-election last year, and Rep. Mike Rogers (R–Ala.) took his place on the committee. Rogers’ spokeswoman, Michaela Sunderman, said that she had “no information” on the events in question.
The Trump administration was seeking to “confuse” the discussion around the 2002 AUMF, according to a Democratic staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee who spoke on condition of anonymity. The staffer declined to comment on the specifics of conference negotiations, but gave an overview of the Trump administration’s argument.
While the administration was using both the 2001 AUMF as a justification to detain ISIS fighters and the 2002 AUMF as a “fallback” legal argument, administration officials gave off the “impression” that they needed the 2002 AUMF to keep ISIS members behind bars, the staffer said.
The final military budget authorization was released on December 3, 2019. Lee’s amendment repealing the 2002 AUMF had been stripped out. So was another amendment by Reps. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) and Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) explicitly banning war with Iran. The law did include some more reporting requirements, but no real changes to the president’s war powers.
Less than a month later, President Trump ordered the assassination of Soleimani.
“Perhaps having the 2002 AUMF off the books would have given them pause,” Brandon-Smith says. “We were right, but it didn’t give us any comfort.”
The overreach by the Trump administration has breathed new life into reform efforts. Rep. Lee’s letter seems to indicate that Democrats now have a unified vision of how to replace the AUMFs. It remains to be seen whether the same forces that stopped war powers reform during the last Democratic administration will prevent it again.
“We did try to do [AUMF reform] a few years ago, and it’s not easy to get to yes,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken during his confirmation hearing last month. “For some the porridge is too hot. For others the porridge is too cold. And can we get a consensus around what’s just right? But I would be determined and committed to working on that.”
![Following a largely preordained election, Vladimir Putin was sworn in last week for another six-year term as president of Russia. Putin’s victory has, of course, been met with accusations of fraud and political interference, factors that help explain his 87.3% vote share. If this continuation of Putin’s 24-year-long hold on power makes one thing clear, it’s that he and his regime will not be going anywhere for the foreseeable future. But, as his war in Ukraine continues with no clear end in sight, what is less clear is how Washington plans to deal with this reality. Experts say Washington needs to start projecting a long-term strategy toward Russia and its war in Ukraine, wielding its political leverage to apply pressure on Putin and push for more diplomacy aimed at ending the conflict. Only by looking beyond short-term solutions can Washington realistically move the needle in Ukraine. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, the U.S. has focused on getting aid to Ukraine to help it win back all of its pre-2014 territory, a goal complicated by Kyiv’s systemic shortages of munitions and manpower. But that response neglects a more strategic approach to the war, according to Andrew Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who spoke in a recent panel hosted by Carnegie. “There is a vortex of emergency planning that people have been, unfortunately, sucked into for the better part of two years since the intelligence first arrived in the fall of 2021,” Weiss said. “And so the urgent crowds out the strategic.” Historian Stephen Kotkin, for his part, says preserving Ukraine’s sovereignty is critical. However, the apparent focus on regaining territory, pushed by the U.S., is misguided. “Wars are never about regaining territory. It's about the capacity to fight and the will to fight. And if Russia has the capacity to fight and Ukraine takes back territory, Russia won't stop fighting,” Kotkin said in a podcast on the Wall Street Journal. And it appears Russia does have the capacity. The number of troops and weapons at Russia’s disposal far exceeds Ukraine’s, and Russian leaders spend twice as much on defense as their Ukrainian counterparts. Ukraine will need a continuous supply of aid from the West to continue to match up to Russia. And while aid to Ukraine is important, Kotkin says, so is a clear plan for determining the preferred outcome of the war. The U.S. may be better served by using the significant political leverage it has over Russia to shape a long-term outcome in its favor. George Beebe of the Quincy Institute, which publishes Responsible Statecraft, says that Russia’s primary concerns and interests do not end with Ukraine. Moscow is fundamentally concerned about the NATO alliance and the threat it may pose to Russian internal stability. Negotiations and dialogue about the bounds and limits of NATO and Russia’s powers, therefore, are critical to the broader conflict. This is a process that is not possible without the U.S. and Europe. “That means by definition, we have some leverage,” Beebe says. To this point, Kotkin says the strength of the U.S. and its allies lies in their political influence — where they are much more powerful than Russia — rather than on the battlefield. Leveraging this influence will be a necessary tool in reaching an agreement that is favorable to the West’s interests, “one that protects the United States, protects its allies in Europe, that preserves an independent Ukraine, but also respects Russia's core security interests there.” In Kotkin’s view, this would mean pushing for an armistice that ends the fighting on the ground and preserves Ukrainian sovereignty, meaning not legally acknowledging Russia’s possession of the territory they have taken during the war. Then, negotiations can proceed. Beebe adds that a treaty on how conventional forces can be used in Europe will be important, one that establishes limits on where and how militaries can be deployed. “[Russia] need[s] some understanding with the West about what we're all going to agree to rule out in terms of interference in the other's domestic affairs,” Beebe said. Critical to these objectives is dialogue with Putin, which Beebe says Washington has not done enough to facilitate. U.S. officials have stated publicly that they do not plan to meet with Putin. The U.S. rejected Putin’s most statements of his willingness to negotiate, which he expressed in an interview with Tucker Carlson in February, citing skepticism that Putin has any genuine intentions of ending the war. “Despite Mr. Putin’s words, we have seen no actions to indicate he is interested in ending this war. If he was, he would pull back his forces and stop his ceaseless attacks on Ukraine,” a spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council said in response. But neither side has been open to serious communication. Biden and Putin haven’t met to engage in meaningful talks about the war since it began, their last meeting taking place before the war began in the summer of 2021 in Geneva. Weiss says the U.S. should make it clear that those lines of communication are open. “Any strategy that involves diplomatic outreach also has to be sort of undergirded by serious resolve and a sense that we're not we're not going anywhere,” Weiss said. An end to the war will be critical to long-term global stability. Russia will remain a significant player on the world stage, Beebe explains, considering it is the world’s largest nuclear power and a leading energy producer. It is therefore ultimately in the U.S. and Europe’s interests to reach a relationship “that combines competitive and cooperative elements, and where we find a way to manage our differences and make sure that they don't spiral into very dangerous military confrontation,” he says. As two major global superpowers, the U.S. and Russia need to find a way to share the world. Only genuine, long-term planning can ensure that Washington will be able to shape that future in its best interests.](https://responsiblestatecraft.org/media-library/following-a-largely-preordained-election-vladimir-putin-was-sworn-in-last-week-for-another-six-year-term-as-president-of-russia.jpg?id=34283894&width=1245&height=700&quality=90&coordinates=0%2C77%2C0%2C77)
