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iraq war
Trump Follows the Grand US Tradition of Ignoring Intelligence to Go to War
Trump’s cavalier attitude about the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies is just the most recent example of presidents ignoring what they did not want to hear.
Jun 28, 2025
I’ll never forget the day I was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency. What does that have to do with President Donald Trump bombing Iran? I’ll get there, so indulge me.
It was the spring of 1983, and I was sitting in an auditorium at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia with my fellow classmates. We were a select group of Columbia University graduate students in the school’s International Fellows Program, and we were in Washington, D.C. for dog and pony shows sponsored by the CIA, State Department, and other federal agencies looking for fresh young talent. I was in the journalism program. Everyone else was studying law, business, or international relations.
After two CIA officers droned on interminably about China, which was not making much news at the time, an over-caffeinated HR officer took the stage. “We need people like you,” she said. “We can’t have good policy without good intelligence, so we’d like you to consider applying here.” She then mentioned that five of the fellows had interned at the agency the previous summer and asked them to hold up their hands, which they did reluctantly. Given the CIA’s terrible reputation at the time, it was understandable why they didn’t want to acknowledge that they had worked there.
Presidents don’t give a fig about what the CIA or any other intelligence agency tells them. They will do what they want, regardless, and Congress does little to nothing to rein them in.
The HR lady then asked if there were any questions. My hand shot up, and she called on me first.
Earlier that morning I picked up a copy of The Washington Post, which ran a story on its front page reporting that the CIA, under President Ronald Reagan’s direction, had dedicated millions of dollars to undermine the fledgling Nicaraguan government, which had overthrown a corrupt dictator four years before. I thanked her for her presentation and then said: “I’m really interested in applying to work at the CIA, but I’m not interested in doing intelligence work. I’m interested in covert action. I’m interested in destabilizing sovereign nations like Nicaragua. How do I apply?”
There was dead silence, and then students began to snicker. The HR lady, meanwhile, was speechless, but she quickly regained her composure and said, “I don’t know anything about that, but the application procedure is the same.”
After a few other, more serious, questions, the session was over. But before I could get up from my seat, I felt the steely grip of the man who ran the program, the extremely conservative dean of Columbia’s graduate school of international affairs. He was not happy. He squeezed my shoulder as hard as he could and said, “Mr. Negin.” (He never addressed us by our first names.) “I want you to know that everything that was said here today is off the record.”
I’m proud to say that, until today, I have honored his off-the-record request. There was nothing newsworthy to report, anyway. But given the incident happened more than 40 years ago, I’m not too worried about recounting it now, especially since it will help make a point.
I Don’t Care What She Said!
Of course, that CIA recruiter was absolutely right. To have good policy, government officials need good intelligence. What she didn’t say, however, is what we learned yet again this past week: Presidents don’t give a fig about what the CIA or any other intelligence agency tells them. They will do what they want, regardless, and Congress does little to nothing to rein them in.
On June 17, when a reporter on Air Force One reminded President Trump that his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had testified before Congress in March that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, his reply was: “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having one.”
In response, Gabbard backtracked, posting on X on June 20 that “dishonest media” took her testimony out of context and Iran could produce nuclear weapons “within weeks to months.”
But that does not mean that Iran is building a bomb.
A handful of officials told The Wall Street Journal last week that the intelligence Israel provided the United States to make its case for attacking Iran did not convince them that Tehran is intent on building a nuclear bomb. “The [Israeli] intelligence only showed Iran was still researching nuclear weapons,” two officials told the paper, “including revisiting work it had done before its nuclear weapons program shut down in 2003.” Although the United States estimates that it would likely take Iran one to two weeks to produce enough enriched uranium for a weapon, “the consensus view among U.S. intelligence agencies,” the Journal reported, “is Iran hasn’t made a decision to move forward on building a bomb.”
Nevertheless, on June 21, the U.S. Air Force flattened three Iranian nuclear sites, and it remains to be seen if the attack will lead to any unfortunate, unforeseen consequences. Two days later, Iran lobbed missiles at a U.S. military base in Qatar, which said its air defenses intercepted. Then, later that day, Trump announced that Israel and Iran had agreed to a cease-fire, but as of the next morning, they both violated it.
