SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
iran
After 'Years of Neglected Oversight,' House Votes to Repeal Authorization Used by Presidents to Wage 'Forever Wars'
One foreign policy expert said these congressional authorizations "have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action."
Sep 11, 2025
Almost exactly 24 years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US House of Representatives voted Tuesday to finally repeal a pair of more than two-decade-old congressional authorizations that have allowed presidents to carry out military attacks in the Middle East and elsewhere.
In a 261-167 vote, with 49 Republicans joining all Democrats, the House passed an amendment to the next military spending bill to rescind the Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress in the leadup to the 1991 Persian Gulf War and 2003 War in Iraq.
The decision is a small act of resistance in Congress after what the Quincy Institute's Adam Weinstein described in Foreign Policy magazine as "years of neglected oversight" by Congress over the "steady expansion of presidential war-making authority."
As Weinstein explains, these AUMFs, originally meant to give presidents narrow authority to target terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and use military force against Saddam Hussein, "have been stretched far beyond their original purposes" by presidents to justify the use of unilateral military force across the Middle East.
President George W. Bush used the 2002 authorization, which empowered him to use military force against Iraq, to launch a full invasion and military occupation of the country. Bush would stretch its purview throughout the remainder of his term to apply the AUMF to any threat that could be seen as stemming from Iraq.
After Congress refused to pass a new authorization for the fight against ISIS—an offshoot of al-Qaeda—President Barack Obama used the ones passed during the War on Terror to expand US military operations in Syria. They also served as the basis of his use of drone assassinations in the Middle East and North Africa throughout his term.
During his first term, President Donald Trump used those authorizations as the legal justification to intensify the drone war and to launch attacks against Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria. He then used it to carry out the reckless assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq.
And even while calling for the repeal of the initial 2001 and 2002 authorizations, former President Joe Biden used them to continue many of the operations started by Trump.
"These AUMFs," Weinstein said, "have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action."
The amendment to repeal the authorizations was introduced by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).
Meeks described the authorizations as "long obsolete," saying they "risk abuse by administrations of either party."
Roy described the repeal of the amendment as something "strongly opposed by the, I'll call it, defense hawk community." But, he said, "the AUMF was passed in '02 to deal with Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and that guy's been dead... and we're now still running under an '02 AUMF. That's insane. We should repeal that."
"For decades, presidents abused these AUMFs to send Americans to fight in forever wars in the Middle East," said Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) shortly before voting for the amendment. "Congress must take back its war powers authority and vote to repeal these AUMFs."
Although this House vote theoretically curbs Trump's war-making authority, it comes attached to a bill that authorizes $893 billion worth of new war spending, which 17 Democrats joined all but four Republicans Republicans in supporting Wednesday.
The vote will also have no bearing on the question of President Donald Trump's increasing use of military force without Congressional approval to launch unilateral strikes—including last week's bombing of a vessel that the administration has claimed, without clear evidence, was trafficking drugs from Venezuela and strikes conducted in June against Iran, without citing any congressional authorization.
Alexander McCoy, a Marine veteran and public policy advocate at Public Citizen, said, "the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs" are "good to remove," but pointed out that it's "mostly the 2001 AUMF that is exploited for forever wars."
"Not to mention, McCoy added, "we have reached a point where AUMFs almost seem irrelevant, because Congress has shown no willingness whatsoever to punish the president for just launching military actions without one, against Iran, and now apparently against Venezuela."
In the wake of Trump's strikes against Iran, Democrats introduced resolutions in the House and Senate aimed at requiring him to obtain Congressional approval, though Republicans and some Democratic war hawks ultimately stymied them.
However, Dylan Williams, the vice president of the Center for International Policy, argued that the repeal of the AUMF was nevertheless "a major development in the effort to finally rein in decades of unchecked use of military force by presidents of both parties."
The vote, Williams said, required lawmakers "to show where they stand on restraining US military adventurism."
Keep ReadingShow Less
The American Reckoning
Someday Israeli leaders will stand in The Hague for what they have done in Gaza, and they will deserve to. But if we are honest, we know US leaders belong there too.
Sep 11, 2025
I have met people who gave me grace in Iran, in Mexico, in Haiti, in Gaza, in Cambodia, in Vietnam. People who understood the difference between ordinary citizens and the governments that rule them. People who offered me kindness when they had every reason not to. That grace stays with me.
