Lawfare › Not Asking the Girl to Dance: I have always supported the administration in taking a broad view of what it means to be an “associated force” under the AUMF. But “associated” does not mean “not associated” or “repudiated by” or “broken with” or even “used to be associated with.”
This is not a stable or sustainable reading of the law, absent some dramatic, non-public intelligence about the ISIS-Al Qaeda relationship. Remember that this is a law that barely a year ago, President Obama was lecturing us needed to be narrowed and repealed. “This war like all wars must end,” he piously intoned. Apparently not, however, before we dramatically expand its interpretive scope and deploy it to support a new and open-ended military campaign that, in the president’s own words, “will take time.” All to avoid asking the girl, who might say no, to dance.