US Congress to vote to fund Syrian “rebels”
Patrick Martin ■ White House officials have insisted that no new resolution is required to authorize air strikes against ISIS targets in Iraq or Syria, claiming that two previous congressional resolutions, passed in 2001 to authorize military action against Al Qaeda and in 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq, still hold sway. This argument is remarkable from a legal standpoint, since the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) is limited to groups that carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the 2002 AUMF targets the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. ISIS was not formed until 2012, and even its predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq, was established only in 2004, after the US invasion and occupation of Iraq provoked widespread opposition in Iraq’s Sunni Muslim minority. In order to invoke the authority of the 2002 resolution backing the attack on Iraq, Obama would have to declare his own war against ISIS, in alliance with a US puppet regime in Baghdad, to be the continuation of Bush’s war against Iraq, which formally ended with the final US withdrawal at the end of 2011. Any congressional resolution to authorize funding the Syrian opposition—let alone a broader resolution on US military operations against ISIS—would provide a legislative fig leaf for a direct attack by the US military on the government of Assad in Syria, which is the real goal of the Obama administration’s latest intervention in the region.