As Trump's illegal attack on Iran goes sideways, Democrats must fight further war funding
The case for Democrats opposing budgetary support for more mayhem in the Middle East (and very possibly beyond) is overwhelming
As the illegal U.S. war on Iran enters its fourth week, the need for the Democratic opposition to do all in its power to rein in President Trump’s war-making powers grows ever more urgent. Even on the contradictory and mendacious terms with which the Trump administration has sought to justify its actions, this is a failed war with unacceptable human and economic costs.
The president claims to be interested in regime change, yet U.S. bombings and assassinations of Iranian leadership appear to have ensured only more of the ultra-theocratic same. The president claims to stand by the Iranian people, yet has expressed no remorse as the joint U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign has killed more than 1,400 civilians, including upwards of 160 children at a girls’ school. The president claims to be dedicated to destroying the Iranian nuclear weapons program (which, critically, he previously claimed had already been “obliterated” by American strikes last year), yet the path to potentially doing so appears to require the deployment of U.S. ground troops in yet another escalation of this war. The president claims that Iran was mere weeks from building a nuclear weapon, yet no credible analyst backs this up. The president claims that an Iranian attack on U.S. interests was “imminent,” yet for evidence points to his “feelings.”
In short, Donald Trump has lied the country into an unnecessary, destabilizing Middle East war. In doing so, he has betrayed his oath of office and his responsibilities as commander in chief. This is all the more damning when we consider that he likely made his decision in an effort to amp up his popularity, via a hoped-for rally-around-the flag effect, in the face of plummeting poll numbers amidst multiple domestic crises (mass deportations, persistent high inflation, and the drip-drip-drip of damning Epstein files revelations, including credible accusations that Trump physically and sexually assaulted a girl).
While most elected Democrats in D.C. appear generally united against Trump’s war, squishy statements from some — including leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries — show that public pressure needs to amp up in order to ensure common sense prevails across the party. In particular, Schumer and Jeffries have appeared open to voting to provide supplemental Pentagon funding for the war, which has been estimated to be burning through $1 billion every day. Now that Trump is apparently looking at a request for a jaw-dropping $200 billion in additional Pentagon funds for the war, the stakes are even higher. Given that stopping funding of the war is where the Democrats have their best chance of reeling in this Middle East chaos, I wanted to set out for helpful demolition a pair of excuses some have put forth in favor of actually voting to fund the war, before moving on to more general arguments in favor of the Democrats using the power of the purse to help end this madness.
“The war is already underway, so we should go along with it.” A variant of this lazy chestnut was offered by Michigan’s Senator Elissa Slotkin (“I mean, we’re in it”). Donald Trump initiated this conflict without a declaration of war or even congressional vote of approval, on the basis of lies and in the absence of an imminent threat to the United States. To say that a president should be supported whenever he illegally and unnecessarily starts a war doesn’t seem much different from saying that the president can do anything anytime, and we all just have to go along. Doesn’t sound a lot like democracy to me! Beyond these obvious process arguments and the foolish idea of endorsing a war that the president himself doesn’t seem to know the real purpose of, there is also the ongoing reality of the war’s increasing cost in lives, treasure, economic damage, and geopolitical mayhem. “We’re in it already” is simply not a credible argument for continuing to be in it.
“We must fund the war because our troops are in harm’s way.” We can view this as a more refined but arguably even dumber justification for supporting Trump’s obscene war than the first one I listed. To grant the best gloss on this, it appears that those who make this argument honestly believe that voting to end funding means that U.S. troops will suddenly be sitting ducks, without ships, fuel, or bullets. But this is simply not what would happen. The Pentagon is not working on a day-ahead fuel and ammunition schedule.
At the same time, we should acknowledge the existence of reports that the Pentagon may be running low on the missile and drone interceptors that have staved off so many Iranian attacks, and that a Pentagon inability to buy more in the coming weeks could indeed result in more damage and deaths to U.S. forces. But this is how the power of the purse works — it forces the president to withdraw American troops because the funding for their supply has been cut off. If the president were to keep our forces in place despite their vulnerability, this would be his choice, not the Democrats’; any harm to them would fall squarely on his shoulders. He’s the commander in chief, after all.
And this gets to the crux of the matter — the president alone simply does not have the power to commit the U.S. to a war (though he does have the power to order troops out of harm’s way if the U.S. Congress insists that the U.S. withdraw from the fight). In the “troops in harm’s way” argument, we can see a fundamental fear of asserting congressional prerogatives and engaging in a fight that, among other things, insists on the president’s responsibility to act competently as a commander in chief. Which leads us to the next point. . .
Donald Trump is an incompetent commander in chief who cannot be trusted to command the U.S. armed forces. Despite his claims to favor an ever stronger and “lethal” American military, the last year shows how the president has laid the groundwork for disaster via his undermining of Pentagon personnel and policies. Under incompetent Department of Defense secretary Pete Hegseth, the administration has initiated a deranged crusade to make non-white, non-male officers and enlisted personnel feel unwelcome in the armed forces, curtailing the military’s pool of talent and ensuring that incompetent men in the mold of Hegseth hold unwarranted power. The recent rounds of illegal attacks on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific show that the corruption of Pentagon competence and adherence to the laws of war is already well apace, as those killings very likely have ignored adverse legal opinions.
