Will Congress Ever Accept Responsibility for Never Ending War?

Writing at The American Conservative, William S. Smith trashes Paul Ryan and House leadership for refusing to debate the Authorization for Use of Military Force. Congress is avoiding any responsibility for the never ending war in Afghanistan. Smith writes:

Last month, Fox News host Tucker Carlson engaged in a raucous debate on air with foreign-policy analyst Max Boot. The July 12 Boot-Carlson debate was very acrimonious and yet, in a strange way, a relief to watch because this type of confrontation over American foreign policy is rare. The nation has been through years of disastrous military interventions, and the American public is overtly weary of these wars. Yet there has been little debate about the direction of American foreign policy, especially in the Congress.

In fact, the congressional leadership has engaged in serial evasion of their Article I responsibility to sanction military action.

The unwillingness of the Congress to debate war and peace has persisted for years.

The underlying reason for the lack of debate is that the bipartisan foreign policy establishment has, since the end of the Cold War, been united in supporting an aggressive, even belligerent American foreign policy. Bush 41 invaded the Middle East with half a million troops to save a dubious Kuwaiti regime just when a peace dividend was in our grasp. President Clinton ramped up Bush’s intervention in Somalia (Black Hawk Down), and then launched wars in the Balkans that probably made the ethnic cleansing worse. Bush 43, of course, gets the gold ribbon of interventionism by creating widespread disorder in Middle East with the Iraq War.