A Bipartisan Vote to Put the Brakes on War
By putting such a sinister face on it, Trump might have finally
inspired lawmakers to rein in America’s post-9/11 war machine.
By Peter Certo
"One of the few things I recall fondly about the Trump campaign — a
short list, I’ll admit — was the candidate’s apparent glee in
ridiculing the war-mongering of his rivals and predecessors.
In early 2016, Trump (correctly) summed up George W. Bush’s legacy
this way: “We’ve been in the Middle East for 15 years, and we haven’t
won anything.”He ridiculed Hillary Clinton for being “trigger happy” —
no standard-issue gibe from a guy who also promised to bring torture
back — even while echoing progressive complaints that the $5 trillion
pricetag from Bush’s wars would’ve been better spent at home.
And though Trump’s relationship with the Russians has since acquired
an unseemly cast, he once offered quite sensibly that “it’s better to
get along” with the world’s other nuclear-armed superpower than not to.
Compared to his rivals, Politico magazine once mused, Trump was “going
Code Pink” on foreign policy. But what a rose-colored lie that turned
out to be.
Since taking office, Trump’s turned virtually all use of force
decisions over to his generals. With the president’s backing, they’ve
ordered 4,000 new American troops back into Afghanistan, sent
thousands more to Iraq and Syria, and nearly quadrupled the rate of
drone strikes from the Obama administration, which was already quite
prolific.
Everywhere they go, they’re escalating the brutality — and we still
haven’t won anything.
They cratered Afghanistan with the largest non-nuclear bomb ever
dropped. They’ve stepped up support for the brutal Saudi-led bombing
of Yemen, where 11,000 have died and thousands more are at risk of
dying of hunger and cholera. Meanwhile they’ve brought civilian
casualties from our bombings in Iraq and Syria to record levels,
inflicting what the UN calls a “staggering loss of civilian life.”
Things are about to get even more dangerous in Syria, as the Islamic
State falters and armed factions turn on each other to claim the
remains of its caliphate.
Under Trump, U.S. troops have repeatedly attacked pro-Syrian forces —
a line Obama never crossed — in a misguided effort to bolster
Washington’s favorite rebels, many of whom are fighting each other.
That’s ratcheting up tensions with Syria’s allies, Iran and Russia,
endangering Obama’s hard-won diplomatic gains with Iran and even
leading Russia to threaten to shoot down American planes.
For Trump, a president lampooned as a puppet of Putin, blundering into
conflict with Russia over an empty corner of eastern Syria should be
an embarrassing prospect. But Trump seems blithely unaware of the
whole thing.
While Trump may be uniquely prone to careless belligerence, the
problem is plainly bipartisan: He’s mostly just adding ghastly
additions to a war scaffolding the Obama and Bush administrations
built before him.
One possible solution? Revoke the congressional war authorization
passed after 9/11, which gave the president authority to track down
the perpetrators of those attacks. There were 19 hijackers that day,
but that law’s been abused to justify military action 37 times in 14
countries, the Congressional Research Service calculates.
Stunningly, on June 29, the House Appropriations committee
overwhelmingly approved an amendment from Rep. Barbara Lee to revoke
that authority..."
Razer