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iraq war
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."
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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.
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Trump’s ‘Shock-and-Awe’ Approach to Governing Is as Deluded as W’s Iraq War
When this nightmare ends we will be left with a mess of rubble and a monumental task of rebuilding.
Sep 09, 2025
Nothing good will come of the chaos that has already been created by the Trump administration. In just a few months, it’s taken a wrecking ball to institutions, agencies, and programs.
The administration has taken dramatic steps to: gut the federal work force; withhold billions of dollars in research grants intended to address health and a range of other scientific concerns; eliminate foreign aid programs and the entities that deliver them; dismantle governmental health institutions; slash programs that provide healthcare and food to the poor and disabled; wreak havoc in international trade relations by imposing, then withdrawing, then reimposing tariffs based on whim or personal vendetta; and create fear and panic in cities across the country with the dramatic expansion of immigration enforcement that has included the hiring thousands of unvetted individuals, many of whom have an ideological bent and are eager to get a gun and badge to carry out their agenda. And this is only a partial list of the Trump administration’s destruction.
A case can easily be made that reform was needed in many of these areas. It must be acknowledged that waste or redundancy is somewhat inevitable in programs or agencies that have been in existence for decades or more. And there can be hesitancy to terminate programs that have either outlived their usefulness or never had their intended impact. But needed reforms are always best done with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
By using the latter approach, the administration has not only done significant damage to government, but has also eroded the public’s trust. The wholesale gutting of staff, cutting of research grants, elimination of programs, and exaggerated claims made in denigrating these programs cannot easily be remedied by the next administration. Expertise has been lost, unmet needs will only multiply, and some elected officials will be hesitant to reestablish or provide funding for programs that this administration has convinced a sizable number of voters are wasteful.
Look at what has been lost. By attempting to discredit the effectiveness of vaccines and shaking the public’s confidence in their importance, we may now see the resurgence of childhood diseases that had largely been eradicated. In eliminating programs that provide food benefits to the poor, not only will they suffer, but America’s farmers who were also often direct beneficiaries of these efforts will be hurt. Tariffs will make imported goods more expensive for American consumers and contribute to an erosion of trust in the US as a reliable trading partner. The resulting loss of US standing in many regions of the world has already led to governments to increasingly look to China. Losses are evident too in setbacks in scientific research, the ability to predict weather conditions and patterns, and the damage done to efforts to meet climate change goals.
When this nightmare ends we will be left with a mess of rubble and a monumental task of rebuilding.
While US President Donald Trump’s disruptive and destructive impact has been mainly felt domestically, it calls to mind the approach President George W. Bush used in the Middle East. In the aftermath of the nightmare of the 9-11 terror attacks, the Bush administration lost control of its policymaking to a collection of neoconservative ideologues both inside and outside of the administration. Convinced that reforming or tweaking the problems that existed in the Middle East would never get to the root of the problems, they chose to apply the wrecking ball to the region. They were going to blow it up and then rebuild “the new Middle East.”
We are now almost eight months into the “constructive chaos” engineered by this administration. The damage they have done is enormous, and will take a generation or more to rebuild.
The Bush policy was based on ideology, not reality. They were going to remove Saddam Hussein, install a government that met US criteria, and, as they so poetically put it, “serve as a beacon of democracy that would light the entire Middle East.” When it became clear that none of this worked, they latched onto the term “constructive chaos” to explain the “logic” behind their Middle East foreign policy. It was an effort to convince us that the mess they had created was intentional and necessary and that the growing violence and instability that followed were merely the “birth pangs” of the “new Middle East” they were helping to usher into existence. But there was no “logic,” and nothing “constructive” about the “chaos.” The spawn of the “birth pangs” were ISIS, an emboldened Iran, and weakened Arab “Republics” that destabilized the region.
We are now almost eight months into the “constructive chaos” engineered by this administration. The damage they have done is enormous, and will take a generation or more to rebuild. At this point, the Trump crowd hasn’t felt the need to fashion a clever explanation for what they’ve done. In part that’s because the impact of the damage is just beginning to be felt and much of Trump’s base are still under his sway and continue to believe that the mess they see isn’t real or will easily be fixed in short order.
But as was the case in the Bush years, reality will ultimately rear its head; questions will be asked and fingers will be pointed. Then the process of rebuilding can begin. It will take time to reconstruct what has been destroyed and to regain the trust that has been lost. But it can be done.
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