"We may need ground forces just to rescue our ground forces."

Andrew McCarthy points out that

less than 24 hours after Obama suggested that Congress should forbid him from using ground troops against Islamic State terrorists, Islamic State terrorists were busy capturing a western Iraqi town just 13 minutes away from the base where 320 U.S. Marines are on the ground, training hapless Iraqi forces. Forget ground forces to defeat ISIS; the way Obama is managing things, we may need ground forces just to rescue our ground forces.

...In our constitutional system, therefore, Congress is not permitted to command the armed forces. It has no more power to direct the president to deploy or not deploy ground forces than it does to tell the president to “take that hill” or capture this enemy combatant.

...Or, as he has done in Iraq and is doing in Afghanistan, he can withdraw even as the enemy is on the rise — a command decision known, in less politically correct parlance, as surrender. But whatever command decisions the president makes, they are his decisions. He is politically accountable for them.

...Obama has made a career of ducking accountability, whether by voting present, leading from behind, or cynically condemning the predictable damage wreaked by his own policies (and relying on the press not to call him on it). The effort to gull Congress into passing an AUMF that purports to forbid military commands that this commander-in-chief has already, and irresponsibly, decided not to give is not just the usual Obama blame-shifting; it is unconstitutional.

...More to the point, ISIS is not close to being the totality of the enemy. Because of his own ideological blinders, the president will not recognize that we are confronted by a global jihad united by the ideology of sharia supremacism. Besides ISIS and al-Qaeda (its Sunni forbear and, for now, rival), the enemy includes Iran and its Shiite terror axis. While battling the Sunni jihadists in Iraq and Syria for the moment, Iran has long colluded with those selfsame Sunnis in the jihad against the U.S., Israel, and the West.

An American strategy that focuses only on ISIS, pretends that al-Qaeda has already been “decimated,” and regards Iran as a potential ally rather than a mortal enemy is doomed to fail. When it does, Obama wants congressional Republicans to share in the ignominy.

Obama’s second rationale involves his legacy hunting. Uniquely in American history, Obama is building a presidential legacy that is not about his contributions to the United States but his place in the movement Left as the man who tamed America.

...I’ve contended several times over the years that the AUMFs currently in effect need overhauling. The objective of overhaul, however, should be to define our jihadist enemies more clearly and encourage the president to vanquish them — without geographical or temporal limits. Still, even with all their imperfections, the current AUMFs, as they’ve been interpreted over the last 13 years, empower the president to use any appropriate military force against al-Qaeda, ISIS, and their sponsors, wherever on earth they operate.

Congress would be wise to improve on the current AUMFs. Obama’s unconstitutional proposal, to the contrary, is the roadmap to defeat.

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