In the current conflict in Iran, we are seeing the fruit of an administration that has bullied the armed forces leadership into submission and ignored or suppressed sound military advice. Exhibit A is the fact that the president and his advisors simply did not grasp or outright ignored the possibility that Iran might retaliate against the U.S. by threatening shipping in the vital and easily-harassed Strait of Hormuz. As any moderately-informed news consumer can by now tell you, the U.S. military has long seen the Iranian threat to oil shipping through the Strait as a major concern in any possible conflict with that nation. Whether Trump disbelieved this information or cowed military officials into downplaying it, the effect is the same: the U.S. is now learning that Iran has plenty of capacity to cause havoc with the U.S. and world economies by mining the Strait of Hormuz and credibly threatening attacks on maritime traffic. The absence of prior planning is there for all to see: the U.S. lacks the naval assets to keep the strait open, which has led to President Trump alternately begging and bullying U.S. allies (and adversaries like China!) into deploying their own forces to the Strait of Hormuz.
I’m risking the reader’s patience with this level of detail because I think it bears heavily on the point I’m making here: for Democrats to support Trump’s war on Iran would be to provide their de facto vote of confidence in a commander in chief who clearly had no plan for this war or its likely contingencies. I do not see how in good conscience they could trust the lives of U.S. sailors, airmen, soldiers, and marines to the wartime leadership of such a man; even if they believed against all evidence that war against Iran is justified and good, Trump has by this point betrayed all trust in his capacity to make decisions on anything remotely related to military matters. Which leads us to. . .
Democratic votes in support of supplemental Pentagon funding would transform this from Trump’s stupid war into a bipartisan stupid war, making the Democrats complicit in all of its failings. Not only would a vote to fund the war constitute an endorsement of an incompetent commander in chief engaged in an illegal war, it would make the Democrats complicit by endorsing both the decision to wage war and Trump’s conduct of it going forward. Given that the Iran war is arguably the biggest fiasco of the Trump presidency to date, there is little sense in Democrats providing any sort of support for the effort, or making themselves the target of public revulsion along with Trump. There is also the even more important point that the party has a duty to stop a war that is threatening our national security and economic prosperity by unnecessarily spreading chaos across the Middle East and beyond.
In particular, Democrats risk making themselves complicit in the loose, murderous rules of engagement under which the military is operating, which have already led to the sinking of an Iranian destroyer far from the combat zone and the above-mentioned missile strike on a girls’ school. The torpedoing of the Dena of the coast of Sri Lanka arguably involved a war crime, as the U.S. submarine that launched the attack reportedly did not attempt to render aid to the shipwrecked survivors (some 32 appear to have survived; more than 80 aboard perished). Meanwhile, the attack on the girls’ school — the deadliest U.S. attack against civilians in decades — appears related to Secretary Hegseth’s elimination of a Pentagon program to reduce civilian casualties. Apart from these killings, more than 1,300 Iranian civilians have reportedly been killed in what is, again, an illegal and unnecessary war. These casualties are unfortunately bound to increase. Do Democrats really want to put themselves on the side of an administration that clearly views the Iranians, including civilians, as mere collateral damage to an effort by the president to salvage his domestic popularity ratings?
Trump cannot be trusted to restrict additional spending to just the Iran war. Questioned about his gargantuan ask for more Pentagon funds — reported to be some $200 billion — the president indicated that it might not just be spent on actions against Iran. Given the president’s lackadaisical attitude towards spending funds for their intended purpose, his increasing political incentives to taper off the Iran war (which are, admittedly, in conflict with his apparent desire to appear big and powerful by continuing to kill Iranians), and his open interest in other, easier wars (Cuba seems to be the next target), giving Trump more money would be tantamount to encouraging him to find new countries to attack.
The clear moral and political necessity of the moment is for Democrats to do everything within their power to curtail Trump’s senseless war-making. The last thing they should do is in any way associate themselves with his insane policies out of political cowardice, or based on overestimates of his political strength. Historian Timothy Snyder recently wrote that President Trump:
took the greatest military force in world history, lost a war to a middle power in a week, begged the world to save him, and demanded that the media lie about this and everything else. I try, but at a simple human level I do not see how anyone can mistake this man’s almost supernatural weakness for strength. His weakness is something negative, gravitational, so deep that it can draw in a whole country. But only if we fail to see it. Only if we let it.
Snyder is right: Trump is weak, and getting weaker by the day despite the violence he is still able to unleash via the U.S. military and other instruments of power built up by generations of Americans. Condemning Trump’s war, calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Iranian theater, and fighting additional funds tooth and nail may well hasten Trump’s political collapse, as an already-war skeptical public sees one of our two major parties giving voice to the truth of the president’s insanity. The downsides to any Democratic waffling on the war could be far more severe than many realize; as former Obama White House official Ben Rhodes noted of Democratic elected officials, “If you can’t say that I’m uniformly against an illegal and stupid war launched by an authoritarian president… how can I trust you on anything?”