60 Words And A War Without End: The Untold Story Of The Most Dangerous Sentence In U.S. History

How 60 Words Led To Endless War For America
A blaze engulfs a car at the scene of an explosion in the Shiite Muslim Al-Amin district of Baghdad on December 8, 2013. A series of bombings, which hit five different areas in and around the Iraqi capital on December 8, killed at least 16 people, security and medical officials said, while another car bomb near a cafe in Buhruz, a Sunni-majority town in the religiously and ethnically mixed Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, killed more than 10 people on December 9 in the latest in a series of attacks on crowded public places this year. AFP PHOTO/STR (Photo credit should read STR/AFP/Getty Images)
A blaze engulfs a car at the scene of an explosion in the Shiite Muslim Al-Amin district of Baghdad on December 8, 2013. A series of bombings, which hit five different areas in and around the Iraqi capital on December 8, killed at least 16 people, security and medical officials said, while another car bomb near a cafe in Buhruz, a Sunni-majority town in the religiously and ethnically mixed Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, killed more than 10 people on December 9 in the latest in a series of attacks on crowded public places this year. AFP PHOTO/STR (Photo credit should read STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Written in the frenzied, emotional days after 9/11, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force was intended to give President Bush the ability to retaliate against whoever orchestrated the attacks. But more than 12 years later, this one broadly-phrased sentence remains the primary legal justification for nearly every covert operation around the world. Here’s how that sentence came to be, and what it’s since come to mean.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot