As I stated during my campaign, I cannot support this bill.
During the course of a decade in Operation Iraqi Freedom, we lost the lives of 4,424 Atlasian heroes, with over 31,000 more who came home wounded. What have we gotten for their sacrifice? What can we tell the families of those soldiers who lost loved ones? Pretty much nothing. The situation is actually even worse now than it was before. While it's nice to say that we might be able to fix all of the world's problems, I'm not sure what evidence exists to suggest we wouldn't just be throwing away the lives of more Atlasian servicepeople on a fruitless venture that does nothing except gain us more enemies in the Middle East. Quite frankly, while we can contribute to the fight against ISIS in certain ways, Atlasia should not be leading this coalition.
I also have a few concerns with how the bill is written. First, is the inclusion of an authorization of military force under a "recommendation" for the framework of negotiations toward building a coalition. That doesn't really make much sense. Either we authorize military force or we don't. This bill seems to suggest that it's only a recommendation or that it might be part of negotiations with other states. It doesn't make sense for the Congress to recommend to itself to authorize military force. It makes even less sense to involve the decision in negotiations with other countries. I believe the intent of the bill is to authorize military force, which is another reason why I'm opposed, but the language is kind of unclear.
Second, the bill doesn't specify whether we will be contributing ground troops to the effort. It authorizes military force (apparently) in Iraq and Syria against ISIS, and it suggests collaboration on "military projects," air strikes, and intelligence. That is pretty vague.
Third, how much is this going to cost? As far as I can tell, there is no current plan to fund the military efforts in this coalition.
Fourth, while I appreciate the efforts of the Secretary of State to provide us with a list of potential coalition partners in the Senate thread, this doesn't guarantee that any of those countries will actually agree to provide the assistance that we'd need from them in order to win. It seems to me that if we agree to authorize military force without knowing whether the coalition partners are serious, we could wind up in a situation where Atlasia is shouldering too much of the military burden or going it alone.
Fifth, I'm concerned about the provision that doesn't allow governments that "support the Syrian government and Bashar Al-Assad" to be part of the coalition. First, that's kind of vague. How do we determine if a country supports or doesn't support. A working coalition would need substantial contribution from Middle East countries to have any chance of long term stability in the region.
Because of these several reasons, I can't support this bill. I hope other Representatives will consider joining me, or at the very least, amending the bill to fix some of its issues.
To this list of questions, I add this: what are the "other terror groups" talked about in the beginning, and never mentioned again?
