Are We Going to War With Iran or Not?
It sure looks like the United States is getting ready to go to war in the Middle East. On Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. government suddenly announced the evacuation of embassy staff and military dependents across the region. Gen. Erik Kurilla, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, then cancelled his planned testimony to Congress.
As those evacuations were happening, the British government’s shipping industry security office issued a bulletin about “increased tensions within the region which could lead to an escalation of military activity.” Asked what was happening, President Donald Trump ominously told reporters, “you’re going to have to figure that one out yourself.”
While the administration wouldn’t publicly say what was going on, its officials were happy to leak the source of the panic to the press. Israel was preparing an attack on Iran, sources told NBC and CBS. The NBC report included a detail that somewhat changes the picture: Israel would attack “most likely without U.S. support.”
Still, Iran isn’t treating the U.S. and Israel as separate actors. There is a round of U.S.-Iranian talks scheduled in Oman on Sunday, and an Iranian official told Reuters that the alleged warnings about an Israeli strike were a form of “psychological warfare” aimed at building leverage.
Israel’s “only option is one that is combined with the United States, and at a minimum, they would need the U.S. to protect them from the barrage of missiles that would be coming from Iran in retaliation,” Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where I used to work, told Al Jazeera. “It’s unclear at this point whether this [series of evacuations] is just part of the choreography or whether this is real movement towards taking military action.”
Whether the warnings are a bluff or a prelude to a real war, they highlight a deeper problem with the way the U.S. is run. War is the most serious decision a government can make, and Americans shouldn’t find out about it through cryptic omens or fat-fingered group chat leaks. If the president feels the need to keep his options open—whether to start a war or stand in the middle of one—he should have to go to Congress and get a war authorization.
Recent polling by the University of Maryland shows that 69 percent of Americans, including 64 percent of Republicans, want a diplomatic deal with Iran, and only 14 percent of Americans want war.
Even the Bush administration, not exactly believers in congressional oversight or limits on presidential power, took more care to build a public case for war in Iraq. (The fact that they lied about an Iraqi nuclear weapons program shows, perversely, that they cared what the public thought.) But the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations all demonstrated that it’s easier to jump into a war and dare Congress to stop it, correctly betting that Americans’ indifference or hostility to the Middle East would be enough to sustain the war politically.
Worse yet, all of these administrations took the decision about war with Iran out of American hands. Since the late Bush administration, Israel and the U.S. have been conducting the Juniper exercises to practice for a joint military campaign. Although the target was never named, and U.S. officials explicitly denied in 2023 that the exercise was based on “mockups of Iranian targets or of any other adversary,” the drills were clearly designed with Iran in mind.
Unclassified U.S. military emails from the time of the Juniper Falcon 21-2 exercise in July 2021, revealed by the group Distributed Denial of Secrets in October 2024, show the heavy involvement of officials from the “Iran Branch” of U.S. Central Command’s planning dir
Article from Reason.com
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