Lot of things here, so we'll go from most frivolous to least frivolous.
First, typo: "President Bush very probably wanted to go to war with Iraq immediately by April 2022" should probably be 2002 instead. Though the timeline when Jeb! won the nomination in 2016 and beat Clinton would probably be better than this one, though if we didn't get Dobbs in that timeline it would not be good.
Second, oral vs. digital stimulation: while I understand that the Catholic church hasn't said anything on the topic, I do think there is a qualitative difference between putting your mouth to your spouse's genitals and applying one's fingers to the same area. Maybe I take the teleological view of such things a little too far, but it seems to me like the hand is designed for manipulation and poking around, while the mouth is built for eating, talking, and breathing, though that might just be a post hoc rationalization of my own personal squicks. Even so, I certainly wouldn't accuse someone of sinning for engaging in oral sex.
Third...I'm not entirely convinced that you're right about this being an illegal war, but I'm not convinced that you're wrong. However, at this point, now that it's started I think the best option is to take the path that the Whigs took during the Mexican-American War--that is to say, supporting the success of American arms while decrying the process that caused them to be used in the first place. Then, once the war's over and the Ayatollahs are gone we hold an impeachment and a trial with the *explicit* proviso that the only person who is at risk is POTUS. Because at this point, I think the consequences of stopping this thing before the job is done will be worse than seeing it through to the end.
(Note: lest anyone think I am a partisan on such matters, if they made me dictator and Edward Snowden fell into my hands, I would give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for exposing the NSA's shenanigans, and then have him shot for treason for running to China and Russia afterwards.)
Not to pile on, but I noticed the other two typos and also this one:
"I am exactly the kind of person the [sic] whose support the Trump Administration would have counted on in the public debate, if they had bothered to have a public debate."
"Because at this point, I think the consequences of stopping this thing before the job is done will be worse than seeing it through to the end."
The war is functionally already over--Iran won. The moment Ali Khamenei was killed, Iran devolved military command to regional commanders who operate independently of the central government. Even if you defeat, or make some sort of deal with, the central government of Iran (Mojtaba Khamenei and Masoud Pezeshkian), those regional commanders don't have to pay attention to it and can keep fighting. Unless there's the political will to put massive numbers of ground troops into Iran to root out every single one of those regional commands (and, to be fair, I don't know what command(s) the Strait of Hormuz falls under), Iran, through those regional commands, can likely keep fighting indefinitely, including attacking Tel Aviv and Haifa (Iron Dome has basically failed at this point).
The one matter on which those regional commanders might honour a deal made by the central government is allowing neutral (or Iranian-aligned) countries' ships to transit the Strait. The catch is that Iran is only allowing it if the shipments are paid for in Chinese yuan (https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/16/business/iranian-oil-exports-hormuz-strait-intl-cmd). Perhaps the EU would be able to make a deal to pay in euros, but Iran is clearly attempting to break the dominance of the US dollar in international trade, be it on oil, gas, or fertilizer, by not allowing any shipments paid for in US dollars to transit the Strait of Hormuz. (And this is to say nothing of the Houthis attempting to close the Bab-el-Mandab and, by extension, the Suez Canal! The only reason that didn't work when they tried it at the start of the Israel-Hamas war is because the US sent an aircraft carrier to rebuff their attacks, but it's far from clear that the US has the capability to do that now.)
So to this I say, what job, and what end? And is there the political will to break Iran to the point where none of those regional commanders remain standing, and the populace is too cowed to permit an insurgency? Because if not, or even if there is but the invasion fails (Afghanistan, anyone? And it will require a ground invasion), Iran wins.
Killing top commanders won't work. Regional commanders have strategic autonomy and it's unclear to me whether they would stop if top IRGC commanders (on security, the IRGC is in charge, not the civilian government) tried to order a halt to operations (said regional commanders might well assume the orders are coming under duress and ignore them, since holding a gun to the head of the IRGC and forcing him to give such an order would likely be interpreted as just another form of decapitation strike).
That's why I say Iran has effectively already won, because they've made themselves too difficult to defeat in the sense of forcing them to halt all military operations from their territory.
There have been many regimes that have had this sort of plan, most notoriously the Third Reich (my apologies for Godwinning), with the "Bavarian redoubt" and " Werwolf." They usually don't work out real well.
Now, it's a possibility, but this kind of thing sounds really good but tends to break down during the implementation stage.
My understanding is that those plans were never really put into effect, whereas Iran has had decades to develop its mosaic defense doctrine (as the explainers note, following Iran-Iraq and later examining how the US and allied forces handled Afghanistan and Iraq, likely also Libya*), and it appears to be functioning right now.
*You can find various Trump tweets from 2011-2013 in which he predicted that to boost flagging poll numbers (or to compensate for his lack of diplomatic capability), Obama would attack Libya or Iran.
November 29, 2011: "In order to get elected, @BarackObama will start a war with Iran."
January 17, 2012: "@BarackObama will attack Iran in order to get re-elected."
October 9, 2012: "Now that Obama's poll numbers are in tailspin -- watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate."
September 16, 2013: "I predict that President Obama will at some point attack Iran in order to save face!"
November 10, 2013: "Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly--not skilled!"
On what you may consider a related note the current RCP polling average for the 2026 Generic Congressional Vote is D+4.9. The last time the Republican Party was ahead on that average was February 16, 2025. It has been at least D+4 for all of 2026.
(end digression)
It helps that, as those articles further note, each regional command has some autonomous weapons manufacturing capability (and especially that among those weapons is comparatively cheap drones on which the US and Israel have been spending substantially more expensive interceptors, to uncertain effect; you can find video of Iranian drones getting past Iron Dome defenses and hitting Tel Aviv). Even at the top the regime reportedly has deep lines of succession for every relevant position.
From what I've read, the Bavarian Redoubt was only planned in late 1943, leaving very little time for actual implementation. Iran has been preparing the mosaic defense strategy at least since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, so they've had a lot more time to prepare for having to use it, as they have now done.
