For one, Trump and his aides have cited many different objectives: deposing the regime, ensuring Iran never has nuclear weapons, destroying the country’s missile capabilities, vanquishing its navy, ending support for its proxies and terrorism, exacting revenge for past attacks killing Americans, as well as ensuring Iran can never project force beyond its borders.
All these constitute a tall order, to say the least. Regime change, for one, is hard to achieve from the air, and yet it seems Washington has no intention of deploying ground troops to depose Iran’s regime, maintain order and assist a new one in taking over. And though airpower can do a lot to degrade and destroy the country’s nuclear program, missile capability and military in the short run, those are a means to an end.
What political objective would be served by effectively disarming Iran? What would constitute success for the U.S.? And how much force would be needed to achieve it? On this, the administration and the president have been silent.
Finally, we have Weinberger’s last two principles, which are the most exacting but also the most important in a democracy: First among them is having a “reasonable assurance” of public and congressional support for the contemplated action.
Here, the administration hasn’t even tried. In his State of the Union address just days before ordering the start of the war, Trump devoted only three of his 108 minutes to Iran. He emphasized that Iran needed to say the “secret words” that it would not get nuclear weapons — words it has uttered for decades — and never made the case to the public for war to achieve this or any other objective.
Also, in contrast to his two Republican predecessors who similarly embarked on wars in the Middle East in the past 30 years — George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush — Trump didn’t seek congressional support either. Rather, he has ignored Congress completely, despite its constitutional role to declare war.