In Iran deal fight, Obama highlights his wars

President Obama: Not a peacenik. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

President Obama promised to end the war in Iraq during his 2008 White House run. He won reelection in 2012 boasting that he had made good on that promise and would soon wrap up the conflict in Afghanistan. But now, as he labors to sell his historic nuclear deal with Iran, Obama wants his critics to focus on how willing he has been to use deadly force overseas — overtly, covertly, sending in troops, ordering drone strikes, acting with or without congressional authority, with allies or unilaterally, and sometimes in ways that test the bounds of international law.

“As commander in chief, I have not shied away from using force when necessary,” the president boasted in a speech on Wednesday to defend the Iran agreement. “I’ve ordered military action in seven countries.”

And so he has. Obama surged troops into Afghanistan not long after taking office. He ordered a secret raid into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. He became the first-ever president to target an individual American, Anwar al-Awlaki, for assassination, a killing carried out by a drone strike in Yemen. He has sent troops into Somalia to target extremist leaders. He waged war in Libya without congressional authority. And he has struck at the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, a military campaign that reaches its one-year mark this weekend, also absent a formal OK from Congress.

Anticipating attacks on Obama’s national security record in Thursday’s Republican presidential debates, a senior administration official provided Yahoo News with a list of nine senior extremists thought to have been killed since September 2014 in operations carried out or supported by the United States, including drone strikes, airstrikes and commando raids.

“As we have in the past, we will take action to disrupt continuing, imminent threats to the United States and our citizens,” the senior official said on condition of anonymity. “We partner with our allies across the globe when we can and take unilateral action when we must.”

The list omits other instances of Obama’s willingness to use the tools of national security in ways that might make many liberals uncomfortable — like using the government’s vast surveillance powers on Americans or the unprecedented cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear program shortly after he took office. The White House is also studiously mute in the face of reports of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, a campaign thought to have been carried out by Israel.

But the chest-thumping approach aims to counter an abiding caricature of Obama as a peace-loving and naïve leader always more at home extending an outstretched hand than displaying a clenched fist.

Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham conjured up that image in a statement after Obama’s Iran speech. “What we object to is the president’s lack of realism — his ideological belief that diplomacy is good and force is bad,” they said in a joint statement.

The two senators, long-standing hawks, were on far firmer ground when they noted that the Islamic State, also known as ISIL, rose to regional prominence on Obama’s watch. And their argument that Obama has done too little to protect Syrians from the unimaginable carnage of their civil war would likely find some liberals nodding in agreement.

But time and time again, Obama has proven to be a far more calculating, even cold, decision-maker when it comes to using military force than his critics (or many of his supporters) reckon him to be. And time and time again, he has bragged about his willingness to fight.

Set aside for a moment the president’s repeated claims to have “ended” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which would likely come as a surprise to the American troops in both countries.

Even before he got the keys to the White House, Obama was telling anyone who would listen that he would not hesitate to violate another country’s sovereignty with U.S. military forces — to order elite American forces into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden.

“If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act, and we will take them out,” Obama said in his Oct. 7, 2008, debate with McCain. “We will kill bin Laden.”

McCain and Obama’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, repeatedly condemned that message throughout the campaign.

And Obama raised eyebrows when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize with a speech in which he condemned the “reflexive suspicion of America” in some countries and declared, “I — like any head of state — reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation.”

Even his famous Oct. 2, 2002, speech against the war in Iraq included a lengthy defense of the use of force, from the Civil War to World War II to the mustering that followed the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I don’t oppose all wars,” he said. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.”

What he is not opposed to, however, is acting without explicit congressional authority, as shown both by the Libya campaign and the ongoing war against the Islamic State.

When Obama ordered the first strikes against the Islamic State, the White House promised that the conflict would not be “prolonged.” The administration has since admitted that Obama’s successor will inherit the war and has not let the absence of a formal authorization from Congress hold back the campaign.

Obama says the campaign is legal under the authorization for use of military force (AUMF) against al-Qaida in the aftermath of 9/11. But Democratic and Republican critics have cast doubt on that claim and said the president should get formal authority to target IS.

The White House requested an AUMF on Feb. 11 and then largely washed its hands of the debate. And unbridgeable gaps between Republicans and Democrats in Congress on whether and how to limit the president’s war-making authority have stalled the legislation.

“Congress has refused a meaningful debate or vote on the war against the Islamic State. A Congress quick to criticize any executive action by the president has nevertheless encouraged him to carry out an unauthorized war,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said on the Senate floor this week.

Kaine, an early and ardent champion of having Congress debate an authorization for the use of military force, tallied up operations since the president launched the first airstrikes on Aug. 8, 2014: 3,000 U.S. troops and 4,500 air strikes at a cost of $3.2 billion through July — or $9.4 million per day.

Kaine concluded that “one year of war against the Islamic State has transformed a president, who was elected in part because of his early opposition to the Iraq war, into an executive war president.”