Further, as a practical matter, Iran doesn't want to stop fighting. The Supreme Leader and the IRGC are in charge on security matters, and the IRGC likely doesn't want to stop (the designation of the group as a terrorist entity and Hegseth's suggestion of a "no quarter" order remove any incentive on the IRGC's part to surrender), while the new Supreme Leader just saw pretty much his entire family killed in the strikes that killed his father. Iran at this point has no reason to accept any sort of ceasefire; the US and Israel attacked while negotiations (in which, from reports, Iran had offered to accept terms far stricter than those negotiated in the JCPOA) so they view those belligerents as operating entirely in bad faith diplomatically, and any ceasefire would just serve to benefit the US and Israel by giving them time to replenish their weapons stockpiles. Iran would much rather maintain military pressure on Israel through cheap drones from decentralized commands, and economic pressure on the United States by blockading the Strait of Hormuz to shipments paid for in USD (and create diplomatic pressure from everywhere else by threatening a global energy and food crisis, and general depression).
Iran wins by surviving, and its weapons are cheap drones and economics. Right now I see no path for the US and Israel to prevent them from continuing to use these weapons, and hence, in my view, Iran has already won.
We will see; I question how long they will continue to operate, especially if the administration starts making offers to non-IRGC forces.
And, again, I get that you don't want Trump to succeed at something, but this really does seem like you're grasping at anything. (Especially with that line about "uncertain effect" regarding the effectiveness of antidrone defenses--total Israeli dead right now is less than two dozen.)
I've always doubted whether AUMF's are in fact a Constitutional exercise of Congress's power to declare war. As a Ron Paul fan back in Bush's term, I was nodding along when I read his speech against the Iraq AUMF: "This is not a resolution to declare war. We know that. This is a resolution that does something much different. This resolution transfers the responsibility, the authority, and the power of the Congress to the President so he can declare war when and if he wants to."
That said, in practice I need to agree you're correct. You make an excellent point that AUMF's (when sufficiently precise) do in fact serve the same role in the public debate. Which, sadly, is lacking here.
I'm praying too that this illegal war will at least bring about good in the end. I agree, it's definitely possible.
Doesn't the war powers resolution specifically say it doesn't authorise anything or add to the president's power? Sot it can't be the thing that authorised repelling invasions or other self-defence.
(1) is intended to alter the constitutional authority of the Congress or of the President, or the provisions of existing treaties; or
(2) shall be construed as granting any authority to the President with respect to the introduction of United States Armed Forces
into hostilities or into situations wherein involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances which authority he would not have had in the absence of this joint resolution."
"The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces."
I think you are correct that Congress thought he had Power #3 already. If they thought this power was new, they would have said, "We are intending to give the President this new power, and we are leaving everything else the same." I also think it's quite likely that the President *did* already have that power immediately from the Constitution.
But, in the alternative, I assume arguendo that Congress at the time was wrong, and that the President actually did *not* actually have Power #3 immediately from the Constitution (even though they believed he did). If that's the case, the War Powers Resolution says, "We are not trying to add anything to his constitutional authority," right before directly adding something to his constitutional authority.
I tend to think that the more specific grant of power is controlling over the more general denial, especially if it becomes clear that Congress was confused about the existing constitutional authority. In that world, I would read 50 USC 1547(d) as restricting expansive readings of 1541(c), but not as nullifying it, or any part of it. I would thus interpret the War Powers Resolution as giving the President new authority to use military force during a "a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces," but I would construe all those terms as narrowly as possible because of 1547(d).
You make a good point, though, that a different case could be made, and I didn't give any thought to that in the article.
I think general language limiting construction has priority over any inconsistent language, even if specific. Otherwise, no construction clause would ever do anything. That is the entire point of provisions on construction, by their nature they affect the whole thing whose construction they regulate.
Nothing in this resolution means nothing in this resolution, not something. Such language is intended to override any accidental grant of power. It seems to me to be rather strong language, and intended to override any contrary provision.
I would say that a construction clause is of a different kind, not simply a general provision, but it has priority over any substantive provision, because any substantive provision has to be construed according to it.
Then -- assuming arguendo the President has no inherent constitutional authority to defend the nation against attack -- what do you make of 1541(c)? Does 1547(d) just nullify that last power?
When a statute's rule of construction tells me to read a provision a certain way, of course I comply. When a statute's rule of construction tells me to ignore a different provision of the same legislative completely, it makes me think the rule of construction must not mean what it seems to mean.
Let me put it this way (assuming arguendo there is no inherent power): Congress may have been confused or wrong about constitutional authority, but it was not confused about whether it wanted to give the president additional powers.
It did not want to give additional powers, which is why it put in the rule of construction, in case it accidentally appeared to give him additional powers.
The rule of construction is primary (and in this case IMO quite explicit). You have to interpret other provisions in accordance with it.
You are trying to interpret the rule of construction in accordance with the other provisions, which is IMO nonsensical, you can not construe anything without following the rule of construction first. You are attempting to construe the resolution by yourself, and only then apply the rule of construction, while you should only look at it through the rule. Congress did not intend this, and it defeats the point of rules of construction.
Rules of construction are primary, and it is conceptually incoherent to attempt to construe them or harmonise them.
So, yes, it does nullify it. This is precisely the kind of situation Congresss adopted the rule to avoid.
Consider the 11th Amendment, which uses the same word "construe": "The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State."
What if you say the federal judicial power did extend there under the terms of the original Constitution? As the Supreme Court had said before this Amendment? Well, the answer everyone's agreed ever since then is, it doesn't anymore. The rule of construction added in the 11th Amendment trumps everything in the original Constitution, no matter how clearly stating otherwise.
Sure, but this is an amendment. I don't deny that, when a law provides a rule that contradicts previous law (or a previous interpretation of law), it nullifes or repeals the prior enactment.
But this is more like if we passed an amendment that said, "The President may be impeached for maladministration. Nothing in this amendment shall be taken to expand the impeachment power." Verba cum effectu
sunt accipienda kicks in here, and I am left trying to give priority to two different parts of the same enactment that appear on their surface to directly contradict.
