US President Barack Obama’s proposed framework for the US-led war against Daesh will not restrict the battlefield to Iraq and Syria, multiple congressional sources told the Guardian, placing the US into a second simultaneous global war that will outlast his presidency.
Several congressional sources familiar with the outlines of the proposal, all of whom expected the White House to formally unveil it on Wednesday, told the Guardian the so-called Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) would bless the anti-Daesh war for three years.
Congressional language to retroactively justify the six-month-old US war against Daesh will not, they said, scrap the broad 9/11-era authorities against al-Qaida, as some congressional Democrats had proposed, meaning the two war authorizations will coexist.
Asked if the anti-Daesh AUMF opens the US to a second worldwide war against a nebulous adversary, one congressional aide answered: “Absolutely.”
Two legislative aides with knowledge of the outlines of the White House proposal said the new AUMF would clarify that the 2001 authority, which Obama has cited to justify everything from drone strikes in Yemen to detaining Taliban combatants beyond the end of US combat in Afghanistan, will no longer apply to the war against Daesh.
Authorization for the second global war “contrasts with the restraint that Obama likes to emphasize”, said Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations.