We're at War and We're Not (Because Only Congress Can Declare War): Some Notes Tonight
I was writing about last week's news when I was interrupted by this week's news, – I joked a few days ago that the whole country would love a slow news week, and I sure would. For one thing we could think about where we are and how we got there and what we do next, instead of scrambling to keep up with where we're going, by which I mean tumbling, falling, being shoved. But under Trump, the eruptions and the news stories about them stumble over each other, dogpile, shove each other aside, crowd each other out of our attention, shout each other down. Of course a lot of what's going on these days and any time Trump is in office is distraction from the distraction from the distraction from the stupid or corrupt or failed thing he just did or just backed off from doing, which is how he recently earned the acronym TACO (Trump always chickens out), which is why life under Trump is continuous whiplash.
Meanwhile the US military bombed Iran, and it seems like an incredibly stupid and bad thing to do, and most of the politicians I've seen speak up are speaking up against it – many Democrats (except for Pennsylvania's Senator John Fetterman, who's become a turkey who thinks he's a hawk) and Republican Thomas Massie, who had introduced a resolution to prohibit the US from joining Netanyahu's war and tweeted "this is not Constitutional" when news of the bombing broke.
It's worth remembering that this is a war of aggression started by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a criminal who is massively unpopular in his own country. And that Netanyahu opposed the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA with Iran that was preventing Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon – until Trump pulled the US out of the deal in 2018, against the wishes of the four major powers who, with the US, negotiated the deal and in opposition to the wishes of the majority of Americans.
Why did he pull out? Maybe because it was one of Obama's signal achievements, and undoing every one of them was one of his chief goals in his first term. Now Netanyahu has convinced Trump to join him, and he's dragging all the rest of us with him. "Netanyahu has spent the better part of two decades trying to strong arm the United States into an unprovoked war against Iran and finally found a president stupid enough to do it for him," notes political science professor David Faris.
It's also worth remembering that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is covered in white supremacist and far-right tattoos, including a crusader's cross and one that reads "Deus Vult," literally God will it, but the phrase "has been popularised by the far-Right, as a rallying cry railing against the spread of Islam." By which I mean he's an idiot and a fanatic and incapable of assessing why this really bad decision is a really bad decision and mounting reasoned objections to it.
The attack has been compared to George W. Bush's invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, but in both conflicts the case for doing so had been built up iwith lies including many that falsely connected Iraq to the 9/11 attacks and with invocations of patriotism that became aggressive silencing of dissent (nevertheless a global antiwar movement, including strong protests in the US, preceded the March 2003 attack on Iraq). In this instance, no case for today's attack has been made, except the assertion that Iran is getting closer to having a nuclear weapons, and the whole business whereby Israel is a tail and the USA is the dog that gets wagged by it over and over.
Nuclear weapons are bad, it's reasonable to state, and also Israel has nuclear weapons, which it does not officially acknowledge. As the New York Times recently reported, "Israel is one of five countries — joining India, Pakistan, North Korea and South Sudan — that is not a signatory to the U.N. Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The agreement, which came into force in 1970, generally commits governments to promoting peaceful uses of nuclear energy and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. (Iran is a signatory to the treaty, although Israel and world powers have accused Tehran of violating it by unnecessarily enriching uranium at high enough levels to build a nuclear weapon.) Israel would have to give up its nuclear weapons to sign the treaty, which recognizes only five countries as official nuclear states: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States."
Max Kennerly remarked on BlueSky, "When Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018, he made it the policy of the United States that every country should have an active nuclear weapons program. Today he made it clear they need to develop functional nuclear weapons as soon as possible. Nothing else can prevent a U.S. attack."
Another thing worth remembering is that Ukraine gave up the vast array of nuclear weapons it inherited in return for security guarantees as described in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. As a former US ambassador to Ukraine put it in 2014, "When the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine had on its territory the world's third largest nuclear arsenal. It was bigger than Britain, France and China combined. And the Ukrainians were prepared to eliminate that arsenal to transfer the warheads to Russia for their dismantlement, but the Ukrainians asked for certain things. And one was security assurances that the United States and Russia would pay attention and respect Ukraine's independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, that there would be no use of force or threat of force against Ukraine." As part of the agreement for Ukraine to give up those nuclear weapons, the US and United Kingdom made security guarantees to Ukraine (and to Belarus and Kazakhstan, also former Soviet states that gave up their nuclear weapons).
Among the possible reasons why Trump decided to get in on Netanyahu's war of aggression (aside from the fact that he's an easily manipulated sucker) is the fact that his polling numbers are tanking. On Truth Social, he whined about the Fox News poll posted below: "The Crooked FoxNews Polls got the Election WRONG, I won by much more than they said I would, and have been biased against me for years. They are always wrong and negative. It’s why MAGA HATES FoxNews, even though their anchors are GREAT." Another explanation came in an email a friend sent me tonight, "And because no one came to his birthday party, one week later we’re in a war."
Sometimes wars sweep up the public in obedient patriotism; it certainly worked for George W. Bush for a few years, but it was a different time, and there was a long propaganda build-up to the war. This one was just sprung behind everyone's back – including Democratic members of the House intelligence committee. Congressman Sean Casten fumed, "This is not about the merits of Iran’s nuclear program. No president has the authority to bomb another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the US without the approval of Congress. This is an unambiguous impeachable offense. I’m not saying we have the votes to impeach. I’m saying that you DO NOT do this without Congressional approval and if Johnson doesn’t grow a spine and learn to be a real boy tomorrow we have a BFing problem that puts our very Republic at risk."
And there's no good explanation or rather justification for why our military just dropped a bunch of big bombs on a country on the other side of the world. Former congressional staffer and Washington insider Matt Vallone declared, "We have no strategy other than to hope that Iran knuckles under following our escalation. That may work but it seems unlikely, so instead we're going to have an unconventional war with Iran." He also remarked last night, "I am a relatively informed person who works in the national security space. I've followed Washington decision-making closely for 15+ years now. I am fairly well-read and pay attention to a range of news sources. I do not know what our goals our vis a vis Iran, nor how we expect to achieve them." No one knows if or how Iran will retaliate, but I suppose we'll find out.
But the worst of the mainstream media will get behind it, as they did the lies that justified getting into the Iraq war, and that will confuse the people who rely on those news sources. Brand new Iran expert Van Jones ranted on CNN that "Iran is not a normal country" as he justified the attack.
Which is part of why I was writing an essay about the failures of the mainstream media when it came to adequately covering last weekend's news, including the political assassination of Minnesota Representative Melissa Hortman and the shooting of three other Minnesotans, Trump's miserable parade, and the huge turnout for the more than 2000 No Kings demonstrations across the country. No kings means that a president doesn't get to unilaterally drag the nation into war, but I fear he just did.
