On this Illegal War
A statement of protest
The United States and Israel have launched major combat operations against Iran. Explosions are being reported in Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, and other cities. Iran has retaliated, firing missiles at US bases in Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE. The region is at war. People are dying.
I want to say something about the Iranian regime before I make the argument I’m going to make, because I don’t want it to be confused. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a theocratic dictatorship that has murdered its own people with extraordinary brutality. In recent months alone, it is estimated to have killed over ten thousand protesters who rose up against it. It has sponsored terror across the Middle East for forty-seven years. It has chanted death to America and meant it. It has worked to destabilize every democratic government within its reach. I do not protest this war on behalf of the Iranian regime. The Iranian regime deserves no sympathy and will receive none from me.
I protest it on behalf of the Constitution of the United States.
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Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution vests the power to declare war in Congress. Not the president. Congress. This was not an accident or an oversight. The Founders were explicit, deliberate, and emphatic about this. They had watched what kings did with the power to make war unilaterally. They had read their history. They knew that the power to send men to die was too consequential, too irreversible, and too liable to abuse to be placed in a single pair of hands. So they placed it in the hands of the people’s representatives. That is what the document says. That is what it has always said.
Donald Trump did not consult Congress. He did not seek a declaration of war. He did not invoke the War Powers Resolution, which itself represents a decades-long erosion of congressional authority that we should have stopped long before now. He posted a video on Truth Social at two-thirty in the morning and announced that the United States military had begun major combat operations against a sovereign nation.
This is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is exactly what the Founders designed the Constitution to prevent.
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I have heard the arguments that will be made in response to this. That Iran was an imminent threat. That the president has inherent authority as commander in chief to respond to threats against the United States. That the Iranian regime was building nuclear weapons. That speed was necessary and consultation was impossible.
I reject every one of these arguments, not because I think Iran is not dangerous — it is — but because these are the arguments that have been used to erode the war power for sixty years, and every time we have accepted them, we have made the next erosion easier. The commander in chief clause does not grant the president the power to initiate major combat operations against foreign nations at will. That is not what commander in chief means. That is not what it has ever meant. What it means is that once Congress has authorized war, the president commands the forces that fight it.
No conservative who claims fidelity to the Constitution can support this. No originalist. No textualist. No one who has ever argued that the document means what it says.
They will. Watch them.
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I oppose this war not because I am a pacifist — I am not — and not because I think the Iranian regime is defensible — it is not. I oppose it because the president of the United States does not have the legal authority to wage it. And a republic that allows its president to make war without the consent of the people’s representatives is no longer, in any meaningful sense, a republic.
The circus has gone to war. Nobody voted for this.
A U.S./Israel regime change war in Iran is a fitting climax to the two decade-long U.S. foreign policy rumspringa. History will remember our decision to do Bibi’s most recent bidding in the Middle East as the final nail in America’s imperial coffin. Regime change in Iran was always central to Israel’s “Clean Break Strategy” (1996) and the Neocons’ “Greater Middle East” fever dream. However, even the dimmest know that Israel, a nation smaller than Vermont, cannot topple Iran, a country almost as big as Europe, without the direct involvement of their rich Uncle Sam. The bill for 25 years of U.S. foreign policy failures, arrogance and corruption is long past due. Today, America spends almost three times more ($877 billion) on defense than our closest rival (China $293 billion), and the whole world knows that we don’t win wars, much less stand behind our allies. Without clear and obtainable political objectives, the regime-change war in Iran will end like our military and political failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. If nothing else, in this subliterate age, Trump and his cabinet of Fox News spokesmodels are uniquely qualified to cosplay statesmen, kowtow to Israel, and oversee the fall of America’s collapsing empire. “This time there really is nobody flying the plane,” wrote Hunter S. Thompson at the start of the American imperial experiment in 2004. “We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they’re dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It’s the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.”
Numbers underwater? Time for a war!