My Three Quick Takes on Striking Iran

First, this is awesome. It’s the United States of America in all of its righteous glory against a terroristic tyranny that has been attacking us for almost half a century, from the Iranian hostage crisis (the first news story I followed as a grade schooler) to the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut to roadside bombs in Iraq — each of which was a separate act of war against the U.S. If you’re unmoved by that, I don’t know what to say. All of the worst people are out there denouncing our country, calling us terrorists, and weeping for the tyrants.

Second, I’ve been against going back to hit Iran a second time in a year unless we meant to finish the job and put an end to this regime for good. As was true in Iraq, the problem was never the precise status of the regime’s weapons programs, but the regime itself. At this writing, it looks as if we may actually be finishing the job — but then, that’s not how things turned out when the smoke cleared in Venezuela.

Third, this is yet another in a long train of diminishments of the sole power of Congress to declare war. The war power, unlike the legislative power, is a shared one: Presidents have independent Article II power as commander in chief to use military force against threats, and many of our presidents have done so without congressional authorization. (That’s even aside from how often Congress has given authorizations to use force, or supplied funds for the use of force, short of a formal declaration of war.) So, the line is not an entirely bright one. In practice and precedent, the case for unilateral presidential action has been strongest when action is swift, short in duration, and either responded to an immediate threat or provocation or required an element of surprise (as was arguably the case with the Maduro raid in Venezuela or the first strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites). Bear in mind — although this is no longer true — that for much of our history, Congress spent half of the time (often, nearly entire years at a time) out of session, out of the capital, and unable to be summoned without months of notice. Presidents have typically been given more leeway to act by sea and air without Congress than when committing significant ground forces, and come to grief when they found themselves in long-term commitments that Congress never authorized.

Here, it’s pretty hard to justify Trump acting without asking Congress for any authority. This assault took lots of advance planning, including huge, public buildups in the Gulf and a ton of diplomatic groundwork with allies. We already struck Iran less than a year ago, so this isn’t even a new conflict. And if we succeed in overturning the Iranian regime, even if not a single American boot is needed on the ground after that, it is bound to give us new longer-term commitments in the region. This is not just a Trump scandal; the erosion of the congressional role has been ongoing a while, and it’s unlikely to reverse itself amidst a wider collapse of our national legislature. But it’s not how this is supposed to work, not least because the absence of a vote in Congress meant that the administration never had to make a case for this to the American public. Nobody will care much if this is a success, which has a thousand fathers. But it raises the stakes if it’s not.