WORSE THAN W!:

It was equal parts ironic and tragic watching US Secretary of State John Kerry testify before the Senate Foreign Relations committee this week, as he shamelessly made the case for a war without end against Isis. It was the same place he sat 43 years ago, as a young soldier, bravely and eloquently calling for an end to American fighting in Vietnam, his generation's endless war - the same war that led to Congress passing the War Powers Resolution, the law the Obama administration has now decided it can completely disregard.

As with much of the White House's secret and possibly illegal march back to Iraq and beyond, almost every aspect of Kerry's testimony on Wednesday was riddled with holes. The Obama administration's case for intervention begins and ends with the fantastical idea that it thinks it can use a law passed 13 years ago - before Isis even existed, and meant for the perpetrators of 9/11 - to start a war that White House officials freely admit will last for years, yet is aimed at a group that virtually all intelligence analysts agree is not an imminent threat to the United States.

Exactly how the administration thinks it can manage to go to war without getting Congress to vote on it is so perplexing, apparently they can't even figure it out. Last week, "a senior administration official" floated the idea to the New York Times that the White House was claiming authority to wage war on Isis based on the Iraq War Resolution from 2002 - the very statute the Obama administration wanted to repeal just a year ago. But this week, with the Pentagon and Congress knocking, it seems Team Obama has abandoned that premise for going to war and returned to one of its initial justifications: the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that declared war on "those nations, organizations, or persons responsible for 9/11".

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