This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 14th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

September 11th, 2001 forever changed how millions of people think about the relative safety of the United States.

That September 14, 2001, when Congress approved an open-ended resolution on the use of force,

has changed for 16 years how the United States engages with the world.

Gene Healy, Vice President at the Cato Institute, talks about this less appreciated anniversary.

I don't think it will get as much attention as the 16 year anniversary of September 11th, but in some ways it may have been more important.

There's the hackneyed phrase September 11th that changed everything,

but in many ways maybe it was the authorization for the use of force that

Congress passed three days after September 11th that changed everything. Okay so what was included within that agreement and what has that agreement been used to justify?

Well it's only 60 words long.

Obviously at the time just after September 11th, the target was Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The operative clause of the resolution just says the president the force against the perpetrators of the September 11th attacks and anyone who harbored

aided and abetted them.

And at the time, the people who passed it didn't sound like they thought they were authorizing an open-ended multi-generational war.

You know, Joe Biden made a big deal out of how this resolution is nothing like the Gulf of Tonkin

resolution that authorized the Vietnam War, that this resolution was far more limited.

Well, it has now been in use for over twice as long as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

And it's been used to authorize military force

in multiple countries, bomb eight countries, and put boots on the ground covertly

and overtly in many others. It has really been transformational. It's not that

presidents before 9-11 didn't engage in frolic and detours, unauthorized uses of presidential force. You know, and some of those could be pretty significant, but most of the presidential

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