Bonnie Kristian
He did so by ordering a commando raid to take out a leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). When the dust cleared, one American Navy SEAL and more than a dozen civilians were dead. Among those killed was 8-year-old Nawar al-Awlaki, a little girl who had the misfortune to be born to al Qaeda propagandist and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, whom the Obama administration killed by drone strikes along with one of his other children back in 2011.
Americans’ new attention to US intervention in Yemen is rightly focused on these details, especially the tragic and preventable deaths. But if we only notice the particulars of this strike, we run the risk of missing an alarming bigger picture: This raid marked the first time the United States has put boots on the ground in combat in the Yemeni civil war, and those SEALs were sent into the line of fire without constitutionally-required authorization from Congress.
If that seems like a pedantic consideration, I assure you it is not. This is a major new development in a military intervention launched by the Obama White House without public discussion or a declaration of war. Obama started US involvement in Yemen secretly and illegally, and to escalate to ground war—to putting US troops in harm’s way—without so much as a go-ahead from Congress would be a serious mistake.