Damn the Intelligence, Full-Speed Ahead!
Trump’s cavalier attitude about the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies is just the most recent example of presidents ignoring what they did not want to hear. One obvious example is when President Lyndon Johnson paid no heed to warnings about a potential quagmire in Vietnam. Another is when President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 under false pretenses.
In early 1963, the CIA cautioned Johnson about intensifying U.S. intervention in Vietnam nearly a year before the now-disputed Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964. The agency suggested that bombing Vietnam would “provoke heavier troop intervention” rather than ensuring a victory. Three days after the incident, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, essentially giving Johnson a blank check to escalate U.S involvement.
We all know how that turned out. From 1961 through 1973, the United States spent more than $141 billion on the war, more than $1 trillion in today’s dollars, and as many as 3.4 million people died, including more than 58,300 U.S. servicemembers, between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, some 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters, and as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides.
Pretty frustrating, no? To spend all that time trying to dig up “good intelligence” and then have it ignored. Especially when scores of lives are lost and survivors have to suffer with their injuries, both physical and psychological.
In October 2002, a month after al Qaeda stunned the United States by attacking New York and Washington, the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan to eliminate al Qaeda and topple the Taliban government. Two years later, the United States invaded Iraq, ostensibly because Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was connected to al Qaeda and possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), neither of which was true.
There is a mountain of evidence that the Bush administration cooked the books to justify invading Iraq, much too much to post here. Suffice it to say that senior U.S. intelligence officials and analysts have testified that Bush and his administration disregarded intelligence that didn’t support their goal of removing Hussein.
In an essay in the March-April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, for example, former national intelligence officer Paul Pillar accused the White House of manipulating intelligence on Iraq’s alleged WMD. He said the administration ignored any intelligence that did not align with its intention to invade. “It went to war without requesting—and evidently without being influenced by—any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq,” he wrote. The “broadly held” intelligence assessment, he added, was that the best way to address the Iraqi weapons issue was through an aggressive inspections program to supplement the sanctions already in place.
In late April 2006, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who revealed that the agency had received credible intelligence from Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, that there were no active WMD programs. “We continued to validate [Sabri] the whole way through,” said Drumheller. “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”
Finally, a September 2007 article in Salon by Sidney Blumenthal confirmed Drumheller’s account. Two former senior CIA officers told Blumenthal that in September 2002, then CIA Director George Tenet briefed Bush on top-secret intelligence from Sabri that Hussein did not have WMD. Bush rejected the information, which turned out to be completely accurate, as worthless. The former CIA officers added that Tenet did not share that intelligence with then-Secretary of State Colin Powell nor with senior military officers planning the invasion. “Instead,” Blumenthal wrote, “…the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs.”
The Iraqi war’s toll was considerable. From 2003 through 2011, when the U.S. military officially withdrew, the United States spent $728 billion (in 2022 dollars) directly on the war, according to a Pentagon estimate. Nearly 4,500 U.S. servicemembers died, while nearly 32,300 were wounded, and some 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed.
A Bookend to My CIA Recruitment Caper
A few years after the Bush-Cheney Iraq debacle, I bumped into one of my classmates who had interned at the CIA before we met at the International Fellows Program. He showed up at my weekly yoga class, of all places. I hadn’t seen him since we were at Columbia. After exchanging pleasantries, I asked him if he wound up working for the CIA. Indeed, he had. “So, do you like working there?” I asked. “It’s less than inspiring,” he replied. Why? Because, he said, policymakers reject the agency’s findings if they don’t support their preconceived notion of what to do.
Pretty frustrating, no? To spend all that time trying to dig up “good intelligence” and then have it ignored. Especially when scores of lives are lost and survivors have to suffer with their injuries, both physical and psychological.
In retrospect, I’m glad I turned down that offer to apply to work at the CIA. I obviously made the right choice. No way I would ever be happy there, even with a job destabilizing sovereign nations.
]This column was originally posted on Money Trail, a new Substack site co-founded by Elliott Negin.
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Who Will Stand to Oppose Trump's Lawless Attack on Iran?
Despite the failure and destruction of the war against Iraq, the United States is once again bombing a Middle East nation with no regard for the consequences.