I appreciate Sathya's frank biting of the bullet and just saying he thinks the rule of construction nullifies the more specific provision, but I don't think that's the only reasonable answer to this hypothetical.
I miss George W. Bush too, James. Of all the U.S. Presidents in my lifetime whom I remember, and Clinton is the first one I remember, GWB is the only one I trusted and whom I thought was doing what he thought actually advanced the common good. I have not had that sense from ANY of his successors, nor from Bill Clinton, his immediate predecessor, either.
And I, too, believe the current Iran War is unjust and illegal and I would have voted for the War Powers resolution and asked my U.S. Senators and Congresswoman to vote for it (thankfully, all 3 of them did so).
I, too, initially supported the Iraq War but now I think the Iraq War was indeed unjust and a mistake.
I'm afraid I'm going to take that chat to my confessor and no one else. I really should have been better, and I, although I am still convinced I was *correct*, I am not persuasive or attractive.
Still feel my hand twitch when I think of his OP, though. Turns out that's a Shiri's Scissor statement for me, which definitely makes me a weirdo.
If you take iraqs GDP per capita in 1988 and apply a 3% growth rate, it’s double what it is now. Iraq saw some gains right after the invasion because sanctions ended, but it’s basically stalled for a decade.
What was the point of it all? Once you expelled him from Kuwait, what did sanctioning his people and impoverishing them for a decade accomplish?
He didn’t have WMDs. He basically learned his lesson and left us alone after the gulf war.
The Middle East has a low average iq and high rates of cousin marriage. Of course it’s going to be ruled by dictators! You’re never going to sub that out. The best you can do is convince them not to fuck with America.
Jumping up and down screaming "I have not learned my lesson" is a good sign that you didn't learn your lesson. Even if you secretly did in your heart of hearts, you can't expect anyone to act accordingly.
I don’t want this to come off as a gotcha because I’m sure you’ve thought it through (and catholic thinkers most certainly have) and I’m mostly curious what the line is:
You usually talk about the sanctity of life when it comes to abortion, that abortion should be generally disallowed for the same reason we categorically disallow murder. In another post you disparaged Roe v Wade for having allowed the US to ”solve some really serious problems by killing a child”. In that same post, you argue against the death penalty, too.
But in this case, children’s lives are explicitly subject to a consequentialist ledger — this one or these twenty or these ten thousand children may have to be murdered for a greater good.
The question then obviously becomes: who gets to make the judgement on which way the ledger points? Ie, to whom does the choice belong? When it comes to murder by military force of children faraway, that’s apparently congress after spirited public debate. In other words, the American people.
But why should this be so? Why should the American people get to make the choice about violent murder of Iranian or Iraqi children, but choice otherwise be entirely disallowed, for example, when made by an American mother?
Is the US public really deemed to have the faculties and moral clarity to decide how to weigh the certain death of Middle Eastern children against the sprawling possible outcomes of war? If so, why would that level of trust not be extended to members of the US public about their own unborn?
I'm neither Mr. Heaney nor Catholic, but I think this is the line of thought:
Children dying in war is something that is going to happen, but it is not murder unless the person killing them is doing so deliberately. It is tragic, and is one of the reasons why you shouldn't go to war unless it is absolutely necessary, but it isn't murder.
Abortion, on the other hand, is the deliberate killing of a child, and is, therefore, murder.
To be fair, this is not really the point of the article, and so is debating something of a side point James makes. So I don't expect or feel obligated for James to respond on this point. And I will add that, despite coming from a different political viewpoint, I tend to agree with the article's thesis.
With that caveat, I do think this is a fair question for someone to ask in general, and I'm not sure Tom's response goes far enough, for the reasons below.
Generally speaking, murder comes in two flavors: intentional murder and depraved heart murder (sometimes called first degree and second degree). https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/malice. Intentional murder is the sort of deliberate killing Tom references. But depraved heart murder is when someone's actions created a substantial risk of death but engaged in those actions nonetheless, and they in fact resulted in a killing. So because we know these deaths are "something that is going to happen" the sort of accidental killing in war of a civilian could still qualify as a depraved heart murder, even if it wasn't deliberate.
The key point is this: both intentional and deprived heart murder require some element of the killing being unjustified. You can see the sample definitions at the link above both include either "without justification" or "unjustified" as part of their definition. So, under either framework of intent. we end up either way at a question of whether a killing is justified or not. However you determine the justification, you will draw your line for murder.
Whether James feels compelled to answer regarding his justifications for abortion as opposed to war, I think he (and readers who agree with this article) would agree that, at least under the American constitutional system, those justifications need to be debated and determined by the people's representatives, and not unilaterally determined by a would-be king.
This is a fair question. I remember we had a (frankly pretty terrible) religion textbook in my senior year of high school, and you've compelled me to go look it up again just so I can accurately quote a passage that always stuck in my head:
> Christine Gudorf... points out that "the Catholic church uses proportional consequentialism in public-realm issues, and a deontological natural law approach in private-realm issues." She continues: "When we consider the methodological inconsistency between the church's treatment of war and abortion, it is small wonder that feminists charge the church with misogyny because of its apparent distrust of women as moral decision makers. Women with the medical option of abortion seem, in the bishops' eyes, to be a greater danger to life than men armed with tanks, missiles, and bombs."
I bring this up because the way Gudorf sees it is an easy way to interpret my position, especially from the outside. (Of course, Gudorf is talking about the Catholic Church, not James Heaney, but she might as well be talking about James Heaney because I do the same thing.) However, Gudorf's interpretation of what we're up to is completely wrong. (It was a bad textbook.)
As a starting matter, I would say this: given the dignity of life, the case for pacifism is actually quite strong. I would probably advise anyone who is just starting out in a belief system that embraces universal human dignity (such as Christianity) to start *there,* with absolute pacifism, and only build on it once you've grown into things a little bit and can see more clearly where the moral lines are drawn. I don't think pacifism is quite correct, but I think it's a hell of a lot less dangerous (to yourself and others) than the opposite error.
