In August, I participated in a trip to the Middle East led by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon, R-Calif. While there we met with several heads of state, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Prime Minister Netanyahu leads a country surrounded by enemies and is constantly under the real threat of violent terrorism. When he articulates his country’s policy and actions against this threat, he is clear, firm and convincing. You can agree or disagree with him, but there is no denying his leadership.
Upon returning from the Middle East, we were almost immediately asked by President Obama to include congressional authorization in the Continuing Resolution for the training and equipping of “moderate Syrian rebels” to fight the terrorist group known as the Islamic State. Simultaneous with the president’s address to the nation where he made the request to us public, we were provided by the White House with a brief fact sheet summarizing the president’s strategy against the Islamic State and the following week were given several briefings, both classified and unclassified.
Chairman McKeon and our committee staff prepared language which contained the president’s requested authorization. While a bipartisan majority, myself included, voted for the authorization in both the House and the Senate, a great many of us did so only because of the limited nature of the authorization and with remaining questions as to the president’s strategy.
In a hearing before our committee the day after we passed the authorization, I observed to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel that in advance of a reauthorization vote, the president should do two things.
First, he needs to lay out for the Congress and the American people a clear and complete strategy for the effective defeat of the Islamic State. Training and arming a relatively small group of Syrian rebels and cooperating with an Iraqi army, which has so far shown a failure to fight, do not comprise a strategy.
The president appears to be in the process of developing a strategy, however, and I took his request to Congress as a necessary first step. Just this week, President Obama clearly expanded his strategy by beginning airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria. While I was pleased to see a strong partnership with other Arab countries from the Middle East, I still do not believe a strategy, worthy of the support of Congress, has been put forward.
Second, once a strategy is finalized, the president needs to come back to the Congress and ask us for a new Authorization for the Use of Military Force. The president and Secretary Hagel have both called this a war, a long-term war, and they are right in doing so. Under Article 1, Section 8, of our Constitution, only the Congress has the power to declare war.
The president and his advisors have made the legally incorrect assertion that they have congressional authorization to proceed in the AUMFs passed authorizing US combat against al Qaeda and the Taliban in 2001 and authorizing the invasion of Iraq in 2002. I am just a journeyman lawyer, but I agree with legal experts from around the nation who have criticized the administration’s position as a matter of law.
More importantly, I think a new AUMF is needed because we are facing a very different set of circumstances in the Islamic State threat, and the people of America are entitled to a public debate on exactly what we are going to do and why. The president’s advisors are disingenuous when they say they don’t need a new AUMF, but they would welcome one if we passed it. The president is the commander in chief and only he, with the advice of the uniformed leadership of our armed forces, can say what we need to do and therefore what the Congress should consider authorizing.
I’m only one member of one house of the Congress, but in listening to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, I think the president runs the risk of losing the support of those of us who voted for Chairman McKeon’s very limited authorizing language when we return to Washington after the elections. More importantly, he risks losing the support of the American people for the long term war he and his advisors are planning.
Make no mistake about it; the president is right when he says the Islamic State poses a very real threat to American interests abroad and to our security in the homeland. Islamic State is a large and growing hardened terrorist army, larger than al Qaeda is or ever was, and the Islamic State controls a land area between Damascus and Bagdad which contains 20 million stateless Muslims. They are well funded, shrewd tacticians and have shown a successful audacity in the scope of their attacks.
They are the most brutal terrorist organization we have ever seen, so brutal that they were expelled from al Qaeda. And they have vowed to attack us here in the United States. We would be foolish not to take them at their word.
Let’s stop them now, before they grow bigger and stronger. But to do so, we need a strategy, something we don’t yet have. The president should study Prime Minister Netanyahu’s style and be clear, firm and convincing in the face of terrorist danger. If he does, I believe he will have broad bi-partisan support in the Congress and from the American people.
We are gravely threatened and we need a leader with a clear plan, a plan which has congressional and popular support.
Rep. Bradley Byrne represents Alabama’s 1st Congressional District. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions for editorials, available at this link.
