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iraq war
No One Voted for Trump's War of Choice on Iran
Constraining a president’s ability to launch needless, open-ended war is one of Congress’ most important constitutional responsibilities. Congress failed to meet that responsibility in 2002. It must not fail now.
Mar 04, 2026
I have spent my career studying the consequences of US military action. I teach about international conflict and diplomacy. I have lived in communities still scarred by the legacy of US nuclear testing. I do not romanticize war or underestimate how quickly “major combat operations” can become a global catastrophe.
Early Saturday, President Donald Trump ordered US military strikes against Iran in coordination with Israel. He warned that Americans could face “casualties that often happen in war” as if the human cost of war were an unavoidable fact of life rather than a choice made by him.
We have seen a version of this story before.
In 2002, Congress made a historic mistake by authorizing President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. That decision was rooted in deception, fear, and a desire for vengeance. That war cost the lives of thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. It also shattered trust in government and left a legacy of instability that the entire world is still living with.
Only two months into the new year, Trump has already invaded or attacked two countries. As Americans, we must treat this moment with the gravity and urgency it demands.
Constraining a president’s ability to launch needless, open-ended war is one of Congress’ most important constitutional responsibilities. Congress failed to meet that responsibility in 2002. It must not fail now.
There is a dangerous myth in American politics that time will solve what leaders refuse to confront. That if we just “wait and see,” crises will cool and accountability will take care of itself. But as Martin Luther King Jr. warned, time is neutral. If Congress stays silent, time does not become an ally of peace; it becomes an ally of escalation, destruction, and death.
Today, the stakes are higher than they were in 2002. The international diplomatic infrastructure that once constrained conflict has been eroded by the Trump administration. We no longer have the nuclear arms agreements we did a decade, or even a month, ago. And our military is integrating and using artificial intelligence for military operations faster than our lawmakers’ ability to make laws and provide oversight.
We are entering a period where the speed of decision-making is accelerating, while the guardrails that prevent catastrophic miscalculation are weakening. This combination should terrify every American.
Only two months into the new year, Trump has already invaded or attacked two countries. As Americans, we must treat this moment with the gravity and urgency it demands.
The greatest responsibility of our federal government is to protect the welfare of the people who call this country home. As a member of Congress, I’ll fight to make sure that no president—Democrat or Republican—can drag the United States into needless wars based on lies or their own capricious arrogance, and I will never relent in my commitment to securing our country and the world from the threats posed by the weaponization of emerging technologies and the continued risk of nuclear war.
The timing of Trump’s attack on Iran poses unprecedented risks to global security. Friday night, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth canceled a Defense Department contract with the AI company Anthropic over its refusal to authorize the use of their technology to spy on Americans and direct lethal attacks. Anthropic came under scrutiny earlier this year after reports that its AI chatbot, Claude, was used during Trump’s reckless and unconstitutional invasion of Venezuela.
This week, one of the sticking points in the negotiations was whether AI could be used to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike. Anthropic refused, and Hegseth canceled the contract. Within hours, Anthropic’s rival, OpenAI reached a deal with the Pentagon. It’s a profitable deal for OpenAI and its shareholders, and a disturbing development for anyone who cares about peace and the future of humanity.
Congress must immediately pass legislation limiting Trump’s ability to take further military action against Iran. That is just the beginning of the work that must be accomplished with all deliberate speed. Congress must also pass legislation limiting national security agencies from using AI technology to launch lethal strikes, and prohibit the Pentagon from any use of AI in its nuclear weapons program.
Now is the time to act.
This op-ed first appeared in the New Hampshire Union Leader.
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Corbyn Accuses Starmer Government of ‘Echoing Tony Blair’s Obedience to Washington’
"Blair dragged the UK into an illegal war that triggered a spiral of hatred, conflict, and misery," Corbyn said. "Twenty-three years later, another Labour prime minister is doing his best to follow in Blair’s footsteps."
Mar 03, 2026
As UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer allows British bases to be used as part of the US-Israeli war against Iran, the former leader of his Labour Party says he's making the same mistake that another Labour PM made 23 years ago.
Jeremy Corbyn, the socialist member of Parliament who led Labour from 2015 to 2020, said on Tuesday that Starmer was "echoing Tony Blair’s obedience to Washington", referring to the then-prime minister's decision in 2003 to join US President George W. Bush's war in Iraq.