I also think that I am prone to the opposite error, so take what I am about to say with any grains of salt you might like to add to it. My support for the unborn has never made me worry about giving an account of myself to the Lord after my death. My support for particular wars -- and even for war in general -- has. I suspect I would be a bad soldier, because I would hesitate constantly about any actual use of violence against an enemy, and the enemy would kill me while I fretted.
(The Catholic Church, for what it is worth, seems to have a similar hesitancy. The teaching that murder is wrong and abortion is murder is considered infallible. The Just War Theory, however, remains a "theory," a popular and well-attested theological framework for thinking about war, but never a doctrine.)
Having given all those cautions, I do think wars *can be* just, and, to illustrate why, I'll give an example of a just abortion -- because I think abortions *can be* just as well, under certain extreme circumstances.
Consider a mother with an ectopic pregnancy. She has a tiny little guy growing in her fallopian tube. This is a medical crisis. Her baby cannot survive in the fallopian tube. There is no currently-known medical treatment that has any chance of successfully moving him from the fallopian tube into the uterus. She cannot save him. Worse, if she simply lets nature take its course, her fallopian tube will explode, and (at least without swift intervention) she will die of internal hemorrhaging.
Now suppose there are two treatments available to her. The first is salpingectomy, the removal of her fallopian tube with the living child still inside it. The second is zethotrexate, a medicine that poisons the child to death, which causes the surrounding pregnancy tissue to dissipate and the child's corpse to pass from the body. (I am using the fictional "zethotrexate" rather than the actual drug, methotrexate, to sidestep certain ambiguities about methotrexate's real-world mechanism of action. The fictional zethotrexate is pure poison. Like rat poison, but for fallopian-tube fetuses.) The zethotrexate has lower risks to the mother than salpingectomy and preserves more of her fertility (both of which are good things).
Given my view that humans are so important that we have a duty to avoid intentionally taking an innocent life under any circumstances, I would say that using the zethotrexate is a moral error. The zethotrexate saves the mother only by means of killing the child. If the child somehow survives the zethotrexate, it's not a miracle. Instead, it's a crisis, because the baby's survival means the problem remains (Mom is still in danger). It is not okay to kill an innocent, not even to save another, and zethotrexate, in this situation, saves only by killing.
However, I think the salpingectomy is morally acceptable -- even morally praiseworthy. The salpingectomy does no violence to the child, and it accomplishes a great good by saving the mother.
Now, to be clear, the child is definitely going to die after the salpingectomy. Ectopic pregnancies usually come out in the first trimester. We are, at best, *decades* away from advancing medical science enough to make a first-trimester child medically viable. In a *sense,* we are killing this child. However:
1. We aren't attacking the child by an act of violence direct at the child, which would be, in my view, impermissible.
2. We foresee the child's death, but we do not intend it. By this I do not simply mean that we don't *want* the child to die or that we regret his dying (although both things are true), but that his death is in no way a means to our ends. If, after the salpingectomy, the baby somehow (by an absolute miracle) lived on in an incubator (impossible with current medical science), grew to full term, and went home with Mom & Dad after seven months, that would not be a crisis, but a profound joy.
3. We have a legitimate end in mind, and that end *is* directly intended. (The salpingectomy does *not* directly kill the baby, but it *does* directly save mom, which is an important good in itself.)
4. Our legitimate end (evaluated here through a consequentialist lens) outweighs the foreseen but unintended bad consequence, at least compared to all realistic counterfactuals that lack those bad consequences. ("Mom lives and baby dies" would not always meet this criterion, but, in this case, there are two possible outcomes: mom lives and baby dies, or both mom and baby die. The former is clearly a better set of consequences.)
Even the Catholic Church, perhaps the most anti-abortion institution on Earth, allows treatment in this case. (They refer to this salpingectomy and other, similar procedures as "indirect abortion," and absolutely condemn only direct abortion, where the death of the child is willed as a means to an end.)
This framework seems to fit a widespread moral intuition (which says that you can save the mom in this case since her baby's going to die anyway), into a moral framework that acknowledges the intuition without just going Full Consequentialist: yes, you can save mom at the cost of baby's life, but only under certain conditions (which might rarely, or never, obtain).
From this framework, we can begin to glimpse the outline of a moral framework within which a war could at least theoretically be morally acceptable -- or even, conceivably, morally praiseworthy. (Cards on the table, this is just the double effect framework, which annoyed Judith Jarvis Thomson so much she invented the trolley problem to problematize it.)
I will assume for the sake of shortening this comment that we each accept the principle of self-defense: if someone, acting from malice, violently attacks me or another innocent without cause, I can use violence to protect myself or that innocent. Out of respect for the attacker's life, I ought to use the minimum force that will reliably disable his attack, but minimum force may still be lethal. (The principle of self-defense assumes that our absolute obligation to avoid taking the lives of the innocent does not extend to the guilty. This requires several extra steps, not least of them establishing what "guilty" means, but, since basically everyone holds this view and this comment is already extremely long, I'm skipping it.)
Now suppose a bad man is about to launch a missile at my house, which will almost certainly kill me and my four-person family. I only have one means of stopping him: a madman planted a bomb under the bad guy's missile launcher and, through a series of misadventures, I ended up in possession of the remote control. Unfortunately, the bad guy has kidnapped his work crush. She is being held prisoner at the launch site. If I detonate the bomb, I will almost certainly destroy the missile launcher (which is also what I intend). However, it is very likely that I will also kill the bad guy and/or the bad guy's perfectly innocent crush. May I detonate the bomb?
The double effect framework suggests that I can. The act of destroying the launcher is legitimate. We do not intend the death of the innocent woman. If she survives the bombing, we will in fact be overjoyed. If she is injured, we will get her (and even the bad guy) all necessary medical aid as quickly as possible; her death is certainly not a means to our end and we fervently don't desire it. We seem to have no other options; we can see the bad man is literally typing in the launch code at this very moment, and it will strike my house seconds later. In all realistic scenarios where I don't detonate the bomb, my family, including two children, are all about to die. There's one of her and four of us. I do not breach the moral law by detonating the bomb (although, if she dies, it may scar my conscience for life). (This analysis would come out differently if the bad guy had ten human shields instead of one, though.)