As a US citizen and physician, I have lived my life trying to hold onto a sense of responsibility. But what I see now, in Gaza, in Haiti, in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, is the full weight of what psychologists call diffusion of responsibility. It is the shrug that says: Someone else will answer for this, someone else will carry the shame.
The United States cannot keep living in that shrug. We armed, funded, and protected Israel as it has carried out the genocide of the Palestinian people. We have supplied not only weapons but coordination, intelligence, and political cover. We let the American Israel Public Affairs Committee function as the arm of a foreign government, not as a lobbying group. We looked away from the checkpoints, the administrative cruelty, the killing of children. This is our legacy.
But Gaza is not an aberration. It is a mirror held up to the long history of our interventions. We overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, in 1953, not because he was a tyrant but because he dared to nationalize oil. We turned that nation toward dictatorship and decades of repression, then had the arrogance to call it democracy. In Central America, we toppled leaders and propped up death squads. In Chile, we helped usher in the bloody reign of Augusto Pinochet, betraying yet another democratic choice in favor of authoritarian brutality.
We speak of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murderous ways as if they are foreign to us. They are not. We have assassinated leaders. We have sanctioned extrajudicial killings, calling them “targeted strikes.” We have funded militias and trained torturers. We still carry Guantánamo on our conscience. We are not better than Putin. We are his rival and his mirror.
We should be an anti-interventionist nation, one that stops imagining itself as the builder of nations and instead takes responsibility for its own failures, its own violence, and its own complicity.
In Vietnam, we unleashed hell. Entire villages were burned to the ground. At My Lai, US soldiers slaughtered more than 500 unarmed civilians, women, children, elders. It was not an accident, not a one-off. It was part of a culture of violence we exported and excused.
And then there is the School of the Americas, now rebranded as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a US military institution in Panama where we trained some of the worst dictators and death squad leaders in Latin America. The manuals we gave them were explicit: torture, execution, terror as tools of governance. We sowed horror and called it security.
Someday Israeli leaders will stand in The Hague for what they have done in Gaza, and they will deserve to. But if we are honest, we know we belong there too. For Mossadegh, for Pinochet, for Central America, for My Lai, for every extrajudicial killing and every sanctioned massacre, and most immediately for Gaza, we should be in the dock as well. We should stand in handcuffs, our heads lowered in shame, finally facing the truth of what we have unleashed in the world.
The truth is that our foreign policy has been one long history of intervention, violence, and betrayal of human dignity. We were in Haiti. We were in Iraq. We were in Afghanistan. We have left the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa littered with the bones of our experiments. Always we tell ourselves it was complicated. Always we tell ourselves we meant well. But what we meant was power, and what we left was ruin.
What reparation looks like now is not cash or aid dropped into a void. It is restoring justice. It is ending our culture of nation building and intervention, and replacing it with support for people, families, language, culture, dignity, and jurisprudence. It is standing against genocide, no matter who commits it. It is admitting that our strength lies not in military power but in whether we can build schools instead of prisons, communities instead of empires.
This is not just a populist opinion. It is a moral imperative. We should be an anti-interventionist nation, one that stops imagining itself as the builder of nations and instead takes responsibility for its own failures, its own violence, and its own complicity.
I am a doctor. My oath is to heal, to do no harm. But as a citizen, I see harm everywhere our government touches. We cannot keep pretending that this is someone else’s crime, someone else’s burden. This is ours.
The reckoning will not wait forever. The question is whether we face it with honesty now, or whether we let it destroy us later.
Keep ReadingShow Less
A Hiroshima Survivor Reminds the World Why History Must Not Repeat Itself
Eighty years have passed since the bombing of Hiroshima, when Kodama’s life and the world changed dramatically. She has not forgotten that day, but she said looking at today’s conflicts, it seems like the world has.
Aug 21, 2025
Michiko Kodama was only seven years old when the world’s first nuclear weapon was dropped on her hometown of Hiroshima. Since then, she has dedicated her life to ensuring that her generation remains the only victims of a nuclear holocaust.