Jun 23, 2025
“Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier,” said President Trump as he addressed the American people shortly after announcing he was bombing Iran. I was too young to watch my political leaders spiral themselves into the war in Iraq – I was only old enough to be able to comprehend the final toll: one million Iraqis died because my country couldn’t help itself from another power grab in the Middle East. I can’t help but feel that the same thing is happening all over again.
Myself, and countless other Americans, are ashamed at how many people have been killed in our name or with our tax dollars. The comfy politicians in Washington condescend to us — that our concern for human life actually goes against our own interests — as if Palestinians and Iranians do more to hurt Americans than the politicians and billionaires who gutted out industry, automated our jobs, privatized education, and cut social services. In our daily life, the people who actually hate us only become more obvious.
Last week before it was absolutely clear that the US would formally enter the war, public opinion polls came out that a vast majority of Americans did not want the US to go to war. This was not the case in the lead up to the war in Iraq. Times and opinions have changed amongst the masses, but that didn’t seem to matter to anyone in the White House this weekend.
In the aftermath of 9/11, our leaders were awfully good at convincing Americans that they needed revenge for what happened. Even if it wasn’t logical, even if it didn’t make sense — we invaded two countries that had nothing to do with 9/11. Revenge is often carried out in a blind rage, and I would say that characterized US actions in Iraq, given the barbaric nature of how the war was carried out, how many civilians died, and with a fallout that’s done very little for “strategic security interests”. I would say that it was a “blind rage” if its violence wasn’t so calculated — specifically to enrich a handful of Americans. It did succeed in that endeavor, and American families had their sons and daughters sent home in body bags so Haliburton's stock could skyrocket. The Iraqi people, with unsolicited promises to be “liberated” from Saddam, got nothing but grief and trauma that continues twenty years later. It was perhaps hard to justify all of that to the public; American public opinion has changed a lot, and so has US-led warfare as a result of that shift.
So, Donald Trump has made it obvious (in case it wasn’t before) that the consent of the governed doesn’t hold any weight in the United States of America. However, it’s still an interesting thing to examine in our current context. Despite a barrage of lies about nuclear weapons (like Saddam’s WMDs) and images of scary, oppressive mullahs (like the ‘dictator Saddam’) Americans still opposed a US war on Iran. If Americans were to leverage this public opinion against war in a meaningful way, by taking some sort of step past having a stance in their heads, what would it challenge? What would it look like? Will Americans oppose – at a large enough scale, US warfare that looks slightly different than it did in 2003?
US warmaking is more subtle to the American public, but not less deadly to the countries we impose it on. Trump insisted in his address to the nation that he has no plans to keep attacking Iran as long as they “negotiate”. This is after Israel killed Iranian negotiators with US approval, and after Iran had made clear their terms of negotiating that the US just couldn’t accept. There’s no definition about what Iranian compliance would look like, setting the stage for further bombing campaigns whenever Trump decides. There might not be troops on the ground or a US military occupation, but a war they refuse to call one is still functionally a war. It still kills people. It still destabilizes countries.
The US fights wars with money, private contractors, and “offensive support.” Only pouring into the streets to oppose sending troops to fight on behalf of Israel against Iran might not be the demand that becomes most pressing in the coming days and weeks. For example, will Americans oppose a war with Iran if it’s primarily conducted from the air?
There’s also a large sector of the American public that still morally supports Israel’s military in one way or another, whether it be overtly or with silence on the subject. Some of them might also make up the large portion of society that opposes the US going to war. For the last two years, as Israel has carried out its genocide campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, the US has been building up Israel’s military, sending off billions of our tax dollars to make sure Israel was perfectly poised for the moment it decided to kill Iranians. Whether the public who opposes war with Iran likes it or not, their support for Israel as a military ally will directly contradict their opinion opposing war with Iran. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, if we want to put it simply.
