Statecraft

BRINGING AN END TO THE FOREVER WAR

“The Constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates,” James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1798, “that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war…. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature.” As James Wilson had earlier explained to the delegates at the Pennsylvania ratifying convention: “This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it.”

In the post-9/11 era, the United States has drifted towards a radically different regime. Two successive presidents have treated the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) as a wholesale, potentially permanent delegation of congressional war powers — a writ for war without temporal or geographic limits.

The 2001 AUMF was passed by the 107th Congress three days after the 9/11 attacks and targeted those who “planned, authorized, [or] committed” the attacks and those who “aided” or “harbored” them. This referred to, respectively, al-Qaeda and the Taliban although they were not named in the authorization. Judging by what they said at the time, the legislators who passed the resolution did not imagine that they’d sanctioned an open-ended, multi-generational war...