"Ignoring the wisdom of ordinary people who could see the catastrophe ahead, Blair dragged the UK into an illegal war that triggered a spiral of hatred, conflict, and misery. More than a million Iraqi men, women, and children paid the price." Corbyn wrote in a Tuesday piece for the democratic socialist publicationTribune.
Infamously pledging to Bush, "I will be with you, whatever," Blair helped to promote the false claims that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. And despite a lack of support from the United Nations, he joined Bush's "coalition of the willing," committing 46,000 British troops to the war.
"This was the last time a Labour prime minister blindly backed the wishes of the US and its warmongering president," Corbyn said. "Twenty-three years later, another Labour prime minister is doing his best to follow in Blair’s footsteps and drag us into a catastrophic, illegal war."
Unlike Bush, US President Donald Trump has not yet put boots on the ground in Iran, instead waging a destructive campaign of aerial bombings and missile strikes that have taken out the nation's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other senior Iranian officials.
As of Monday, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), a US-based monitor of human rights in Iran, reported that at least 742 civilians had been killed since Saturday by US and Israeli attacks, with nearly 1,000 injured and more than 600 deaths still under review.
While Starmer has stressed that the UK "had no role" in launching the war, he has lent credence to the questionable case the US and Israel have made to justify it, including emphasizing that Iran "must never have nuclear weapons."
Iran has always contended its nuclear program was not for military purposes, and it had no desire to produce a nuclear weapon. Prior to Saturday’s strikes, reports indicated that Iranian negotiators had offered to give up the nation's entire stockpile of enriched uranium.
And though he has accused Iran of launching "indiscriminate strikes" across the Gulf, Starmer has been reticent to criticize similar actions by the US and Israel, which have had vastly larger death tolls, including the bombing of a girls' school that reportedly killed 165 people, most of them girls between ages 7 and 12, and attacks on several hospitals.
One day after the first strikes were conducted, and following mounting pressure from Trump, Starmer announced that he'd given the US approval for "specific, limited defensive" use of three Royal Air Force (RAF) bases—Fairford in England, Akrotiri in Cyprus, and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean—in order to destroy Iran's missiles "at source" after a drone hit Akrotiri, causing minimal damage.
However, Starmer continued to claim that the UK had learned the "mistakes of Iraq," and "will not join offensive action now."
Corbyn said that Starmer's insistence that bases would only be used "defensively" was merely "meaningless vocabulary that reveals Starmer’s contempt for the intelligence of the British people."
In Parliament on Monday, Starmer said that "the use of the bases is to allow the US to use its ability to take out the ability of Iran to launch the attacks in the first place."
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday used similar reasoning to justify launching the war, explaining that Iran was likely to retaliate against a planned Israeli attack and that it therefore posed an "imminent threat" to US personnel even though that threat was contingent on Israel attacking first.
Corbyn described the idea of a "preemptive strike" as a contradiction in terms. "Under this convoluted reasoning," he said, "almost any attack on anybody can be classified as a defensive measure. Starmer’s words are Newspeak—and cannot shield his government from complicity in the devastation ahead."
Like in the United States, the British public has expressed low support for American and Israeli actions against Iran. According to a YouGov poll published on Monday, 49% disapprove of US military action, compared to 28% who support it. Fewer than 1 in 5 Labour voters said they supported it.
Voters also said they oppose their government's involvement. Compared with just 32% of Brits who said they supported letting the US use British bases, 50% said they opposed it.
"For too long, Britain has blindly followed the US as it indulges in disastrous imperial fantasies," Corbyn said, noting the UK's continued support for Israel over two years of US-sponsored genocide in Gaza.
Corbyn is now an independent MP who co-founded a new political party after being thrown out of Labour in 2020 over dubious accusations of antisemitism, which he has alleged stem from his strong criticism of Israel.
"It’s time to forge a different path. Now is not the time to try to rescue a ‘special relationship’ characterised by impunity, genocide, and war," he said. "Now is the time to forge an independent foreign policy based on international law and peace."
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US War on Iran Would Be a Cynical, Lawless, and Catastrophic Escalation
Trump is following in the footsteps of the five US presidents before him, quickly abandoning his formal strategy goals and diverting America’s overpriced but impotent war machine back to the Middle East.
Feb 19, 2026
After some delays, the United States is dispatching a second aircraft-carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, from the Caribbean to the Middle East to join the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group and threaten Iran.
This is the third Atlantic crossing for the Ford’s crew since it set sail from Norfolk, Virginia, in June 2025, and the second time its deployment has been extended, first to redeploy from the Middle East to the Caribbean, and now to redeploy back to the Middle East.
