Unfortunately, in this, as in so many other areas, Congress is in perpetual flight from responsibility. It should begin by revisiting the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which was enacted while the World Trade Center and Pentagon still smoldered.

The AUMF authorized the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.” As Rosa Brooks, a former Pentagon official and now Georgetown University law professor, crisply notes, five and three of those words especially matter.

In her simultaneously witty and disturbing book “How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything” (2016), Brooks notes that the AUMF does not authorize force “against anyone, anywhere, anytime” but only against those who “planned, authorized, committed or aided” 9/11. And it authorizes force for a specific purpose — to “prevent any future acts” against this nation by such entities, “not to prevent all future bad acts committed by anyone, anywhere.”