Former Texas Congressman Ron Paul weighed in on the situation, and noted that this appears to be one more war the U.S. is fighting without approval from Congress—and it is a war that includes the presence of U.S. troops in 53 out of the 54 nations in Africa.
While South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a devoted war hawk and member of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, initially admitted that he was not aware the U.S. had troops in Niger before news of the attack surfaced, he immediately pledged his support to yet another military conflict created by the United States.
As Ron Paul noted, the U.S. is still using the Authorization for Use of Military Force that was passed after 9/11 and intended to be used to go after the suspected terrorists responsible for the attacks.
The AUMF that was passed in 2001 has been used and abused over the last 16 years to fit each and every military conflict the U.S. decides to pursue. Instead of focusing on one group, the U.S. has applied the authorization to any situation in which the trigger phrases Al-Qaeda, ISIS, or Islamic terrorism are included, and U.S. officials are now scrambling to find a way to make that definition fit, in order to justify military presence in Africa.