A House Republican wants President Obama’s National Security Advisor to explain a summer request to repeal the 2002 military authorization, just months before air strikes began in Iraq.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon, R-Calif., sent a letter to National Security Advisor Susan Rice, telling her the president’s request to repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force “must come to an end.”
McKeon also told Rice that any new military authorization should not be limited to exclude any options, though the letter did not specifically reference the use of U.S. combat forces.
“An AUMF too narrowly construed, that provides a playbook to the enemy on how to avoid pressure from the United States, is self-defeating,” McKeon said in the letter.
The letter, also signed by Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas, the number-two Republican on the panel, asks “why the administration reversed its position,” on repealing the AUMF in July.
That’s when President Obama cited his powers under the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs to carry out air strikes against Syria and Iraq, and to send U.S. military advisors into the region in order to help defeat Islamist terrorist groups.
The letter points out that on July 25, Rice sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, asking him to repeal the 2002 AUMF, saying “such a repeal would go much father in giving the American people confidence that ground forces will not be sent into combat in Iraq.”
The GOP rejected the proposal.
McKeon and Thornberry in the letter urged Obama to come clean with Americans on the use of military force in Iraq needed to defeat the Islamic terrorist.
“They understand the United States is back in combat in Iraq,” they said in the letter. “The ‘confidence’ they seek is that the president has the will to do what is necessary to complete the mission this time.”
