According to a new letter to the House Foreign Affairs Committee from Assistant Secretary of State Mary Elizabeth Taylor, the Trump Administration is unlikely, in the event that they attack Iran, to use the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) as the legal justification.
The 2001 AUMF, passed after 9/11, is extremely broad, and has been used for myriad US wars. At the same time, it was plainly al-Qaeda related, which has led many lawmakers to warn it shouldn’t be seen as covering an attack on Iran.
Speculation about this has even led the House to put language ending the AUMF into their most recent military spending bill, though it is widely expected this will be taken out to reconcile it with the Senate version.
President Trump has suggested that no authorization is necessary, and indeed, that he wouldn’t even have to inform Congress if he was going to attack Iran. The expectation from the White House seems to be that no legal justification at all would be offered.
That’s clearly problematic, legally, but the ongoing Yemen War, in which the US is participating, was never authorized in any way either, and Trump has simply vetoed attempts by Congress to force him to end the plainly illegal conflict.
Taken as the de facto standard, this means that a president can effectively launch any illegal war he wants, and so long as both houses of Congress cannot muster a veto-proof majority, there is really no way of stopping him.
Majorities in both the Senate and the House oppose the notion of Trump attacking Iran without explicit Congressional approval. Let’s hope that’s enough to keep him from acting independently.
“Taken as the de facto standard, this means that a president can
effectively launch any illegal war he wants, and so long as both houses
of Congress cannot muster a veto-proof majority, there is really no way
of stopping him.”
Hey, it officially started with Truman (in the modern era, at least,) in Korea, continued through Johnson and GW Bush and Obama, why stop now?
“Unlikely”. Wow, that is so reassuring.
But it’s only relevant if 1) Trump unilaterally attacks Iran, and 2) Trump actually goes to Congress before doing so.
In fact, what is likely to happen is either Israel or the CIA or some other party interested in starting the Iran war foments an incident in the Gulf which Trump will then use to “retaliate”. Or Trump will engage in some act such as a US Navy blockade of Iranian oil shipments which, while constituting an act of war under international law, won’t be considered such by Congress.
Once Trump has initiated a military attack on Iran, he has sixty days to continue it before he has to ask Congress for “authorization.” Iran is unlikely to wait sixty days to retaliate, so escalation will then occur.
So it’s utterly irrelevant whether the AUMF will be used to “authorize” the war. Congress isn’t going to unilaterally force Trump to stop it and risk being blamed for not “supporting the troops” or “supporting Israel” or anything else someone thinks up.
And more importantly, if the immediate goal is to join Israel in attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon, the AUMF can be spun to authorize that war, even if Hezbollah has nothing to do with Al Qaeda, the original target of the AUMF. That’s why Pompeo is trying to link Iran to Al Qaeda, because then he can transfer that to Hezbollah as an “Iranian proxy.”
99 percent of the US electorate has no clue about any of this, so that will work just fine.