Obama Devises New Legal Rationale for Syria War and New Wars

The Obama Administration has crept another step closer to expanded warfare, using the same method evident a week ago when it announced that it had given the military the authority to attack Syrian government forces if they engage in combat against armed opposition groups trained by the U.S. military. A questionable policy change is hatched in the bowels of the White House and leaked to a reporter via some anonymous official, rather than engaging the U.S. Congress and the American people on war and peace.

This time, the step involves the new legal rationale the Obama White House gives to explain the legal authority it believes it has to support the above policy, announced via unnamed source last week: Article II of the Constitution. “If Syrian government forces attack the Syrian fighters we have trained and equipped while they were engaging ISIL, the President would have the authority under Article II of the Constitution to defend those fighters,” the unnamed senior administration official told The Hill. Nor does this just apply to the handful of vetted fighters that the U.S. military has trained; it covers the groups they come from and return to, which haven’t been vetted. In fact, a U.S. official (the same one?), said the U.S.-led coalition already is providing those groups with air support against ISIS even though they do not yet have U.S.-trained rebels embedded with them. A diplomatic official told The Hill that some of the groups may target Assad — which would bring the United States closer to war with the regime.

According to legal experts consulted by The Hill, Obama’s legal rationale is turning Article II on its head. Louis Fisher, scholar in residence at the Constitution Project and former Congressional Research Service researcher, and other legal experts say Article II has been interpreted to allow a President to “repel sudden attack” against U.S. troops, the U.S. mainland, and its interests. Using it to defend Syrian rebels would not fit under that previous interpretation, he said. Stephen Vladeck, law professor at American University, said, “by that logic any person or piece of military equipment used by anyone on a side of a conflict with which we agree, is all of a sudden covered by Article II. And that cannot be right.”

Though not mentioned by The Hill, such an interpretation could have dangerous implications for U.S. policy in Ukraine, where the U.S. has “assets,” not only U.S. troops, but also Ukrainian national guardsmen from such neo-Nazi groups as Right Sector and Azov battalion that they’ve trained, and humvees, radars and other equipment that the United States has supplied to the Kiev regime for war against its own Donbass region.