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Last Updated on July 30, 2021.

WASHINGTON — Win Without War Executive Director Stephen Miles released the following statement regarding airstrikes conducted against Kataib Hezbollah and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada in Syria and Iraq this Sunday:

“This Sunday, we received the all-too-familiar news that the United States had conducted airstrikes not authorized by Congress or based on any claimed statutory authority in two separate sovereign nations, Iraq and Syria.

“These tit-for-tat military strikes between the U.S. and armed non-state actors in Iraq and Syria, coming 18 years since the United States first invaded Iraq, shows us all we need to know about the destructive and destabilizing reality of endless war. It is time the Biden administration sees what the U.S. public has long known: no amount of bombs — no number of years of military presence in a country we never should have been in in the first place — will make us, or anyone in the world, safer.

“Given the pace and regularity of these attacks, we have serious concerns about the President’s claimed authority to conduct these strikes under Article II of the Constitution. It is Congress, not the President, that must decide whether and when the United States goes to war.

“During these kinds of strikes, it’s easy to forget that people and families live in the areas and are stuck between violence that they have nothing to do with. We’ve seen how these cycles of violence spiral and cause enormous suffering, pain, and instability — it’s time we interrupt this process.

“We call on the Biden administration to end this escalation and the entire endless war mindset that led to it.”

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June 28, 2021