Iran Shouldn’t Have Nukes. But We Also Shouldn’t Let Trump Conduct an Unconstitutional War.

Lechery, lechery; still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion: a burning devil take them!

–Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act V, Scene II.

So he’s had his big moment, and it is going to go down in history one way or another. I do hope that history notes that this whole conflict is being straw-bossed by two leaders who stay in office for the purpose of staying out of the slammer. However, who is leading whom by the nose is no longer relevant.

And, God help us, outrage over the president’s usurpation of Congress’s war powers never has sounded more thin and impotent. That horse has been out of the barn since President Jefferson sent the fleet after the Barbary pirates. Vietnam clinched that deal 164 years later. We now have a president whose approach to constitutional barriers has been to light them on fire. So God love you, Tim Kaine and AOC, but nobody’s listening. Nobody ever does, once the boom-booms begin to go off. From The New York Times:

“There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran, far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days,” he said. “Remember, there are many targets left. Tonight’s was the most difficult of them all, by far, and perhaps the most lethal. But if peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speed and skill. Most of them can be taken out in a matter of minutes.”

The bold talk continued on Sunday. The president Truth Socialized openly about regime change in Tehran. From The New York Times:

U.S. strikes on Sunday stoked fears of a dangerously escalating conflict across the Middle East and urgent calls from world leaders for diplomacy. But after his administration spent much of the day emphasizing that the United States did not intend to enter an all-out war with Tehran, President Trump suggested on social media that a change in Iran’s government was not unthinkable. “If the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Perhaps the most curious reactions have come from our erstwhile Never Trump allies. They’re still repulsed by the man, but he did deliver them the air strikes they’ve been stanning for the past three decades. David Frum, for one, seems rather bumfuzzled.

Striking Iran at this time and under these circumstances was the right decision by an administration and president that usually make the wrong one. An American president who does not believe in democracy at home has delivered an overwhelming blow in defense of a threatened democracy overseas. If a single night’s action successfully terminates Donald Trump’s Iran war, and permanently ends the Iran nuclear-bomb program, then Trump will have retroactively earned the birthday parade he gave himself on June 14. If not, this unilateral war under a president with dictatorial ambitions may lead the United States to some dark and repressive places.

I am loath to point out that, under our Constitution, a president cannot conduct “a unilateral war.” Also, if Frum straddled a little wider, he’d have split right up to his eyebrows.

Trump did the right thing, but he did that right thing in the wrongest possible way: without Congress, without competent leadership in place to defend the United States against terrorism, and while waging a culture war at home against half the nation. Trump has not put U.S. boots on the ground to fight Iran, but he has put U.S. troops on the ground for an uninvited military occupation of California.

That tearing and ripping sounds painful. Nearly every Republican president elected in my lifetime has launched a war overseas while fighting a culture war at home. In Richard Nixon, of course, the two merged as one. His bloody adventurism in Southeast Asia prompted division and war at home that was in every way also a culture war. George H.W. Bush fought Gulf War I with a massive polling advantage while allowing the flying monkeys to roam freely and write the party platform at the 1992 Republican convention, and that was only four years after he handed his 1988 campaign over to the tender ministrations of Lee Atwater and his band of goons. As for W, well, there were the dirty campaigns in the 2002 midterms as he ran up to the catastrophe in Iraq, to say nothing of his 2004 reelection campaign, in which he ran on the not-yet-entirely-disastrous war in concert with ratfcking John Kerry’s military record and placing anti-gay-marriage referenda on the ballot in every key state.

Anyway, it didn’t take long for the administration’s amateur-hour incoherence to reassert itself. The secretary of defense was out there saying the attack wasn’t about regime change, a phrase which, as we have shown, the president is throwing into every microphone. I hope Tulsi Gabbard hasn’t ordered new curtains for her office.

As for the actual military consequences, I have no hot takes to sell. It would not be good for the world if Iran had nukes. An unstable theocracy with the bomb is about as bad as it gets. That’s why I celebrated the deal cut by Barack Obama and John Kerry by which Iran agreed to close down its nuclear program, and apparently it was well on the way to doing so before a tiny orange thumb from Florida dropped onto the scale. As for unstable theocracies, well, maybe organizing the overthrow of Mosadegh and handing Iran over to the Pahlavis back in 1953 wasn’t the best long-term idea either. And it’s a terrible idea now. As for the other military consequences, I leave that to better-informed minds than my own, but I have concluded that we should have left Iran alone for the past seven decades. We’ve done nothing for that place except screw it up.

Which leaves us with the president and the dense, dark, forbidding jungle of his mind and soul. It is too easy to call him a bully. He is a beta who has been cosplaying an alpha since the day he was born. His father, a true alpha and also a freaking vampire, taught him that dominance, real and imagined, was the only route to wealth and success. Later, he was taught how to refine this approach by Roy Cohn, another creature of the night. It has sustained him through business failures, public ridicule, and tabloid infamy. It was the engine behind all the women he abused, all the contractors he cheated, and all the lives and careers he’s ruined. There are two kinds of people in his dark, forbidding jungle—suckers and losers. Military people shouldn’t feel singled out by that distinction. We are, all of us, to him, suckers and losers, all the way back to the founding fathers, who set up a government for suckers and losers. Now he has an army and an air force. Now he has his moment.

Maybe more of us should have shown up for his damn parade. I dunno.