AUMF: Authorized Usage of Military Force

ISIS/ISIL has been quite the hot topic as of late in both the mass media and the offices of many important political leaders of our country. The behavior of this group is absolutely horrific, obviously, but there's something just a bit unsettling the way the media has been portraying them to me. The rhetoric routinely used about how the US needs to protect itself and its interests by going in there and beating up the bad guy is being repeated by so many news organizations that the question has no longer become "Should we invade?" but instead "How much should we invade?" This is further replicated in national politics by Obama's recent request for congress to authorize strikes against the so-called Islamic State. The reason that this is somewhat problematic for me is two-fold: First, it falls back upon terrorist rhetoric, and secondly it assumes that the correct thing for the US to do is to invade another country(ies).

The word terrorist is quite a fickle one. Everyone assumes that they know what classifies someone as a terrorist, but no one's really ready to defend that definition. We jump to slap the the label of terrorist on any extremists in the middle east, but you only get wide-eyed stares when you suggest that the US government's actions might just be terrorist-esque as well. Yet, when asked what makes a terrorist a terrorist, the usual definition is just someone who uses terrorist activities to forward a political goal. US foreign policy, specifically in the middle east, has oft inspired and caused terror along the people there. I mean hell, there are kids there who are afraid of blue skies  due to US drone strikes. The result of this implicit double standard is an uneven portrayal of violent state-based actions. Furthermore, the US's terrorism is "justified" by targeting those who we call terrorists in the middle east. This logic seems to suffer a lack of any sense of objectivity, only feeding the state war machine.

Speaking of war machines: Holy shit, US middle eastern policy. America has been involved in middle eastern domestic politics since 1949 when it supported a coup in Syria, and we've had troops continuously in there for longer than I've been alive. Despite this lengthy invasion, it rarely affects US domestic life (Arguably in no meaningful way since 9/11). This is a part of the reason that this  never-ending sequence of wars continues to rage on. Another aspect of it is that US intervention in other countries is no longer something that citizens (and the world) are shocked by. It's become the status quo- it's more abnormal if the US doesn't have it's hand in some other country's cookie jar. And in my humble opinion, a country where we're constantly bombing other places in the world doesn't exactly sound like the shining city on a hill.