Can Congress Stop Mad King Trump’s Mad War on Iran?
For some years now, there have been the glimmerings of a bipartisan movement to restrain presidential power over foreign policy. After the bloody catastrophe of George W. Bush’s war on terror, and the manifold abuses of the Obama administration—like assassinating American citizens without trial—many thought, or hoped, that Congress would reassert its constitutional powers and duties.
So far, it hasn’t. Congress failed to restrain Donald Trump in his first term, and failed to restrain him again after his kidnapping of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro. Now Trump has started a full-blown war on Iran, in concert with Israel, without so much as a fig leaf of a legal justification.
Yet while many congressional Democrats are demanding a vote on a war powers resolution—including some surprising voices like the centrist Mark Warner (D-VA)—so far only a handful of Republicans are doing the same, such as Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Thom Tillis (R-NC), and the reliable gadfly Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY). Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), who previously talked a big game about restraining presidential war powers, has already come out against the resolution.
More from Ryan Cooper: Trump’s Senseless Waste in IranA vote probably will come at some point this week, but it will be largely symbolic. As Kevin Frey explains at MS NOW, while the Senate might actually vote against Trump, House Democrats are proposing a “concurrent resolution” that does not carry the force of law, because a normal joint resolution would require the approval of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, which is not going to happen. House Dems could lever out the resolution with a discharge petition, but that takes weeks. Even if both pass, Trump is certain to veto it, and there is no prospect of assembling two-thirds majorities to override him.
It is instructive to compare George W. Bush’s war of aggression against Iraq with the joint Trump-Israel war of aggression against Iran. For one thing, the Bush administration at least granted the American people “the courtesy of lying to them,” to quote writer John Ganz. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and much of their cabinet spent a year building the case for invasion, with the result that 73 percent of Americans initially supported the war. They also got permission from Congress.
After the invasion, the administration did attempt to rebuild Iraq. Though it was a stupendously corrupt and incompetent effort, plagued with torture and murder that touched off a huge civil war that killed maybe a million people, spilled into Syria, and led directly to the rise of ISIS, a lot of money was still spent and a lot of American soldiers got killed (at least ostensibly) trying to keep the peace. (It also ironically greatly strengthened Iran’s position, as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been a rival.)
The cost of the invasion—not least in how it gravely undermined the United Nations charter, which categorically forbids wars of aggression—was not remotely worth it. It was a crime of world-historic proportions. But today, Iraq is sort of recovering. The democratic government the Bush administration sketched out has persisted and taken root, after a great deal of domestic Iraqi reforms and organization. The economy, while plagued with chronic high unemployment and largely dependent on oil exports, is growing. It could be a lot worse.
By contrast, “a lot worse than Iraq” appears to be the explicit Trump-Israel goal for Iran. There has been no vote in Congress on an authorization to use military force, and no public argument whatsoever making the case for war, or even clearly explaining the rationale, which changes by the day. First it was about getting rid of alleged nuclear weapons facilities that Trump himself had loudly promised were destroyed months ago. Then it was about getting rid of ballistic missiles. Then it was about regime change. And then it was about helping Israel.
Rather than capturing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and putting him on trial, as happened to Saddam Hussein, the Trump-Israel forces just assassinated him, along with numerous other top Iranian officials. On Tuesday, Israeli forces bombed Iran’s Council of Experts as they convened to select a new supreme leader.
It would be hard to ask for a better demonstration of why Congress, not the president, is supposed to have power over war.
About the only objective that fits with these facts is that Israel wants Iran to become a failed state, and Trump either shares that goal, or is too stupid and lazy to stop them. Israel doesn’t want Iran to become a prosperous, healthy democracy, because that would reduce Israel’s relative power in the region—particularly given that Iran has about nine times Israel’s population. By immediately murdering anyone who looks to be consolidating power, Israel can ensure Iran becomes a Thirty Years’ War-esque nightmare dystopia. “We wanted to prevent them from picking a new supreme leader,” an Israeli official told Axios.
It would be hard to ask for a better demonstration of why Congress, not the president, is supposed to have power over war. As I have previously written, American taxpayer dollars are being spent at a rate of perhaps a billion dollars a day in service of a goal that the president can’t even articulate. The Founding Fathers were wrong about many things, but they were entirely correct to vest power over war with the legislature, which is supposed to publicly debate and vote on important questions.
I can at least imagine why Israel wants to keep 93 million people in utter destitution forever—though it’s also not difficult to imagine that leading to severe blowback eventually—but that goal makes no sense whatsoever for the United States. In addition to costing American lives, further ruining our international reputation, wasting money by the cargo plane-load, and using up all our incredibly expensive interceptor batteries, the Iran war is already causing an energy crisis.
Oil prices were already shooting up on Monday, and on Tuesday, Iraq—which produces about 4 percent of the global total—announced it was starting to shut down its major oil fields for lack of a way to export the product. In a market with a large share of price-insensitive demand, that is a recipe for skyrocketing prices.
It is the blackest of ironies that a “war for oil,” as many anti-war protesters (somewhat inaccurately) claimed Bush’s invasion was about, would be a marked improvement over what Trump is doing. Now the protesters’ slogan could be more like “No war, oil!” Trump is such a belligerent dolt that he can’t even keep cheap gas flowing for MAGA’s precious pickup trucks. And the war might actually undermine one of the few silver linings in the cloud of Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq: that country’s presently half-decent economy.
But if we want Congress to do its job, and stop America’s emperor from punching more sucking chest wounds in the Middle East’s political order for no reason, we will have to start by throwing Republicans out of power in the House and the Senate.
The post Can Congress Stop Mad King Trump’s Mad War on Iran? appeared first on The American Prospect.