Spencer Ackerman catches Biden in a lie. The president is claiming that the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs give him the authority to order the attacks in Iraq and Syria, but that is not true:
Biden says that authority for the strikes lay "with the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) and the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq (Public Law 107-243)."
Just to be clear, Biden's official policy is to repeal that Iraq AUMF. More striking to me is the invocation of the 2001 AUMF. That's the wellspring of the War on Terror. And while the 2001 AUMF is terrifyingly capacious, there is no way to justify the weekend's strikes "against the IRGC and IRGC-affiliated personnel and facilities" under it.
The Trump administration lamely attempted to use the 2002 AUMF as authorization for killing Soleimani four years ago, but absolutely no one bought it. It was preposterous to use a decades-old authorization for the invasion of Iraq as cover for the assassination of an Iranian general, and it is no less preposterous to apply it to strikes against local militias now.
Even Trump and his officials didn’t have the gall to invoke the 2001 AUMF back then. Several presidents have stretched the 2001 AUMF almost beyond recognition to give cover to all kinds of operations against groups that didn’t even exist when the 9/11 attacks occurred. Until now, no one has tried to claim that it applies to using force against groups that don’t have some tenuous connection to Al Qaeda. Applying it to the use of force against Shia militias that previously fought against ISIS is beyond absurd.
As Ackerman explains:
Various administrations, facing minimal resistance, told themselves and Congress all manner of stories about how the AUMF licensed attacks on "al-Qaeda affiliates" or even ISIS since there was some theoretical through-line to al-Qaeda as it existed on 9/11. There is simply no such story to tell about the 2001 AUMF's applicability to Iran and its affiliates.
It is curious that the Biden administration chose to hide behind two completely irrelevant resolutions to defend military action in Iraq and Syria. In the past when they have wanted to justify retaliatory action against militias in Iraq and Syria, the administration has fallen back on generic appeals to Article II powers and a distorted understanding of self-defense. Now they are bringing up authorizations from a generation ago that have no connection with the wars that are being waged today. They must know that they are on the shakiest legal ground, and that’s why they are grasping at anything they can find.
The administration is really trying to be too clever by half by claiming that the troops that came under attack are somehow covered by the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs and therefore military action taken in response to attacks on them is similarly covered. Brian Finucane points out that it still doesn’t make any sense:
The problem is that neither of these AUMFs work.
First, really hard to see how the 2002 *Iraq* AUMF is relevant to US ops in Jordan. Second, if US ops at Tower 22 were supporting presence at Tanf, 2001 AUMF isn't relevant b/c US not conducting counter-ISIS ops at Tanf.
We might add to this that military operations against ISIS weren’t really authorized by the 2001 AUMF, either, but Obama didn’t let that get in the way of waging the war.
U.S. military action in Iraq and Syria is unauthorized. The administration’s claims that it is covered by these old resolutions from the start of the century are nonsense. No doubt Congress will roll over and accept whatever the president tells them, but the public needs to understand that the president is lying to Congress and to us when he makes these claims.