It Is Time to Get Serious About ISIS
For more than 18 months, Sen. Tim Kaine has been like an Old Testament prophet, crying in the wilderness.
His message? That Congress and President Obama must jointly negotiate an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (an AUMF, in common parlance) to lay out the terms and overall strategy for engagement against the forces of the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS.
And he got the same reception one biblical prophet after another received from the powers-that-be: He was ignored.
Well now, after ISIS directed or inspired attacks in just the last two weeks have claimed 224 lives aboard a Russian passenger likely bombed after leaving an Egyptian airport, after 43 people died in two suicide bombings in Beirut and capped off with the horrific attacks Friday night in Paris that claimed 129 lives and injured hundreds, it’s time Congress and the White House listened to Virginia’s junior U.S. senator.
When ISIS first appeared on the scene in the Middle East, rising from the muck of Iraq and the Syrian civil war, the organization mainly operated in western Iraq and eastern Syria, where it declared the territory it controlled a new “caliphate,” instituting a harsh, seventh-century version of Islam they said was what the Prophet Mohammed envisioned. Sunni in nature and backed logistically by former Ba’athist officials of the regime of Saddam Hussein who were purged by the Shi’ite government in Baghdad, they shocked the world with graphic beheading, stoning and immolation videos.
In the summer of 2014, President Obama committed the United States to military action against ISIS, working with the Baghdad government and regional powers such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The authorization, administration lawyers said, derived from the AUMF passed by Congress in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that gave the president the authority to pursue al-Qaida and “associated forces” in response to those attacks.
Congress, Kaine argues, has a constitutional duty to sign off when a president puts the U.S. military in the line of danger. And the president, he says, has a constitutional duty to seek that support. Relying on a 14-year-old AUMF, written for the post-9/11 battle against al-Qaida, just doesn’t cut it.
After months of cajoling, Obama presented an AUMF proposal that congressional Republicans decried as too limited in scope. Their version, the president said, was too open-ended. And there the matter has sat.
As a result of the political standoff, ISIS’ power has grown exponentially. The terror threat is growing. Involvement by the U.S. military is deepening and widening.
It is time for the White House and Congress to unite behind a comprehensive strategy to combat ISIS. Because of dawdling by the politicians, innocents have died. This cannot continue.