A just war, conducted justly, is -- or at least should be -- a scaled-up version of this silly hypothetical. You act defensively, against a clear and grave threat, you try everything else to address it first, and, when you fire ze missiles, you never ever ever will anyone else's death as a means to your legitimate ends. (Again, this would probably make me a very bad infantryman.) (It also disagrees in important ways with certain commonplace beliefs about how one ought to act in war.)
You might know that, simply because war is huge and terrible and mistakes get made, you are almost certainly going to kill innocents by accident in the process of disabling the bad guy from harming you. However, you do what you can to prevent that, and you weigh the possibility of civilian deaths *very, very seriously* before you take the first violent step. You make sure that what you're doing will save more lives than it cost. If you ever actually "murder" any children far away -- that is, deliberately killing them by direct intention, or, as @River Allen suggests, by depraved indifference to their welfare and/or proportionality -- then you are doing evil, and no degree of state sanction can expiate that.
On that point, I did not mean to imply at any point here that the American people / Congress gets to decide all this and its judgment is infallible. It is my view that Congress's approval is *necessary* for any war to be just, because they hold the care for the common good in this respect, but Congress's approval is not *sufficient*. Congress could authorize a war that is clearly unjust for some other reason, and, as citizens, we would not be bound to defer to their judgment. We may even be obligated to conscientiously object, or, in extreme cases, actively resist. (OTOH, we *are* bound by Congress's judgment if it decides *not* to authorize a war. It's asymmetrical because you need a green light from all criteria for a war to be just, so just one red light derails your war. War is morally prohibited by default.)
Indeed, if the Iraq War taught us anything, it's that the American people's evaluation of the proportionality criterion is anything but infallible.
Does that address some of your concerns? Your questions were wide-ranging and my answer even moreso.
Because I would hate to shamelessly self-promote my own work, like the fine article linked above, if this is not the proper place for self-promotion... What am I talking about? That would obviously make me a ridiculously selfish person. I hope no one who sees this comment goes and reads the exceptionally thoughtful and entertaining article linked above.
>As a result, America spent a full year talking, as a nation, about the just war criteria as applied to Iraq. We had raging national debates, including on the floor of Congress, about whether the cause was just, about its proportionality, about alternatives. Every point of the just war theory was litigated in endless detail at water coolers and dinner tables across the country. We spent months arguing whether a new war would be self-defensive enforcement of the terms of the Persian Gulf cease-fire (good), or a new preemptive war of aggression (bad).
I don't think we could do this anymore. I don't think we have the kind of polity necessary for a Democracy anymore. Maybe we can manage a Republic, but in a Republic leaders wouldn't necessarily act on the wishes of their constituents, but on what they deem to be their best interests.
This has been a weird week for me. I am another one of the dozens of Americans who thought Iran needed to go down for a long time. I was absolutely enraged that Trump promised to interfere if the Iranian government harmed protestors at the beginning of the year, which lead to bold protests where tens of thousands of people died. Then Trump does something about it and I don't feel like it's fair for me to be mad about it.
I noted a few weeks ago how strange it is that Trump isn't doing propaganda:
"I remember more buildup before the Iraq war.
"Not military buildup, no one was tracking military airplanes movements on the internet.
"But propaganda buildup. Americans hated Terrorists, Muslim Extremism, and the backwards sheepherders who dared spit in our eye well before we invaded Iraq.
"That faded over time and the will to fight went away.
"For Iran, I think Trump forgot to do the propaganda? How many Americans really hate and fear the Ayatollahs? Don't get me wrong, the world will be better with them gone. But how many Americans are looking at their sons and thinking, "Even if this little guy becomes maimed and killed, it would have been worth it if victory is achieved?""
It isn't intuitive to me that the Governor of Texas couldn't morally send his National Guard into Mexico and wage war on Cartels that harmed Texan citizens. He probably shouldn't do this because of the diplomatic and political blowback, but those are prudential determinations. I don't see it being obviously morally wrong.
First: What do you make of reports that some military commanders are saying that this war is an attempt to bring about the prophecies in the Book of Revelation? (Prophecies which, among other things, include the extermination of all Jews, mostly through death with a relative handful through forced conversion.)
You note that the religious leaders in Iran may well want to bring about some sort of apocalypse; that may be so; but it seems like some leaders on the US side want the same.
Second: One bit of speculation on these events that I've seen is that Donald is being coerced into attacking Iran. It seems very plausible to me that, somewhere, there is video of him raping an underage, probably even prepubescent, girl, and the threat of its release is what is pushing him into doing this. (I've even seen some reports that there were similar attempts to coerce Clinton using his raping of Monica Lewinsky.)
(The video you can find is one of Ivanka Trump giving a tour of her childhood home in New York. You only need to watch the first minute or so of it. The first thirty seconds have her showing off the various posters and memorabilia she had, stuff from boy bands and the like. She's reasonably chipper and upbeat when talking about that. The next scene has her standing next to her childhood bed. The change in tone and demeanour is startling, and she's pretty quick to change the topic to point out the view from the window. I doubt there's any video of anything that happened on that bed, but it would not at all surprise me if something did--and of course Donald has outright said, in front of her, that he would date her if she wasn't his daughter.)
I've also seen the case made that the intent here is not to reform Iran into an ally of the US and Israel (which it may or may not have been prior to the 1979 Revolution, when the Shah was more or less a dictator, after the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh* when he planned to nationalize Iranian oil reserves) but rather to shatter it into a failed state so it can't exert any influence of any sort on the region. (I've also heard reports that leaders in Tehran have devolved political and military command and control to regional leaders, which means that any attempt at a peace deal is impossible now.)
