Congress should step in, but
there's a big reason why they might not.
As
President Donald Trump was in Florida kicking off his bid for a second term, his national security team was
in Washington hatching plans that make that prospect much less likely.
The
architects of the failed George W. Bush foreign policy rightly derided by Trump
as a “big, fat mistake” on the campaign trail today exercise undue influence
inside this White House. The end result could be a war with Iran.
Just
as their last turn at the wheel wrecked the Bush presidency and eventually left
Barack Obama in power alongside three-fifths Democratic majorities in both
houses of Congress, the Republican Party’s wildest hawks could now ensure that
Trump is a one-term president. The president once understood this, telling Jeb
Bush, “Your brother and his administration gave us Barack Obama…. Abraham
Lincoln couldn’t have won.”
Trump
defeated Jeb, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio, running on a foreign policy of
“America First” and repudiating a decade and a half of unwinnable wars. He then
won in an upset over Hillary Clinton, who voted to invade Iraq, pushed “kinetic
military action” in Libya, and otherwise hasn’t seen a war she hasn’t liked
since Vietnam.
Now
Trump is on the precipice of ceding the war issue to his political opponents,
as the border crisis metastasizes and the suburbs turn blue. Joe Biden would be
the third Democratic presidential nominee to have voted for the Iraq war—the
exception, Obama, twice won the White House—just as Chuck Schumer is the third
straight Senate Democratic leader to have done so.
If Trump follows Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo and his Bush retread national security advisor John Bolton into a
preventive war with Iran, he will make Biden and Schumer look like Tulsi
Gabbard—and perhaps pave the way for a different Democratic nominee against
whom the anti-Hillary playbook of 2016 will prove less useful.
The
president began the year promising to end the war in Syria, which Congress
never authorized in the first place, and wind down the war in Afghanistan.
Alongside low unemployment, the job growth that followed deregulation and tax
cuts, and remaking the Supreme Court in Antonin Scalia’s image, keeping ISIS at
bay without launching a new war in the Middle East—though he has surely
escalated some ongoing conflicts—stands among his top accomplishments.
Perhaps
that is the soft bigotry of low expectations, to use a Bush-era phrase, but in
an era of forever war, it counts for something. That is, it will count for
something until the Trump team invokes the congressional authorization of force
used for the Afghan war to start a new one in Iran, a move too brazenly
unconstitutional for even the Bush-Cheney contingent of old.
The
cakewalk crowd has reemerged to assure us that pinprick strikes against Iranian
nuclear facilities are possible and that the regime in Tehran will prove a
paper tiger. But everywhere their promises have turned to ash. There were no
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or cheering throngs greeting America’s
finest as liberators. Groups ideologically similar to the Islamists who
attacked us on 9/11 emerged from Iraq and Libya as more powerful, not less.
Iran has long been the unprincipled
exception to Trump’s opposition to Middle Eastern quagmires. His desire to undo
the Obama presidency predisposed him to unraveling the nuclear deal and led him
to folly in Yemen. Now it might prompt him to redo the foreign policy mistakes
that toppled the Bush dynasty, paving the way for a socialist to become the
next commander-in-chief.
Still,
there remains a powerful voice inside the White House who could halt this march
to war. “The president, who campaigned against getting the U.S. bogged down in
unnecessary foreign wars, is considered the primary internal obstacle to a
counterattack,” Politico reports.
Not
even Trump’s opinion should matter most. The Constitution vests the power to
declare war in Congress. To justify a new war based on an outdated resolution
passed nearly 20 years ago to authorize retaliation against the 9/11 attackers
would be an unconscionable power grab by the executive branch that lawmakers
should not countenance. Yet time and again, Congress has shirked its
constitutional duties.
The Democrats in the House have an
opportunity to put their money where their mouths are. But maybe they won’t.
An Iraq-like war in Iran would go a long way toward accomplishing their main
goal: making Donald Trump a one-term president.
W. James Antle III is the editor of The
American Conservative.
