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At the command of President Trump, U.S. military killed one of the world’s most dangerous men, Iran’s Quds Force commander, Qassem Suleimani. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) expressed her disapproval disapproval in the President for not asking Congress before eliminating the Iranian General.
This is not the stance Pelosi took during the Obama Administration, when he commanded over 2,800 attacks in multiple countries with consulting Congress.
Daily Wire reported on President Trump’s predecessor.
“The U.S. military has been conducting strikes in Iraq for 10 months, and began striking directly at targets in Syria last September as part of Mr. Obama’s announced campaign to degrade the capabilities of the Islamic State,” The Washington Times reported in April 2015.
This past weekend’s attacks brought the total to 1,458 strikes in Iraq and 1,343 in Syria by U.S. forces. Coalition forces allied with the U.S. have conducted another 655 attacks on Iraqi targets and 95 in Syria.
Mr. Obama has justified the attacks under his commander in chief powers and under the 2001 resolution authorizing force against al Qaeda, and the 2002 resolution authorizing the ouster of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill have said Mr. Obama is stretching those laws and that the strikes could be illegal — though they say they want to put them on firm footing by passing a new authorization.
What’s more, there were “ten times more air strikes in the covert war on terror during President Barack Obama’s presidency than under his predecessor, George W. Bush,” the Bureau for Investigative Journalism reported in 2017.
Obama ordered strikes outside the Middle East in places like Somalia and Yemen. President Trump has been clear that the attack at the Iraq that ended the General’s life were in order to prevent a war, not start one.
The President has relied on the same statutory authority that allows him to deploy troops for 60 days with congressional approval that his predecessors used to carry on decades of war.