*I lived with someone from Iran for three years when pursuing doctoral work. According to him, when Mosaddegh died (1967-03-05), the official explanation for why flags flew at half-mast in the country was not to mourn Mosaddegh, because the current regime was set up in the wake of his overthrow, so officially honouring him would have been out of the question, but on the other hand, he was a former Prime Minister, so he couldn't not be honoured. Instead, the official reason for Iranian flags flying at half-mast was the death of Georges Vanier, Governor General of Canada, who died in office on the same day--but everyone knew it was actually for Mosaddegh.
(A little over a decade later, staff at the Canadian Embassy in Tehran forged passports to help evacuate US personnel from their embassy during the Revolution, which would have caused a major diplomatic scandal had it been discovered at the time. The thanks we got for this is "51st state" and "they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines".)
Fourth: Under the legal standard just set by the killing of Ali Khamenei (for whom I shed absolutely no tears: https://bsky.app/profile/cristianfarias.com/post/3mbjlwkmb6c24), the threats Donald has made against Canadian (and Danish, and Panamanian, and I've lost track of who else's) sovereignty would seem to justify any of those countries (especially us, we're right next door with a long land border and very vulnerable to an invasion) bombing the crap out of DC (and maybe Palm Beach) and killing Donald (not just kidnapping him, as one could argue could be justified after the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro). (I would also shed absolutely no tears for Donald's death. For that matter, I would also shed no tears for Maduro's.) For what should be very obvious reasons I would not support this (on the other hand, I am absolutely in favour of imposing a Dayton Agreement-style arrangement on the United States, should its ostensible allies--Tarnak Farm was enemy fire--ever be in a position to force those terms on it), but it seems to me that it would be a straightforward implementation of the precedent just set.
EDIT: On impeachment and conviction, I'm going to quote myself from elsewhere:
"What's needed is not impeachment.
"What's needed is a vote of no confidence.
"A pity the US developed its political system before it had better examples."
"In a healthy representative democracy, an executive purporting to declare war unilaterally would be stripped of executive authority by a straightforward vote of no confidence by the legislative body directly representative of the people.
"(By implication I do not consider presidential systems to be healthy representative democracies. The combination of de jure power, democratic mandate and permanence in office is too dangerous.)
"(I also freely concede that there is substance to many of the criticisms made of parliamentary systems, but given the shitshow I'm seeing to my south I'm very glad I live with one of those than the nightmare less than a hundred kilometres away from me.)"
Note: I did err in the second comment. The matter of declaring war, at least in the Commonwealth realms, is part of the royal prerogative and therefore does not require approval by Parliament. However, the prerogative (outside of some very limited circumstances, of which declaring war is not one) is only exercised on the advice of the ministers of the Crown, and the lower House can remove those ministers by simple majority vote. An executive purporting to declare war when a majority of the lower House is opposed to such declaration, therefore, should be removed in a straightforward vote of no confidence.
(1) I have been hearing about these supposed military commanders and cabinet officials who believe themselves to be fulfilling Revelation since I was a babe watching the Iraq War buildup. It's rumored every single time a Republican President takes military action within 2,000 miles of Megiddo, or even supports some Israeli action in the area.
I've never actually met anyone who actually believes some U.S. war is fulfilling biblical prophecy. Even my QAnon friend, who is quite clear that Trump is a divinely appointed vindicator opposing a global satanic pedophile cult, has not suggested that any U.S. military action is designed to bring about the second coming. They are out there, perhaps, "outside my ken," as Pauline Kael put it in her famous 1972 quote, but I don't know them, I don't see them show up in polling, and they're oft-rumored but never revealed. *Maybe* this is just a side effect of my hanging out in more Catholic-coded spaces (even the Protestants at Federalist Society events talk like Catholics, if you don't mind me wildly stereotyping), and I don't have as good visibility into them as you do because we tend not to see the nuts on our own side... but, nevertheless, I have developed a fairly high prior that rumors to this effect are always false. That prior can be overcome by evidence, but it hasn't been at this time, at least not for me.
Deus vult is a memey thing to say on the Christian Right at the moment. As a matter of fact, the thing I wrote on Reddit that *specifically* set off my interlocutor was, "Husbands, go down on your wives! Deus vult!" It is not something I want to see tattooed on the Secretary of War, but neither do I read much into it other than "this guy spends way too much time online."
(2) I have a similar thought process on this one. I thought the Donald Trump pee tape kompromat theory was very plausible. I guess it's impossible to *prove* it doesn't exist, but for various reasons, I no longer think it is at all plausible. It now seems to me that it was the basest sort of rumor started by people who should have known better that took on a life of its own, not because of the evidence, but because it fueled the most desperately-held belief of progressives: that Donald Trump is just one revelation away from toppling.
The "Trump is just deflecting from Epstein because there's proof he's a kiddy-diddler lurking in the wings" seems to me to fill a similar niche, and I updated after the pee tape was discredited to require strong evidence for me to buy in. Haven't seen it.
That said, like the Mueller investigation, the Epstein case is now too tangled and politicized for me to be able to parse it, so I have given up trying to predict what will come of it.
(7) I think Cuba would be next if this went well. I have my doubts.
(8) I am mulling the vote of no-confidence as an alternative to impeachment for Some Constitutional Amendments, since it is obvious that impeachment is a dead letter. No doubt I will want to put some filthy American spin on it, but maybe I'll restrain myself for the sake of Keep It Simple Stupid.
(1) What I know about the reports concerning end-times preaching in the US military is what's in Larsen's article about complaints to the MRFF. How credible those complaints are is, of course, another matter.
As for Hegseth's tattoo, if you notice, that Instagram post was from May 2020. The post was specifically to promote his book "American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free", released that same month, which he says ends with those two words. Maybe "Deus Vult" has been a meme on the Christian right for six years, I wouldn't know, but it's not some recent thing for Hegseth.