There is a grave danger that the US government is preparing to exploit the genuine sympathy of people all over the world for the Iranian civilians massacred during protests in December and January as a pretext for an illegal military assault on Iran.
A new US war on Iran would be a cynical and catastrophic escalation of the crisis already swallowing its people, piling the unimaginable death and suffering of a full-scale war on top of many years of economic strangulation under US “maximum pressure” sanctions and the repression of the recent protests.
There is no good reason to sacrifice American soldiers and sailors in a war on Iran; no justification to kill Iranian troops for defending their country, as Americans would do if another country attacked the United States; no justice in killing Iranian civilians by turning their homes and communities into a new US war zone.
The world must act to prevent war, and the voices of Americans calling for peace and humanity may have an impact on President Trump and US politicians, in an election year when Americans are already sickened by US complicity in genocide in Gaza and the murderous paramilitaries invading US cities.
In a succession of speeches and in its National Security and Defense Strategy documents, the Trump administration promised a major shift in US foreign policy away from endless wars in the Middle East, to prioritize its ambitions to expand US power and coercion in the Americas and the Pacific.
But Trump is already following in the footsteps of the five US presidents before him, quickly abandoning his formal strategy goals and diverting America’s overpriced but impotent war machine back to the Middle East, to threaten or even attack Iran.
The renewed US threats against Iran have made it clear to Iran’s leaders that their symbolic strikes on Al Udeid air base in Qatar in June 2025, in retaliation for US strikes on nuclear facilities in Iran, were an insufficient deterrent to future US and Israeli attacks.
So Iran has signaled that it will respond to any new Israeli or US attacks with more deadly and destructive retaliation against US forces in the region. Foad Azadi at the University of Tehran reports that Iranian leaders now believe they would need to inflict at least 500 US casualties to successfully deter future attacks.
Iran’s leaders may well be right that Trump would have a low tolerance for US casualties and the political blowback he would suffer for them, if he should make the fateful choice to launch such an unnecessary and catastrophic war.
Iran has had many years to prepare for such a war. It has modern air defenses and an arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones with which to retaliate against US targets throughout the region, which include US bases in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE, and the flotilla of US warships loitering near, but not yet within range of, Iran’s shores.
The US is so far showing respect for Iran’s military capabilities, keeping the Abraham Lincoln at least a thousand miles from Iran’s coast, according to retired US Colonel Larry Wilkerson of the Eisenhower Media Network.
This cautious US naval deployment is a far cry from the six US carrier battle groups the US deployed to commit aggression against Iraq in 2003. The United States still has twelve “big-deck” aircraft carriers like the Lincoln and the Ford, but nine of them are in dock or unready for deployment. The USS George Washington, based in Japan, is now the only US carrier in East Asia, since the Abraham Lincoln left the Philippines in January to threaten Iran.
Standard deployments for these warships last only six or seven months, and their lack of readiness is the result of several years of overextended deployments, after which they need longer periods of maintenance and repair than the normal six to nine month turnaround time between deployments.
For example, since the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower completed a nine month combat deployment in the Middle East in January 2025, it has spent over a year in dock at Norfolk to repair the wear and tear it sustained in the failed US campaign against Yemen’s Ansar Allah (or Houthi) forces.
The United States and its allies bombed Yemen in successive campaigns under Biden and Trump, but failed to reopen the Red Sea and Suez Canal to Israeli or allied commercial shipping. As a result of the Yemeni blockade, most Western cargo shippers diverted their ships away from the Red Sea, forcing the Israeli port of Eilat into bankruptcy in July 2025.
Ansar Allah paused its blockade when Israel signed a ceasefire in Gaza in October 2025, but larger ships still avoid the Red Sea and insurance rates remain high, as Israel’s aggression and genocide continue to destabilize the region in unpredictable ways.
The US failure to defeat the much smaller Ansar Allah forces in Yemen is a small taste of what US forces would face in a prolonged war with Iran, which already inflicted significant damage on Israel during the twelve-day war in June 2025.
Iran used its older missiles and drones to deplete Israel’s air defenses. Then, once Israel began to exhaust its stocks of interceptors, Iran used newer, more sophisticated ballistic missiles to strike important military and intelligence headquarters in Tel Aviv and other military targets.
With Israel in trouble, the US entered the war directly, and bombed three nuclear enrichment sites in Iran, before agreeing to an Iranian ceasefire proposal on June 24, 2025. Israeli censorship has prevented a comprehensive public accounting of its losses in that war.