On the other side, Israel’s war crimes in Gaza also might have something to do with why opposition to the war on Iran is so prevalent. Because the back-up justification for attacking Iran, made by the ruling class, in case the nuke lies didn’t work, was portraying Iran’s leaders as scary, irrational, and evil boogeymen. The ruling class, decrying an evil Hitler-esque foreign leader in Iran, is now the boy crying wolf. We were told the same things about the leaders in Libya and Iraq to justify our country bombing of theirs. The result was Libyan, Iraqi, and to a lesser extent, American blood pooling in the streets. On top of that collective memory, we’ve seen our government entrench itself with Netanyahu — a commander of a military that’s killed countless Palestinians and a handful of Americans without any condemnation from our government. If there are murderous and unjust dictators in the Middle East, one of them is named Benjamin Netanyahu, and we are told he’s our greatest ally, and acting on behalf of Israel is acting in the best interest of Americans. Now, even if the US wanted the war on Iran all along, it appears to the world that Israel pulled us into the war – people do not like that, rightfully so.
If Americans who are against the war can reject these new forms of hybrid warfare as much as they reject the traditional forms of warfare, and the sectors of the public still sympathetic to Israel see the blatant contradictions in front of their eyes — then perhaps this public opinion could mean something real. Furthermore, it’s been made clear that the American ruling class will not change course solely because the people they “serve” oppose what they are doing. They’ve also demonstrated that they are willing to jail and deport people who disagree with them and their foreign policy escapades. The genocide in Gaza has made it clear that Americans standing against the actions of their government do so at great personal risk. Do Americans disagree with US involvement in the war enough? Do they disagree to the point where they are willing to experience threats, jail time, repression, physical harm, or other forms of violence? In the case of a war that could turn nuclear with an untethered Israel and Trump Administration at the helm, I sincerely hope so.
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Trump Is Trying to Unconstitutionally Bomb His Way Back to Popularity
With approval ratings underwater, why not follow Bush’s advice and launch a “little war”? What could possibly go wrong?
Jun 23, 2025
In the modern era, it was probably George W. Bush who first said it out loud and then acted on it: When you’re unpopular and losing politically, just start a little war that’s easily winnable and you’ll be back on top.
As he told his biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, in 1999 about his plans for an Iraq war as a strategy to get himself reelected in 2004:
One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait), and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed, and I'm going to have a successful presidency.
It worked for Bush, although history hasn’t been kind to him as a result. Donald Trump’s second presidency, meanwhile, has been an unmitigated disaster, both in real terms and politically as his approval ratings have slipped so far underwater they’re in late-years Richard Nixon territory:
- Inflation is up, and the tariffs aren’t bringing jobs home.
- Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires bill is in trouble.
- The GOP war on our schools and libraries is creating a huge backlash.
- Women are dying—and furious—because of red state abortion bans.
- Armed thugs are kidnapping people off the streets without warrants or due process.
- Those same immigration raids are causing food to rot in our fields.
- Trump’s destruction of USAID has already killed an estimated 300,000 poor children and handed Africa and parts of Asia to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
- Despite Elon Musk’s claims, the Epstein files are still hidden.
- Nobody except billionaires wants Trump to sell off our public lands.
- The housing crisis is worsening.
- Trump’s cuts to Social Security and Medicare are creating havoc for people trying to sign up.
- Putin has made a fool of Trump as he continues his murderous campaign against Ukraine.
- Musk now knows every penny you’ve ever earned and every drug you’ve ever taken.
- Republicans are on a national purge of voter rolls in blue cities in red states.
- Between 5 and 10 million people showed up to protest Trump’s fascist policies.
So, why not follow Bush’s advice and launch a “little war”? It worked for Ronald Reagan with Grenada and Bush with Iraq: What could possibly go wrong?
After all, when America goes to war—be it Korea in June of 1950, Vietnam in April of 1965, Kosovo in January of 1999, or Afghanistan and Iraq in October of 2001 and March of 2003 respectively—Americans always rally around the flag, the military, and the commander in chief.
At least initially.
Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to get an American president to attack Iran so his jeremiad wouldn’t be a lonely one since he tried to strong-arm Bill Clinton in the 1990s; he finally found one who’d go along with him.
Which is not to say the Iranian regime doesn’t deserve some serious comeuppance.
On more than one occasion I’ve been in Israel when Iranian-funded suicide bombers killed innocent civilians, and their “Death to the Jews” rhetoric has gotten really old. Not to mention Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s having looted Iran to the tune of $95 billion, an amount that makes kleptocrats like Putin and Trump seem like pikers.
