Iranians rally to protest the U.S. attack on Iran, in Enghelab Square, Tehran, on June 22. Donald Trump’s order to attack has initiated a fresh debate inside Congress over the wisdom and legality of his actions.ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images
Political figures, commentators and historians seeking perspective on the bomb and missile strikes Donald Trump ordered Saturday on Iran are reaching for guidance from the country’s experience in Vietnam and Iraq. But perhaps the best instruction might come from two Second World War figures.
One is Dwight Eisenhower, who concluded eight White House years with a 1961 Farewell Address reminding Americans that, in meeting challenges, “there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.”
The other is Winston Churchill, who in a 1942 Lord Mayor’s Banquet speech at London’s Mansion House saluted the victory of the “men of British blood” in the Second Battle of El Alamein but cautioned, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
These two notions, if not those exact quotes, are what White House and Pentagon officials face in the aftermath of the stunning barrage of Iran’s nuclear sites and the apparent ceasefire between Israel and Iran reached Monday.
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They don’t know whether the spectacular display of the combination of high-tech firepower and brute force achieved the destruction of Iran’s nuclear project. Nor do they know whether the cannonade directed at three vital sites signals the brutal end, or the more ominous beginning, of a confrontation between the world’s greatest military power and one of the most obdurate theocracies in world history.
As the prospect of American armed intervention mounted, the U.S. President said, “Nobody knows what I’m going to do.” The same now can be said of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran.
The country has been weakened by the Operation Midnight Hammer assault. Israeli military actions wiped out the leadership and much of the combat force of Iran’s associated Hezbollah paramilitary group and then all but destroyed its air-defence capabilities. But in its current convulsion of hurt and rage, Iran might still undertake an offensive of asymmetrical warfare, employing ingenious techniques to attack American military personnel and installations in the region or to retaliate with terrorist attacks inside the United States. On Monday, it fired missiles at the U.S. base in Qatar but there was no damage.
Missiles were seen in the sky over Doha on Monday as Iran's military said it had carried out a missile attack on the U.S. airbase in Qatar. Qatar said it intercepted the missiles and there were no casualties.
Reuters
Indeed, what is known now is far less than what is not known.
“We heard a lot of White House braggadocio, but many questions remain,” Dennis Goldford, a political scientist emeritus at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, said in an interview. “We still don’t know what was destroyed. We don’t know Iran’s response. We haven’t engaged the constitutional issues involved. And we don’t know the implications of the accumulation of power in the executive branch and the collapse of the will of the legislative branch.”
But Mr. Trump’s order to attack Iran has initiated a fresh debate inside Congress over the wisdom and, perhaps more important, the legality of his actions.
“Congress needs to ask, what are the consequences of our bombing Iran?” Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of California, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said in an e-mail response to a Globe and Mail inquiry. “Will it make us more secure or put our troops at risk and simply push Iran to expel inspectors, rip up the non-proliferation treaty, and rush to develop nuclear weapons? Americans are sick of wars in the Middle East. We need a vote in Congress.”
In 2020, during his first term in the White House, Mr. Trump didn’t consult Congress before ordering an air strike to kill Iranian military general Qassem Soleimani, who organized fighting proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. Nor have past presidents satisfied demands for legislative consultation and approval of many of their actions since the passage of the War Powers Act in 1973.
There remain enormous domestic political ramifications of the weekend attack.
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Mr. Trump campaigned on keeping the United States out of “forever wars” – such as those in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan – a notion that his MAGA base embraces with ardour. If this conflict has the prospect of qualifying as a “forever war,” many of the President’s supporters will feel betrayed.
One of them is the outspoken Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who said in a social-media post, “I don’t want to fight or fund nuclear-armed Israel’s wars.”
The American attack also raised the question – more a debating point than a relevant issue now that bombs and sea-launched Tomahawk missiles have reached their targets – of whether Washington or Tehran was responsible for blowing up negotiations.
A separate debate point – one more relevant, with implications for international law – is whether the weekend attacks mean the United States actually is at war. Since the Korean War, which then-president Harry Truman, avoiding congressional approval, described as a UN-led “police action,” the U.S. hasn’t formally declared war, a power the Constitution gives Congress, not the President.
The remarks of a third Second World War figure may have relevance to the current situation, especially if the apparent ceasefire between Israel and Iran does not hold.
In a campaign speech days before the 1940 election – at a time when Canada as well as portions of Asia and Europe were involved in worldwide combat – Franklin Delano Roosevelt told a Boston audience, “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”
That was a world-class artful dodge, for if the United States were involved in a war, it would no longer be a “foreign war.” Similarly, any attack on American citizens or assets beyond the Qatar attack, even if provoked by the action Mr. Trump ordered, would likely negate the power of the President’s vow among his MAGA masses.