The Senate will mark the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq this week by voting to repeal the outdated authorization of military force that greenlighted the war, a bipartisan effort to formally conclude a badly misguided conflict America is still paying for today.
Nineteen Senate Republicans voted with Democrats to advance its repeal on Thursday, a largely symbolic move that advocates say is designed to reassert Congress’s authority to declare war. Yet it leaves untouched the broad 2001 authorization for use of military force (AUMF) that every presidential administration since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has used to wage war across the globe.
There is broad agreement in Congress and among the public that bad intelligence led to President George W. Bush’s decision to begin airstrikes on Iraq on March 19, 2003, and that it resulted in the loss of thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives and trillions of wasted U.S. dollars.
But there are still some Republican senators who argue that good things came out of the war and that the whole enterprise was ultimately worth it. That view is not shared by more recent GOP arrivals in Congress, however, reflecting a changed party under former President Donald Trump that is increasingly questioning U.S. involvement abroad, including in Ukraine.
TVNL Comment: When will they ever learn, when will the ever learn?
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