President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the Oval Office at the White House on Tuesday.Mark Schiefelbein/The Associated Press
When president George H.W. Bush went to war against Iraq in 1991, he sought and won the consent of the Congress of the United States. Resolutions authorizing military force passed the House, by a margin of 250 to 183, and the Senate, 52-47.
Mr. Bush had earlier secured the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 678. The cause was clear and compelling: to repel Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The coalition in support numbered 34 countries in all.
When president George W. Bush went to war against Iraq in 2003, he, too, obtained the consent of the Congress. He famously failed to win the approval of the Security Council but he did line up more than 40 countries in support.
The particular casus belli in 2003 was the Bush administration’s charge that the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, had reconstituted his previous attempts to develop nuclear arms. That later turned out to be false. But most western intelligence agencies at the time believed it. Saddam’s own generals believed it. There is evidence that he himself may have believed it.
Contrast these two previous examples of U.S. military action, as controversial as they were and are, with the war Donald Trump has just launched against Iran. No Congressional approval. No Security Council resolution.
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And no international support. Well, next to none. The war is being conducted with the active participation of one country, Israel, and the explicit support of a handful of others, including Argentina, Australia, and, for some reason, Canada.
The point is not that Mr. Trump’s war against Iran is illegal, though it is that, under both U.S. and international law, in the absence of any of the conditions that might make it legal, or at least legitimate: if not the express authorization of the requisite bodies, then the sort of emergency that might justify acting without them.
Trump officials have cycled through a series of possible justifications, with a lazy indifference to fact that conveys their contempt for the very idea of having to justify their decisions. For example, that Iran was on the verge of gaining the capacity to make nuclear weapons – the very capacity the President had claimed was “completely and totally obliterated” by last year’s bombing runs. In contrast to 2003, virtually no one even pretends to believe this. (The Carney government is again a notable exception.)
Or: Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S. homeland – almost immediately repudiated by Pentagon officials – later updated to the farcical claim that because Israel was about to attack Iran, and because the administration feared that Iran might retaliate by attacking U.S. forces, the U.S. had to attack before either of them.
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It was all about regime change, for about five minutes, accompanied by another one of Mr. Trump’s calls for ordinary Iranians to rise up against the regime – the same regime that had earlier slaughtered tens of thousands of them, while Mr. Trump stood by. Then it was about a Venezuelan-style operation that would take out the top guy but leave the same odious regime in place. Plus a half a dozen other airy rationales.
This is the point: not the law, as such, but what the law represents. The reason why presidents are expected, if not required, to seek Congress’s approval before going to war – the reason they are encouraged, if not expected, to seek the approval of the Security Council – is not out of some bureaucratic concern that everyone fill out the proper forms.
It is to force them to lay out their case – to show why war is necessary, why no less drastic intervention will suffice; and to show that they have a serious plan for winning it, including a plan for what comes after. Needless to say, the Trump administration has done none of these. It is not just a war of choice. It is a war of fancy, without the slightest grounding in law, or necessity, or reality.
Anyone with any sense of how the world works knows that war is sometimes necessary. But anyone with any sense of the awfulness of war – of its enormous toll, in lives and money; and of the enormous risks of unforeseen consequences – knows that the case for war must meet a very high bar. Otherwise we are at peril not only of one unnecessary war but, by normalizing such aggression, of others.
It is not for the Iranian regime’s sake that we insist on this – any more than the criminal law exists for the benefit of criminals. We “give the Devil the benefit of the law,” as in the famous phrase, for our own safety’s sake.