But does any of that make this America’s war?
And, if it is, shouldn’t Congress have a say in the decision like our Constitution requires? Article 1, Section 8 says, after all:
The Congress shall have Power… To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.
There isn’t a single mention in Article II, which covers the presidency, of that person having any decision-making power over war and peace; as commander-in-chief he’s required to follow the dictates—or at least permissions—of Congress.
Which is why Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Clinton, and both Bushes all went to Congress to get authorization for dropping bombs on other countries, and President Obama used Bush’s bipartisan congressional Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) to legitimize his attacks on Libya and elsewhere.
Trump has no such authority, and he’s not even claiming authorization via the AUMF; unlike every previous president he hasn’t provided a legal rationalization for the attack.
The War Powers Act requires Congress get at least a 48-hour notice. Trump did none of that; he’s daring Congress to challenge his authority to act unilaterally, and all about a handful of Republicans have already rolled over.
As Democratic Rep. Sean Casten of Illinois said, echoing AOC’s call for Trump’s impeachment because of his failure to follow the law:
No president has the authority to bomb another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the U.S. without the approval of Congress.
Congressmen Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) agreed, saying, respectively:
“While President Trump’s decision may prove just, it’s hard to conceive a rationale that’s Constitutional,” and “This is not Constitutional.”
It’s also important to point out that President Obama had worked out a 2015 deal with Iran (the JCPOA) and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as Germany and the European Union.
Iran upheld the deal, even maintaining it for a year after Trump pulled the U.S. out and it collapsed. They did away with 97% of their enriched uranium (from 10,000 kilograms to a mere 300), dismantled two-thirds of their centrifuges, capped their enrichment at 3.67% (the level needed to fuel nuclear power plants), allowed International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors unlimited access to all their nuclear sites, and committed to maintaining the system for 25 years.
The deal eliminated, in large part, Netanyahu’s rationalization for his perennial call for other nations to bomb Iran; odds are he’s the one who convinced Trump to tear the JCPOA up. Had Trump not gone along with him, today’s situation would be vastly different.
By defying the law—the Constitution, the War Powers Act, and the AUMF—and simply bombing Iran without any consultation whatsoever, he’s also pulling a dictator stunt,
But here we are. With almost 50,000 U.S. troops within easy range of Iranian missiles. And to crank the fury quotient in Iran up to 11, Trump himself is now explicitly calling for a Bush-Iraq-style regime change.
One pro-bombing argument that Trump’s war hawks have made is that we’re aiding Ukraine against Russia, so why shouldn’t we aid Israel? Both, after all, are democracies that largely share what have come to be known as “American values.” And, in fact, we’ve been providing Ukraine with pretty much the same type of support as Israel (at least prior to the Trump presidency) including weaponry, advice, and intelligence, albeit on a much smaller scale.
But America hasn’t bombed Russia like we just did Iran; by directly bombing those nuclear facilities, we’ve destroyed any rationalization that we’re merely “helping an ally.”
And Iran is highlighting that, as is their ally, Russia.
Former Russian President Medvedev (and Putin right-hand-man), noting that these attacks will just make the Iranian leadership more popular with their own rally-around-the-flag effect, just tweeted an ominous threat:
A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.
Keep in mind, Iran’s supplied Putin’s army with thousands of deadly drones for use in Ukraine. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced yesterday that today he’ll be in Moscow to “consult with each other and coordinate our positions.”
As I noted in the Saturday Report, Putin had advised Trump against this move, in no small part because Russia has over 600 nuclear scientists in Iran and has made billions building one Iranian nuclear reactor with contracts on the books to build seven or eight more. The two countries are allies, and Iran is—more than any other country—helping Russian oil exports get around U.S. and U.N. sanctions.
While it’s unlikely this will rupture Trump’s lapdog-like slavish adoration of and deference to Putin—there’s clearly something going on there that goes back years if not decades—if Russia or North Korea supplies Iran with tactical nukes it could signal a major change in the world balance of power.
And don’t forget that China is also an explicit ally of both nations and has a military that is second only to ours (and quickly overtaking us).
