Here We Go Again: A War that Makes Me Ashamed to Be an American

We’re 13 days into the U.S.-Israel war against Iran—and it seems as ill-conceived and wrong as when it started. Oil prices keep going up. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba has taken control of the Iranian government, despite delusional American hopes that the governing regime there would quickly collapse. President Trump and his aides can’t get their stories straight on why the United States started this war and what its end game is. American officials are privately conceding that U.S. military personnel bombed a girls’ school, but Trump is still playing dumb. Congressional Democrats are unsurprisingly furious, but the most notable criticism this week came from Trump 2024 supporter Joe Rogan, who declared himself “betrayed” by a president who in the podcaster’s view had promised not to get into “stupid wars.”

It’s entirely possible that in a few weeks, the war is over, the U.S. has killed Mojtaba Khamenei and installed a more American-friendly leader, oil prices are down, and Rogan is back on the Trump Train. But even if scenarios most favorable to Trump play out, Americans should be infuriated and embarrassed that our country is waging this war. This is the second worst war launched by the United States in the last few decades, in my view only eclipsed by the Iraq War that started in 2003.

There are three reasons this military action stands out as worse than nearly all others. First and most importantly, there is no clear reason for the U.S. to be attacking Iran right now. There was no chance Iran would launch a nuclear attack on the United States. There was little immediate indication of an imminent nuclear attack on Israel, an ally of the U.S. who we have long defended. It’s true that the Iranian regime has denied democratic rights to its citizens, killed those who protested, constantly attacked Israel military either directly or through proxies like Hezbollah, and at times tried to develop a nuclear weapons program. No one is claiming that Iran is Switzerland. But nothing happened in the days and weeks before February 28 that required the U.S to suddenly start dropping bombs on Iran.

This lack of a clear rationale has left the administration giving multiple and at times contradictory explanations for the war. The Wall Street Journal had stories on Wednesday with headlines, “The Trump Team’s Evolving Messages on Iran” and “Trump Says the Iran War Is Nearly Won But Israel Has Other Ideas.” Those headlines capture the strategic confusion at play. The U.S. is two weeks into a war that it’s not exactly sure why it’s fighting and out of sync with its partner (Israel) in the conflict.

This dynamic is unusual. Most recent U.S. military interventions had clear (although at times misguided) justifications. Some of those justifications, such as the 1991 Gulf War in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, were very compelling. Likewise it made sense that the United States would overthrow the Taliban following the September 11 attacks, though the Taliban ended up back in power 20 years later. Even the Iraq War had a clear justification—-the Bush administration, many congressional Democrats, and many journalists wrongly but sincerely believed that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction.

Second, this war not only didn’t have the approval of Congress or the American public, but it happened despite explicit opposition from them. The administration had been hinting that it would attack Iran for months, so news organizations conducted polls on the idea. And the surveys showed public opposition to a war in Iran far outpaced support.

Americans used to “rally around the flag” after our troops formally entered a conflict, leading to more support for both the president and the war. Not here. Public support for this war still remains well below 50 percent, according to numerous surveys.

Congress is always trying to duck taking responsibility for foreign policy, so it hasn’t given a clear authorization of military force since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. We’ve had 20 years of presidential-led military action in Syria, Somalia, and numerous other places. Usually though Congress tacitly approves or at least doesn’t strongly object to the conflict. But in this case, congressional Democrats had been complaining for weeks about Trump unilaterally overthrowing Venezuela president Nicolás Maduro and clearly didn’t want a repeat of such military action. And I doubt congressional Republicans would have voted to attack Iran, because much of their base is also wary and tired of the U.S. fighting wars in the Middle East.

Trump didn’t even get informal support. I could imagine a scenario where members of both parties’ Intelligence Committees in the House and Senate and Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer, the two very pro-Israel figures who lead the Democrats, were briefed and signed onto this war before it started. That wouldn’t be ideal, but better than nothing. That doesn’t seem to have happened either. By all accounts, Trump consulted more with Israeli President Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the war more than any American elected official.

A needless war not supported by most Americans is troubling for a third reason: This is not a minor skirmish. The Trump administration managed to remove Maduro in a quick operation with fairly low numbers of casualties. That’s not happening in Iran. Ground troops haven’t yet been deployed, but America and Israel are bombing all over Iran, destroying the country.

The attacks have been so aggressive that Trump and South Carolina Lindsey Graham, hardly peaceniks, have blanched. Graham went on X to beg the Israelis to not destroy too much Iranian infrastructure. Trump is wary of acknowledging, despite overwhelming evidence, that the U.S. accidentally bombed a girl’s school in Minab, killing more than 150 students.

In terms of length and casualties, this war pales in comparison to other recent ones. The U.S. was in Afghanistan 20 years; we haven’t even been in Iran for two weeks. Nearly 200,000 people (troops and civilians, both Afghan and American) died in the war in Afghanistan; 300,000 in Iraq. So far, an estimated 1,200 Iranian civilians have died, and seven Americans.

But in terms of recklessness, belligerence, and shamelessness, this war already outranks the one in Afghanistan. The United States, which in its best moments has been a champion of democracy at home and policeman against dictators abroad, is now using its military might to execute a goal shared by Netanyahu and some American neoconservatives, but opposed by the U.S. public, many elected officials, and a wide swath of world leaders. And the war has already resulted in a military action so heinous (the bombing of the girls’ school) that U.S. officials won’t admit that they did it.

Trump does horrible things every day. But on domestic issues, he’s largely representing the Republicans who voted for him. On foreign policy though, his decisions speak for America to the world. And the message that he and therefore we are delivering is that the United States has massive power and horrible judgment. We can and will kill any country’s leader on our whims. We can and will bomb a country so aggressively, without any real rationale, that we will accidentally kill 150 girls attending school. This war is a permanent moral stain on the United States. It’s the latest time during the Trump presidency where I am ashamed to be an American.