Vol. 79/No. 7      March 2, 2015

That means that beside U.S. airstrikes and special forces operations, the Iraqi army, Kurdish forces in both countries, and select groups fighting the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship in Syria would wage bloody battles on the ground to defeat the reactionary Islamist forces.

The resolution bars what it calls “enduring offensive ground combat operations,” and is not “authorization of another ground war, like Afghanistan or Iraq,” Obama said Feb. 11. However, it does give the White House “flexibility” to deal with “unforeseen circumstances” and authorizes more far-ranging attacks on any “associated persons or forces” of Islamic State.

The military force request would expire after three years and repeals a 2002 law that authorized the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Executive power to launch war moves abroad, barred by the Constitution, has been the subject of debate over the past 40 years. As mass protests against Washington’s Vietnam War won increasing backing in the working class inside the army and across the country, Congress passed the War Powers Act in 1973. The act requires either a formal declaration of war or congressional authorization for the president to conduct military operations longer than 60 days.

Many administrations have ordered military operations without authorization, including Bill Clinton in Serbia in 1999 and Obama in Libya four years ago, with little complaint.

The administration says its operations in Iraq and Syria today are already legal under the still-standing 2001 act authorizing war operations against al-Qaeda, including in Afghanistan, for attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Washington has led more than 2,000 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria over the past six months and put some 2,700 U.S. troops in Iraq to train that country’s armed forces. Now, Obama says, he would prefer Congress back the war.

The proposed resolution has evoked criticisms across the spectrum of bourgeois politics. Republican House Speaker John Boehner called for a “robust authorization, not one that limits our options” in a Feb. 11 statement.

The same day a New York Times editorial called Obama’s request “alarmingly broad,” saying, “If the White House prevails, it would get virtually unrestricted power to engage in attacks around the globe as long as it can justify a connection, however tenuous, to the Islamic State.”

US attempts to rebuild Iraqi army
In Iraq, Washington’s efforts have focused on trying to rebuild Baghdad’s army, which has shrunk to 48,000 since it was routed by Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, last summer. As the Iraqi army imploded, Islamic State seized control of one-third of the country’s territory in the predominantly Sunni Arab west. Washington wants Baghdad’s troops to fight Islamic State and to serve as a counterweight to the increasingly autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. But this hasn’t been going so well.

Islamic State forces took control of al-Baghdadi Feb. 12, less than five miles from the Ayn al-Asad air base, where more than 300 U.S. military personnel have been training Iraqi troops. The town was one of the few in Anbar province still under government control. The following day, Islamic State unsuccessfully attacked the base.

Since the U.S. war in Iraq brought down the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003, Washington has backed successive governments in Baghdad dominated by sectarian Shiite political forces. Backed by Iran, the capitalist rulers in Baghdad have funded and armed Shiite militias, encompassing more than 100,000 fighters, which have been more capable than the Iraqi army in fighting Islamic State. But they’ve also carried out sectarian and brutal attacks on Sunnis living in those areas.

Kurdish fighters, led by the Peshmerga army in northern Iraq and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria, are the only truly effective forces combating Islamic State.

“We will continue cleansing one village after another and after that, we will continue to liberate all of Rojava [West Kurdistan] and all Syrian soil” from Islamic State, Shorsh Hassan, YPG spokesman in Kobani, told the Associated Press Feb. 10. After more than four months of bloody street battles, Kurdish forces led the battle to drive Islamic State out of Kobani in January, with support from U.S. bombing. Since then they have retaken more than 160 villages in the area. “This is the promise we have made to ourselves and to the Kurdish and Syrian people,” Hassan said.
 
 
Related articles:
NYPD ‘terror’ unit threatens workers’ political space
Wash. rally: Charge cops who killed farmworker
 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home