In all the hyperventilating over the possibility of Iran joining the other nine members of the nuclear club, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has now injected a new potential escalation in a speech to AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The Kentucky Republican
says he would introduce an authorization for the use of force against Iran if intelligence indicates that nation has decided to build a nuclear bomb or starts enriching uranium to weapons-grade level:
McConnell, who along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will sit down with Netanyahu on Tuesday, told the pro-Israel lobby that a nuclear Iran would not only threaten Israel but other nations in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain.
“Israel’s security is not negotiable,” McConnell said. “We can’t shrink from affirming that to the rest of the world, and we certainly can’t shrink from telling a sitting president how we think it’s best achieved.”
In case you're unfamiliar with AUMFs, it was just short of a decade ago when the House and Senate voted on one
authorizing the president to use military force "as he determines to be necessary and appropriate" to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq."
The two key reasons put forth for the authorization was that Iraq was developing or had in its possession weapons of mass destruction and had a working relationship with al Qaeda. Both assertions were not supported by evidence at the time, but, as we later had confirmed by the Downing Street Memo and Bush-Blair Memo, the Cheney-Bush administration distorted intelligence reports and presented "facts" at the United Nations that it knew to be untrue in order to justify an invasion it was already set on prosecuting.
Another AUMF was signed by President Bush just a week after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. That one authorized military force against those who "planned, authorized, committed or aided" the attacks or harbored those who did. In addition to the attack and invasion of Afghanistan that everyone who voted for the AUMF fully expected, the authorization was also used as implicit approval for domestic spying, the establishment of military tribunals, the extraordinary rendition and torture of suspected terrorists, the holding of those suspects indefinitely without trial and the set-up of the detention center in Guantánamo. The resolution was cited this month by Attorney General Eric Holder as legal backing for the assassination of U.S. citizens suspected of being terrorists.
So where might McConnell's proposed authorization take us?
(Continue reading below the fold)
War with Iran obviously. If the president believed that that nation's leaders had decided to build a bomb or was putting together the necessary ingredients for one, and he chose not to let them complete it, the AUMF would give him the green-light.
While Iran's incendiary, anti-semitic, eliminationist rhetoric about Israel is nothing new, and that government's oppression of its own people is vile and murderous, there is no direct evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons or that it intends to do so, something it, in fact, vociferously denies. Given Iran's record of past concealment, however, there is certainly reason to be suspicious of its claims that everything it's doing is for peaceful purposes. But suspicions aren't evidence. And while the Obama administration would presumably not choose like its predecessor to fabricate and exaggerate evidence about an Iranian bomb-making effort in order to go to war, AUMFs, as we have seen, outlive the administrations under which they are passed.
Moreover, there is the little matter of what gives the United States or anyone else the right to attack a country because it has built or otherwise obtained a nuclear weapon? If Iran did so, it would certainly be a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and it would certainly frighten the neighbors, and not just Israel. But owning nuclear weapons doesn't signal aggressive intent. Ten nations have done so, and nine still have them. But only one has ever used any, the first two it built. And that was 67 years ago.
What else might such an AUMF contain? What might it authorize a president now or in the future to do beyond taking out Iran's nuclear-enrichment facilities, its unfinished plutonium reactor in Arak and dozens of other nuclear-related operations? More civil liberties curtailments? A freer hand to use force in general? It all depends on the wording, the interpretations of the wording and the intentions of those who will employ it to justify their actions. That covers a lot of ground.
McConnell's speech may simply be election-year fodder, not all that different than Mitt Romney's pathetic op-ed in today's Washington Post, merely some chest-thumping in which to call out the president for supposedly not doing enough to stop Iran from going down a path nobody has certain evidence that it is going down. Or he may mean it. If the latter, it is easy to imagine that Congress would go along with it, despite how previous AUMFs have been used. More war and more constraints on freedom at home would undoubtedly be potential outcomes.