That could end up looking like the allies-axis conflict of the 1940s, and we all know how bloody that ended up.
On the other hand, when Trump killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on January 3, 2020, Iran’s response was relatively mild. Five days later, they threw a few missiles into the al-Asad air base in Iraq, injuring over 100 U.S. soldiers. Trump downplayed their wounds, calling the traumatic brain injuries “a few headaches,” and the issue pretty much died.
Odds are Trump’s betting history will repeat itself, and he may well be right; Iran’s Supreme Leader would probably rather luxuriate in the billions he’s stolen from his people than confront our military—along with Israel’s—head-on. Not to mention Trump’s tendency to TACO—cutting and running—when the heat gets turned up.
The wild card here will be the advice Putin gives Khamenei’s envoy in their meetings today, and the type of military support Russia may provide. Khamenei’s been generous with his Shahed attack drones, which have helped Putin turn the war in Ukraine to his favor; will Russia return the obligation of help to Iran in their time of need?
Meanwhile, Trump continues to shoot himself—and America and the free world—in the foot, as he just put conspiracy nut Kari Lake in charge of Voice of America and she just gutted our Farsi-language Iranian service, Radio Farda. As The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board wrote in a recent op-ed, on Lake’s watch:
Radio Farda has cut freelancers, furloughed staff, and allowed podcasts and social-media accounts to lapse. It has also cut back on broadcasts through Kuwaiti transmitters that supported short-wave radio broadcasts in Iran. This old technology remains a critical source of information in times of crisis or social upheaval, such as today.
The initial gutting of Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and the various U.S. foreign-language services was almost certainly a gift to Putin and Xi, as the Russian- and Chinese-language services were among the first to go. But Lake has taken her neofascist commission a large step further, gutting pro-democracy programming in dozens of languages worldwide.
Iran is also believed to have “sleeper cells” in the United States and other countries they could activate to commit acts of terror on the scale of 9/11. Unfortunately, Trump has replaced the intelligence professionals who ran our domestic anti-terrorism agency with a hard-core right-wing MAGA loyalist who’s only 22 years old, has no intelligence or military experience, and was most recently a lawn boy and grocery store assistant.
But that’s merely stupid, putting loyalty above competence, something we’ve come to expect from Trump and can see vividly in almost every one of his most important appointments; at least it’s not unconstitutional.
Both the Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Act—written in response to the excesses and lies that led to and made a bloody mess of Vietnam—require the president to consult Congress before commencing hostilities against any other nation. While Bush’s AUMF gave Trump a loophole, he didn’t even try to invoke it, meaning that he’s gone way beyond any actual legal authority he has, which is why AOC is calling for his impeachment.
To compound Trump’s apparent war crime, he informed several Republican members of Congress of the impending attack on Iran but failed to notify their Democratic colleagues, including those in the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” that U.S. law (50 U.S.C. § 3093) requires be notified about any “significant anticipated intelligence activity” including the use of military force.
By letting Republicans in but freezing out Democrats at the highest level (with the most secure top-secret clearances and proven discretion), Trump has politicized his attack on Iran, making it seem even more than before like what Bush was trying to accomplish back in the early 2000s when his approval numbers were underwater and 9/11 essentially rescued him.
By defying the law—the Constitution, the War Powers Act, and the AUMF—and simply bombing Iran without any consultation whatsoever, he’s also pulling a dictator stunt, essentially saying, “I, alone, will decide what I can and cannot do.” That’s an impeachable offense under the Constitution.
And it’s even possible that Trump is hoping for something similar to 9/11; his gutting of our intelligence agencies, including firing over 1,200 CIA employees, sure makes it look that way.
So, what do we do?
A bipartisan group of Senators and House members, during the last year of the Biden administration, introduced the National Security Powers Act that would restore the Constitution’s requirement for congressional approval for acts of war.
Although the proverbial horse has already fled the barn, now it’s vital that we close the door before Trump takes Congress’ and the public’s acquiesce as permission for escalation, repeating the mistakes of Vietnam, et al. We must demand Congress pass it, along with requiring a legal justification from Trump for this act of war.
The number for the congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121. Tag, you’re it!
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