(2) At this point I genuinely think there is a segment of the US population which could watch a video of Donald raping a prepubescent girl and then turn around and argue that it's perfectly OK to do that. (See here for a transcription of a conversation in which a Trump supporter asks why it's wrong to rape children: https://decivitate.jamesjheaney.com/p/a-woman-has-died/comment/211162691 Note also there the remark Miller made about Greenland, and I would add further that the member of the Folketing whom I quoted as responding is a conservative, sitting in opposition to the current government.) Maybe I have too low an opinion of politicians, but I doubt you could even get two-thirds of the current US Senate to convict over such a video. (Yes, it would not have been misconduct in office, but the articles of impeachment would more likely allege a violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, claiming that the video is also in the files and has not been released pursuant to that law, with the victim properly blurred but the perpetrator on full display, and that Donald abrogated his responsibility to direct the Department of Justice to comply fully with the law.)
I don't think I ever really believed the pee tape speculation, but on the Epstein question, just consider that the man is named tens of thousands of times in the released files, and at least one member of Congress has claimed (without other members claiming otherwise, to my knowledge) that in the unredacted files he is named roughly a million times. (It's not entirely partisan, as well; keep in mind that just to force a vote on releasing the files, Thomas Massie, Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene all signed on, to give the bill 218 co-sponsors in the House; meanwhile, Adelita Grijalva was the 218th co-sponsor and she was not sworn in for seven weeks following her victory in a special election, with no apparent impediment to doing so, as I recall, as even though the government was shut down for much of that time, the shutdown only started a week after she won her seat, so she could have been sworn in then even if the shutdown precluded her being sworn in while it was ongoing.)
(7) I think Cuba is next even if this doesn't go well. The current blockade is crippling that country, and backing down would make Donald look weak.
(9) (I meant to include "Ninth" in my edit but forgot, point 8 is about Jesse Ventura saying silly things.) Keep in mind that a large part of the reason the confidence mechanism does not result in constant instability even in hung Parliaments (at least these days; Weimar Germany is another matter) is because, usually (especially in monarchies), bringing down the government also necessitates triggering a general election, putting at risk the political careers of everyone who just voted to turf out the government! (The proper functioning of a parliamentary system relies, in effect, on channelling the base self-interest of the politicians to produce stable governance. Whether it produces good governance likely depends on whether you happen to agree with the policies of the current government.) Arguably France's recent parade of Prime Ministers occurred in part because the Assemblée nationale did not have to risk re-election to defeat Macron's picks.
(I know you already covered electing the President, but Suriname's model would seem to me what you'd want if you're following the KISS principle.)
Forgive me, but the "a Trump supporter asked why raping children is wrong, therefore Trump supporters would not turn on him if it were definitively shown that he raped a child" is a classic example of nutpicking. I'm pretty sure that, for example, if we took a poll of NAMBLA members we would find *at least* one Democrat, and probably more. This would not, in fact, prove that Democrats as a whole are down with pederasty.
That isn't what I said. Some of Trump's supporters have turned on him just over his initial refusal to release the files. That's what turned the "QAnon Shaman" against him. I have no doubt he would lose much of his current support (already significantly diminished compared to November 2024) were proof such as a video of his raping a minor to come out. I also have no doubt that the view expressed by that caller in the transcribed conversation is not an entirely isolated case and so there is a segment of the population which would not turn on him over the matter.
As for something like NAMBLA membership cutting across ideological lines, that I don't doubt is true, but it's not relevant to what I said.
No, it's actually pretty relevant. That you brought that fellow in *at all* as a response to "We don't know exactly how this would play out" indicates that you're of the opinion that enough Trump supporters to be politically relevant would be okay with Trump being a pedophile because of some rando. This is, to put it mildly, libel based on nutpicking, as I pointed out.
In Cuba, both hotels and hospitals have generators to keep functioning in the event of blackouts. Of course, those generators themselves need fuel.
Many hotels in Cuba are privately owned; hospitals, on the other hand, are government-owned, as part of, I believe, a single-provider healthcare system.
One major effect of the US government policy described in the above article, permitting private businesses in Cuba to import fuel while government entities cannot, therefore, is to permit hotels to have power while hospitals cannot, allowing visitors to the island some degree of comfort while those needing medical care cannot receive it.
(There is reporting that many patients on ventilators have died as a result of the current US blockade which is denying fuel to hospitals so that they cannot run their generators, but I cannot confirm the extent of its veracity.)
Let me begin with where we agree. I agree that our current war with Iran is unlawful under the Constitution and that it may also constitute a war crime as a war of aggression. I agree that the war in Iraq was as lawful as it was disastrous.
Where we disagree.
You fail to recognize that at least 500,000 human beings died from direct and indirect consequences of the war in Iraq.
2006 Lancet Study (655,000 estimate):
Full Title: Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey
The suffering we caused by our invasion is orders of magnitude greater than the suffering caused by SH and his regime. So I do not believe that it is legitimate to argue that the war was justified on the basis of how it improved the lives of the Iraqi people.
I do not believe that there was ever any evidence offered by the Bush administration that an attack was likely in the near future. So while the war was lawful under our constitution, it was not under international law or the Charter of the United Nations. But of course, this was after the surprise attack on 9/11, so that might be a good excuse for jumping the gun.
You may not believe in international law, but that is the true origin of the first prosecution for a war of aggression against Nazi Germany's leadership at the Nuremberg trials. Chief U.S. Prosecutor (and Supreme Court Justice) Robert H. Jackson just declared it to be so and made it a fundamental principle of international criminal law.
I could be wrong (I frequently am) but I do not believe that there are any dots connecting Catholic theology to the development of this area of law under any treaty or convention. Nor was this principle accepted prior to the end of WWII. If anything, the horror of WWII alone was sufficient to bring about this watershed change in thinking.
One final thing. Two "men" might reach different conclusions?
I suggest you consider using "Reasonable people might disagree..."
It may not be a big thing to us old guys, but it is to our female pilots bombing Iran right now.
Despite the foregoing, I love the essay.
Your research and writing are superb.
You're the only one I spend so much time writing responses to.
Jon
PS
Look for Hammentaschen next week.
