The Great Middle East Head-Fake
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
03 February 19
A Senate vote on Syria and Afghanistan withdrawals proves Washington is
still clueless and in danger of re-electing Trump
The New York Times tweet was triumphant, music to #Resistance ears:
On the surface, it was a truly bipartisan defeat of Trump. A full 22 of
those 68 yeas were Democrats.
But every Senate Democrat who's even rumored to be running for president
voted nay. The list included Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders,
Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar and Jeff Merkley.
Sherrod Brown did not vote.
Was it possible that their reluctance was connected to the fact that survey
after survey shows the public has lost appetite for our Middle East wars,
especially in Afghanistan?
The "stinging rebuke" in the Senate that has Washington buzzing was a
graphic example of how out of touch the capital is with the rest of the
country, which would like more of a say in when, where and why we go to war.
Start with the fact that the Senate never demanded a vote on the presence of
American troops in Syria. Just last year, in fact, it did the opposite.
On December 19th, 2017, Virginia's Tim Kaine - the latest ex-vice
presidential candidate whose face America couldn't pick out of a police
lineup - sent a letter to then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and
then-Defense Secretary James Mattis asking about a December 15th, 2017 Wall
Streeet Journal article on Syria.
Kaine was concerned because a "U.S. official" told the Journal we were
changing our mission there, from combating ISIS to an "explicit new goal"
preventing "Iran and its proxies" from establishing a "presence" on Syrian
territory.
Kaine cried foul:
If these reports accurately reflect your intentions, the actions you are
likely considering far exceed the counter-ISIS mandate and lack domestic or
international legal authority.
Summing up, Kaine bluntly asked:
What is the legal basis for using military force to compel Bashar al-Assad
into participating in political negotiations?
The Pentagon replied via Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Policy David
Trachtenberg, whose letter basically said the Trump administration didn't
need no stinking authority.
Trachtenberg insisted they were covered by the 2001 Authorization to Use
Military Force (AUMF), which he said permitted force against terrorists
connected to the 9/11 attacks, but also any threats that "may re-emerge and
that may not be covered by the 2001 AUMF."
Translation: We're covered by a 16-year-old law that gives us authority to
pursue terrorists and any other threats not covered by that law.
Mary Waters, assistant Secretary of State for legislative affairs, said that
while the U.S. wouldn't "seek to fight the government of Syria or Iran or
Iranian-supported groups in Iraq or Syria," it would "not hesitate to use
necessary and proportionate force to defend. forces engaged in operations to
defeat ISIS and degrade Al Qaeda."
In other words, the "explicit new goal" in Syria was a bait-and-switch.
Trump planned on using the terrorist-fighting authority in AUMF to explain
being on Syrian territory in the first place, and if we happened to engage
with the forces of another sovereign country like Syria or Iran while there,
that would only be in "U.S. national self-defense."
As a result, as has been reported over and over, no matter what your opinion
on America's occupation of Syrian territory, it is almost certainly illegal.
Or, as Time put it, there's never been a legal explanation for our presence
there that "passes the laugh test."
Having been told off by the Trump team, the Senate meekly got together to
craft a new AUMF. The proposal among other things would trigger a 60-day
review period by lawmakers, in the highly probable event a president decided
to make war against a new country.
But nobody on the Senate Foreign Relations committee believed they could get
the measure passed. "I think it's going to be very difficult to get to the
finish line on this," predicted Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD). So even that
pathetic ask for a fig leaf of congressional authority for future wars went
nowhere.
A few months later, the Trump administration - changing course from the
president's own earlier statement that "I want to get out" of Syria - leaked
news of a new "indefinite" occupation plan that sounded strikingly like
regime change. This is from a September 6thWashington Post report citing
"senior State Department officials":
The administration has redefined its goals to include the exit of all
Iranian military and proxy forces from Syria, and establishment of a stable,
nonthreatening government acceptable to all Syrians.
This seemingly momentous decision was never voted on or debated in Congress,
though the latter did not object. Apparently, lawmakers were too busy
wolfing down military contractor donations to issue a "stinging rebuke" over
having their institutional authority over the war-declaring process bypassed
for the umpteenth time since 9/11.
A month or so later, Mattis testified on the Hill about four soldiers killed
in Niger in early October. He told Congress the Niger mission was authorized
under title 10 "train and equip" provision, which permits the Secretaries of
Defense and State to "provide training and equipment" to "one or more
foreign countries" for the "purpose of building the capacity of such
forces."
Add Niger, then, to the list of active combat missions not expressly debated
or approved by Congress. Instead, Congress long ago handed blanket authority
to the executive branch to send forces to "one or more" foreign countries.
No "stinging rebuke" there, either.
Yet when Trump decided he was going to withdraw forces from Syria and
Afghanistan, suddenly it was We Are The World time on the Hill. Republicans
and the non-presidential candidates on the Democrat side joined hands to
renounce the executive branch for daring to withdraw troops from somewhere
without permission.
Meanwhile, in the House, Reps. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) and Van Taylor (R-TX)
launched another bipartisan bill, seeking to limit funds the president could
use to withdraw troops from either Syria or South Korea.
The proposal is an awesome comedy. It doesn't really demand the president
ask Congress for permission to withdraw troops.
Instead, the bill would require the "Secretary of State, the Secretary of
Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence" to issue a report to
Congress reassuring them that the moves would not "would not undermine the
nation's security," as the New York Times put it.
People who are applauding this series of moves as a big win for the
anti-Trump cause must not have been following his campaign a few years ago,
when bashing foreign wars became central to his successful run to the White
House.
"We went from mistakes in Iraq to Egypt to Libya, to President Obama's line
in the sand in Syria," he barked in 2016, adding that under him, we would be
"getting out of the nation-building business."
Despite countless insults to veterans - from the McCain "I like people who
weren't captured" debacle to the Humayun Khan episode to moronic comments
about PTSD - Trump did well on Election Day in areas with high numbers of
battlefield casualties. Some academics speculated the "casualty gap" in key
states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan may have helped turn the
race for Trump.
Think about what this week's sequence of events has told those voters.
The constitutional idea that Congress does the declaring of wars, while
presidents only command them, is designed to give voters extra input on this
most crucial of decisions, i.e. when we're going to risk American lives (to
say nothing of foreign ones).
But Congress has been abdicating that responsibility for a while now. Two
successive presidents made a joke of it, expanding limited authorization to
go after 9/11 terrorists into nearly two decades of open-ended Middle East
missions. We were bombing seven countries when Trump took office, and
probably 99 percent of voters couldn't have named them.
When Trump tried to withdraw troops from two countries, what happened?
Congress, snoring on this issue since at least 2001, threw a fit that the
president was acting unilaterally.
Members of the House went so far as to propose a law that essentially
requires the assent of not just the Pentagon, but the Director of National
Intelligence (!) to dial back military deployments. And people wonder where
"deep state" paranoia comes from?
Ask the Democratic presidential hopefuls who voted nay yesterday how any of
this is going to go over outside the Beltway. If Congress refuses to stop
wars and the president isn't allowed to, exactly where does the ordinary
person have input on these questions?
It's not that voters don't care about the fate of the Kurds or worry about
the possibility of the Taliban "recapturing" Afghanistan.
It's that they've lost confidence in Washington's ability to avoid making
these situations worse through military action, especially since they've now
officially told us they will not take "no" for an answer, when it comes to
war.
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