While overextended deployments have caused wear and tear to aircraft-carriers and other warships, US weapons transfers to its allies in Israel, Ukraine and NATO have depleted its own weapons stocks. This creates pressure on US leaders to hold off on launching a new war against a well-prepared enemy like Iran until it has replenished them, which could take a long time.
Meanwhile the war in Ukraine has exposed structural weaknesses in the US war machine. Russia has vastly out-produced the west in basic war supplies like artillery shells and drones, which has proven militarily decisive in Ukraine.
As Richard Connolly of the RUSI military think tank in London has pointed out, Russia did not privatize its weapons industry after the end of the Cold War, as the US and its allies did. It maintained and improved its existing infrastructure, which he called “economically inefficient until 2022, and then suddenly it looks like a very shrewd bit of planning.”
After the Cold War ended, on the initiative of Soviet leader and visionary peacemaker Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia’s economic weakness forced its military leaders to make honest, hard-nosed assessments of what it would take to defend their country in the post-Cold War world, and the shrewd planning that Connolly put his finger on is one result of this.
On the US side however, Eisenhower’s infamous “military-industrial complex” used its “unwarranted influence” to exploit the west’s post-Cold War triumphalism and expand its global military ambitions. Many Americans immediately recognized this as a dangerous new form of imperialism. Wiser heads among America’s political leaders and foreign policy experts predicted that the rest of the world would ultimately reject America’s new imperialism and be forced to confront it as a threat to peace.
The neoliberal privatization of US and western armament production turned it into an even more lucrative and politically powerful industry, which only reconfirmed Eisenhower’s warnings. Monopolistic military contractors have produced smaller quantities of increasingly expensive, technologically advanced warships, warplanes and surveillance systems. Despite wreaking catastrophic destruction in country after country, these weapons have proven impotent to prevent humiliating US defeats in its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine, and will likely prove just as useless in a major war with Iran.
The simplistic, linear thinking of Trump and his advisors leads them to believe that the solution to a trillion dollar per year war machine that can’t win a war is a $1.5 trillion per year war machine.
But this is nonsense. Russia has not defeated the US and NATO by outspending them. Quite the opposite. Since 1992, the US military alone has outspent Russia by fifteen to one ($26 trillion vs $1.7 trillion in constant 2024 dollars, according to SIPRI). Russia’s military superiority is the result of taking its own defense more seriously and confronting its problems more honestly than corrupt US leaders have ever tried to do since the end of the Cold War.
At a price tag of $17.5 billion, the USS Gerald R. Ford is the largest, most expensive warship ever built, costing more than the entire annual military budgets of most other countries. Making an even bigger warship for $26 billion would not make Americans any safer, just a bit poorer.
Relying on the offensive use of military force and record military spending to try to solve America’s problems has put the United States on a collision course with the rest of the world. In 1949, long before Eisenhower’s farewell speech in 1961, he offered some sage advice to politicians and pundits who were calling for a massive US attack on the USSR to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.
Diplomacy does not mean holding a gun to someone’s head and demanding that they sign an unconditional surrender.
“Those who measure security solely in terms of offensive capacity distort its meaning and mislead those who pay them heed,” said Eisenhower. “No modern nation has ever equaled the crushing offensive power attained by the German war machine in 1939. No modern nation was broken and smashed as was Germany six years later.”
Unlike Iran today, the USSR was indeed working to develop nuclear weapons, but Eisenhower warned Americans against launching a new war that might kill millions to try to stop it.
As Eisenhower insisted, offensive military action offers no solutions to international problems. But diplomatic solutions are always possible. Diplomacy does not mean holding a gun to someone’s head and demanding that they sign an unconditional surrender. It means treating other people and countries with mutual respect and finding solutions that everybody can live with, based upon rules that we all agree on.
The UN Charter universally prohibits the threat or use of force and requires all countries to resolve disputes peacefully. So one country’s wrongdoing, real or perceived, is never a valid pretext for another country to threaten or use military force.
There is no good reason to sacrifice American soldiers and sailors in a war on Iran; no justification to kill Iranian troops for defending their country, as Americans would do if another country attacked the United States; no justice in killing Iranian civilians by turning their homes and communities into a new US war zone.
Could the stark choice our country is facing in Iran be a turning point, a moment when the American people will stand up and clearly, strongly say “No” to war, before our corrupt leaders can plunge Iran and the United States into yet another “Made in the USA” military catastrophe?
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