WASHINGTON (AP/The Hill) – U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says that the Senate will vote to repeal two decades-old measures giving open-ended approval for military action in Iraq.
The vote, which would come after consideration in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, could take place just before the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It would repeal the 2002 measure that greenlighted that March 2003 invasion, along with a separate 1991 measure that sanctioned the U.S.-led Persian Gulf War to expel Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait.
“Every year we keep this authorization to use military force on the books is another chance for a future president to abuse or misuse it,” Schumer said. “War powers belong squarely in the hands of Congress, and that implies that we have a responsibility to prevent future presidents from hijacking this AUMF to bumble us into a new war.” He was referring to the Authorization for Use of Military Force.
The bill, led by Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Todd Young, R-Ind., passed the Senate Foreign Relations panel and the then- Democratic-led House in 2021. But it never came up for a vote in the full Senate, despite significant bipartisan support.
In his infamous February 5, 2003 speech at the UN Security Council, then-U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell lied to the world about non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to prepare the ground for the invasion of the country.
Powell presented false American intelligence to the United Nations that then-Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The presentation led to the Iraq War and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths.
In March 2003, the U.S. and Britain invaded Iraq in blatant violation of international law and under the pretext of finding WMDs; but no such weapons were ever discovered in Iraq.
More than one million Iraqis were killed as the result of the U.S.-led invasion, and subsequent occupation of the country, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored.
The U.S. war in Iraq cost American taxpayers $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, according to a study called Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.
Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States invaded and occupied Afghanistan, despite the fact that no Afghan was involved in the attacks. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans died in the U.S. war on the country.
Former acting Pentagon chief Christopher C. Miller said the United States must hold senior American military leadership accountable for the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Miller who served as acting U.S. secretary of defense from November 9, 2020, to January 20, 2021 wrote in “Soldier Secretary,” a memoir released this week, that the U.S. military-industrial complex has now become a “hydra-headed monster” with “virtually no brakes on the American war machine.”