President Obama wants a fresh set of keys to the Mideast war room, and the old Bush requested ones, that he’s still borrowing, undermining the legality of his executive powers, to be taken away. The replacement keys would again come with preapproval of the use of discretionary force, but redirected towards a more limited interpretation, absent a Bush anti-terrorist carte blanche, and with a preset expiration date. That President Obama has already employed Bush’s keys outside their intended use, against a new vehicle for Islamic extremism, remains instructive and telling as to actual Congressional restraints on the executive branch. More instructive still, this Decider-in-Chief is one inviting congressional restraints, and from an opposition majority that keeps beating the drums of conflict.

This new Authorization for Use of Military Force is requested to allow the president to fight the continuing advance of ISIS, ISIL, or IS, all acronyms for a growing insurgent movement to form an Islamic State. ISIL doesn’t want to be the ruling political identity of any, or all, existing sovereignties in the region, but the formation of an Islamic caliphate uniting the entire Muslim world. The Mideast, as mapped by Western subjugation in the last century, is to be dismantled and returned to the Muslim design it was meant to be, its rule in direct descendance from Muhammad himself.

President Obama promises that any authorization will not constitute the start of “another ground war, like Afghanistan or Iraq,” but must allow him freedom to send in ground troops for “targeted missions” when needed. To some, this sounds like just so much Clintonesque lawyerism, everything depending on what the meaning of “IS” is, or how “war” is measured.

Barack Obama was voted into office because he was going to bring an end to two endless wars in the Mideast. Seeking retribution, we mired ourselves in a far too costly battle that presented no foreseeable solution. “Mission Accomplished.” Not. America realized that regime change was most needed at home.

Post 911, presidential aspirant Obama took a bold stand in the prevailing political winds clamoring for all out war, declaring his opposition to engagement in Iraq because its politics posed “no imminent and direct threat to the U. S.” Our enemy was a very for real Bin Laden, not a posturing Saddam. For Obama, an Iraq war needed “a clear rationale with strong international support,” or it would “only fan the flames of the Middle East.” A politically manufactured justification would mistakenly “encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida.” Citing our own Civil War and WW2 as examples of the sometimes moral necessity of war, Obama made perfectly clear that “I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.”

One incredibly dumb Iraq war then joined an equally dumb Afghanistan war, both, in Obama’s view, “based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.” The War on Terror became a war on the most elusive enemy, that of fear itself. We were at war with a primordial bogeyman, and our desired goal was of ideological overreach, far beyond payback.

Barack Obama, elected to guide us out of such mistaken leadership, found himself presidential inheritor of the very futility he had identified before it began.

As if that wasn’t surreal enough, barely settled in as Commander-in- Chief of two wars, he found himself the completely unexpected recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Fully aware of the irony, in accepting the honor he trotted out the “Just-War Theory,” even though neither war met such a doctrine’s criteria, either in motivation or conduct.

Obama still projects total confidence in his steadfast position of lawyered leadership, as if legality and justice are actually the same thing. However, a “ Shock and Awed” Muslim world, increasingly a world apart, possesses an equally steadfast moral doctrine towards the practice of violent justice.

ISIS grows with each assault from the West’s superior military might. President Obama’s AUMF request fully anticipates the need for renewal in three years time. ISIL labels us as the “Crusaders.” Our policy of self-righteous intervention, not to bridge an ideological divide, seeking co-existence, but to force a fundamental cultural shift to our world view, gives that label understandable credence.

Some say ISIL’s swelling recruitment is due to lack of sufficient employment and stagnant economics. Others think it reveals a far more profound impetus, a cultural defense brought about by spiritually corrupt Western values that more and more “terrorists” find undesirable or worse.

Three mid-teen British girls have recently thrown in with what we see as incomprehensible madness. Rather than marginalized fanatics, they were “socially well integrated” model students before leaving their families clueless and flying away to join in a fight against the Great Satan.

Brutal depictions of radical Islam justice keep attracting foreign recruits to ISIL’s provision of some inexplicable fulfillment, inexplicable to those that practice their faith publicly once a week, at best, rather than three times a day, and incomprehensible to those that believe secular exceptionalism need not accept any other world view.

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Gary Anderson lives in Bath.