“When you witness something like this, you think how can I live? Am I allowed to live? But, I’m glad I’m alive,” Kodama said. “I’m glad I had the life I wanted, and I think it’s because I can tell the stories of those who have passed away.”
Kodama is the assistant secretary general of Nihon Hidankyo, an organization composed of Hibakusha, the Japanese word that refers to the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. In 2024, Nihon Hidankyo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their advocacy work on nuclear nonproliferation.
“To fight against nuclear weapons is to preserve life because it is the weapon that is capable of completely destroying the entire Earth. It’s the weapon that’s capable of stopping time,” Kodama, 87, said.
“The atomic bombs that I experienced 80 years ago were like babies compared to today’s nuclear weapons,” said Kodama.
Eighty years have passed since the bombing of Hiroshima, when Kodama’s life and the world changed dramatically. She has not forgotten that day, but she said looking at today’s conflicts, it seems like the world has. And she’s determined to continue reminding the world of the terrors of nuclear weapons.
She remembers being under her desk as the bomb hit. She saw a flash of light followed by an extreme wave of heat. Somehow she survived along with her classmates. She recalled the horrific sight of people who had come to her families’ suburb to try and get relief from the epicenter. People who had been so badly burnt that their skin was coming off their flesh.
“These sorts of images show the differences between conventional weapons and nuclear weapons. It’s just a weapon that is so inhumane, so indiscriminate that we just should not have it,” Kodama said.
The Doomsday Clock, which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created in 1947 to measure how close the world is to man-made catastrophe, signals that the world has moved closer to nuclear catastrophe than it ever has been. In January 2025, the clock was moved one second closer to midnight, sending a stark signal to the global community that we are moving closer toward the brink of nuclear holocaust. The clock currently looms at a mere 89 seconds to midnight.
“I fear that World War III will turn into a nuclear war,” she said.
Nine countries currently have nuclear weapons, and many more are seeking to get it as a deterrent.
“I think it’s a huge mistake,” Kodama said. “Nuclear weapons and humans, and of course the Earth, cannot coexist. I know this from personal experience.”
In June 2025, the US bombed Iran’s nuclear sites out of fear they were getting closer and closer to developing a nuclear weapon. Experts said that Iran’s aspirations will not stop and that other countries could follow its example
“In the span of two weeks, Iran was bombed by two nuclear powers, the US and Israel. That could lead to a perverted logic in which developing the nuclear bomb is seen as their only way to be safe from further attacks,” said Thomas Countryman, president of the board at the Arms Control Association.
Kodama warned that more countries with nuclear weapons would only increase the likelihood that a nuclear holocaust would take place.
Kodama described apocalyptic scenes from when the bomb first hit in the center of Hiroshima. People riding on Hiroshima’s famous tram instantly turned to charcoal; those that didn’t die instantly had their skin stripped off from the heat of the ground, and many ended up jumping in the river for relief where they also died.
Although she was one of the fortunate ones to survive the bombing, the consequences of the bomb continued well after August 6 for Kodama.
“I’ll be a victim of the atomic bomb until I die. Yes, I can’t escape the fact that I was a victim of the atomic bomb” Kodama said.
For example, Kodama recalled how she faced discrimination within Japan as a survivor and was told that would have to live alone without getting married because people at the time did not want their future generations “mixed” with those that survived an atomic bomb. Moreover, even after she married and had kids, her daughter suddenly died at 45 after contracting cancer, which Kodama believes was passed down from herself.
Her mother, father, and two brothers, one of whom was born after the bombing Hiroshima, also died of cancer which she attributed to the effects of radiation exposure.
However, even with the devastating effects of Hiroshima, Kodama warned that the bomb dropped 80 years ago would only cause a fraction of the damage that today’s weapons could inflict.
“The atomic bombs that I experienced 80 years ago were like babies compared to today’s nuclear weapons,” said Kodama.
In fact, just 20 days before the bomb exploded she moved from the center of Hiroshima to a suburb. Everyone in her former school was killed. Kodama noted that in some ways she was lucky because the Hiroshima bomb didn’t completely destroy life.
“When the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, it was said that no plants would grow for 80 years, but the following year, those trees in the garden sprouted young shoots,” Kodama said. “If something like that were to happen again, no plants would really grow. They wouldn’t grow for 80 years, or even a hundred years. It would be impossible to survive.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular