Asking Congress to Back ISIS Strikes Is Tricky for Obama
WASHINGTON — When President Obama summoned his closest advisers to the Oval Office a year ago this week to tell them he was holding off on a missile strike against Syria, one of his arguments was that if he acted without Congress, he might not get congressional backing for military intervention the next time he needed it.
“He can’t make these decisions divorced from the American public and from Congress,” a senior aide said at the time. “Who knows what we’re going to face in the next three and a half years in the Middle East?”
Now, Mr. Obama knows what he is facing — rampaging Sunni militants who beheaded an American and have declared an Islamic caliphate across a swath of Iraq and Syria. But as the president considers airstrikes in Syria against the group, known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, seeking a congressional imprimatur remains a politically tricky undertaking.
It is not just that many Democrats and even some Republicans are wary about endorsing a new American military venture. The White House is also wrestling with how to define the president’s war-making authority in a way that does not undermine his claim last year that he had finally taken the United States off a permanent war footing
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/29/world/middleeast/obama-isis-syria-iraq.html?_r=0
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