Unhappy 20th anniversary Iraq war AUMF

October 16, 2002 was a sorrowful day in American history. Twenty years ago today Congress voted an AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force) greenlighting the immoral, illegal and criminal Iraq war, begun five months later.

Besides a couple hundred thousand Iraqis killed, nearly 7,000 US and allied soldiers, journalists and contractors were killed.

It took nearly 9 years for America to declare the war over, but roughly 2,500 US troops are still defiling the largely broken nation of Iraq.

In 2005, a presidential commission found that not one bit of US intelligence information used to pass the AUMF was correct. The entire AUMF and subsequent war were simply made up.

Not only were there no consequences for the falsified AUMF, it became the AUMF that future presidents could invoke to perpetrate more murder and mayhem on a hapless world. President Obama used it to restart the Iraq war in 2014, this time to fight ISIS that was created by the first Iraq war.

Obama used it again in 2016 to justify military action against ISIS in Syria. His logic: Wherever ISIS goes, the 2002 AUMF follows.

Obama’s expansion of the AUMF was stretched even further by Trump who used it to sanction use of force to address both “threats to, or stemming from, Iraq.” That was applied to assassinate Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, whom we didn’t like, in 2020, nearly 18 years after the October, 2002 Iraq AUMF passage.

Both the House and Senate have introduced resolutions to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF. It’s long overdue for Congress to take back control of war making powers from war happy presidents. Alas, anytime a volatile foreign entanglement occurs, Congress has a history of rolling over and passing whatever war making authorization the current US president desires.

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