Purim was last Tuesday, so I am a little behind.
Another celebration of our victory over--this time the Persians--what a coincidence.
I thought the Lancet study was b.s. when it came out. I recall combing through it a bit and roasting it, but this was 20 years ago, before I had a blog, so I have no clear idea whether my thinking was justified (and no strong desire to revisit it).
But I also recall that the figure I had in reply to the Lancet study was that Saddam Hussein's regime had directly or indirectly brought about well over a million deaths. The war, too, would eventually end (and it did), but Saddam's dictatorship would have just kept killing (directly and indirectly) indefinitely, as he would hand the regime on to his sons. So, even taking the Lancet study at face value, we were still saving a lot of people on net, or thus was my view in about 2006. I remember yelling at my tenth grade Christian Morality teacher, who cited the Lancet study in class, that he wasn't comparing reality to the actual counterfactual where Saddam remained in power, but to a fantasy utopia where nothing bad happened in Iraq, although I don't think I put it as well as that.
(I never seriously engaged with the PLOS study, since by 2013 the war was over. But, FWIW, I thought its estimate of 405,000 excess deaths over 8 years *much* more initially plausible than the Lancet's 655,000 excess deaths over 3 years.)
It is, of course, certainly true that, when the war *started*, the idea that even 100,000 people could die was unthinkable to me -- unless Saddam used his WMD, which I fully believed he had.
As for international law, it was my view (and, as I understand it, the view of the U.S. government) that the 2003 Iraq War was not a new war at all (for international law purposes, anyway), but rather a continuation of the 1991 Persian Gulf War (which had international authorization) in order to enforce the terms of the broken cease-fire. Obviously, France didn't agree with the U.S.'s view on this! But I don't think that's an implausible position, and so I think it's fairly difficult to call the war illegal under what was considered international law at the time.
As I said, I don't have a great desire to relitigate the Iraq War, a painful error that I spent far, far too much debating while it was going on. I am, for the most part, happy to agree to disagree on any of these points, since it's all twenty years ago now. But I thought I owed my key Hammentaschen hookup at least a limited explanation for what the heck I was thinking! :)
I was under the impression that Congress had, at some point in the past few decades, given the Executive the power to perform war-like operations for 30 (or was it 90?) days without authorization from Congress.
At least, this is what Ben Shapiro keeps saying and I haven’t heard an opponent of this war argue otherwise, so I have tentatively believed him so far, since I haven’t had time to do my own research.
The fact that you haven’t talked about it either makes me wonder: is this such a big blind spot for opponents that even you (with whom I seem to share a bit of an obsession with representing the other side seriously and charitably) have missed it, or has Ben been lying about this?
Ben has been conflating political fait accompli with legality since 2017, but he usually uses couching language so it’s not hard to tell them apart if you pay attention. But I don’t recall him using couching language this time.
This is a common myth. It is possible Ben Shapiro believes it in good faith. I am not hostile to him (grateful, even for his criticisms of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson), but, if he is claiming what you say he is claiming, he is wrong.
The War Powers Resolution was an attempt to reign in the executive branch's war powers run amok. Congress basically wanted to pass a law saying, "Yes, the President has to come to Congress to get a declaration of war / AUMF before he can start a war."
However, Congress recognized that there would be times when the President is forced to respond to a direct "attack on the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces." (50 USC 1541) If Congress made no provision for these cases, then the War Powers Resolution would essentially tell the President that, even if our troops are under attack, the Soviets are paradropping troops into Kansas, the U.S. military is forbidden to respond in any way, even to return fire, until Congress has convened and passed a declaration of war. Most people think this restriction would have been unconstitutional, but, worse, everyone agrees it would have been crazy. When the enemy starts a surprise attack on our troops, the President must be able to order an immediate response.
So the War Powers Resolution carves out an exception *for that narrow class of situations*: if the U.S. is attacked, or if the President so much as deploys troops into a region where they're *likely* to be attacked, he can deploy troops, but he has to notify Congress. Congress must then affirmatively authorize the operation within 60 days, or the operation terminates. This structure was intended to allow the President to respond to attacks, while leaving Congress's joint, affirmative authorization in the driver's seat.
Now, Congress, at this point in history (the 1970s), did not trust the President the slightest bit to follow the spirit of the law, and rightly so, so they spelled out in exacting detail what situations trigger this reporting requirement (50 USC 1543). But they are also very clear that this new requirement a *constraint* on the President's existing limited powers under the Constitution, not an *authorization* to do anything he couldn't do before (50 USC 1541, 50 USC 1547) -- like unilaterally start a war with Iran.
Somehow, this 60-day limitation on defensive military operations memetically transformed into a 60-day blank check to bomb anyone, anywhere in the world, as long as you're in and out in 60 days. This is perfect nonsense, and I don't know where it came from, or when the idea took hold, but it is widely believed and it drives me up the wall that smart, prominent voices like Ben Shapiro are still spreading it. It's widespread enough that I probably should have included a section about it in the article. Someone I love innocently asked me about it last night and I literally started jumping up and down with outrage yelling, "The War Powers Resolution doesn't say that at all! You've been lied to!" I had to blush afterward, because I didn't know I felt quite that strongly about it until I was in midair. (And obviously not my interlocutor's fault at all.)
Claude Code and yt-dlp to the rescue! ChatGPT and regular Claude don't have access to YouTube transcripts—probably due to ToS issues—and Gemini 3 Pro (!) repeatedly hallucinated answers—get it together, Google!
I found the quote in Ben Shapiro's live show hours after the war started on Saturday, March 1:
> And now there have been questions raised about the legality of this action. Let us be clear about military action. My favorite is when people start citing the war-making power of Congress under the Constitution. Cool beans, guys. You know, when the last actually declared war of the United States was? Like, full-scale declared war of the United States — it was World War II. That is not the way that war has been done in the United States for a very long time, because the opportunity is simply too quick. You got to move fast. And so there is something called the War Powers Resolution. It requires the executive branch to go justify its action before Congress within 60 days of military action beginning. If you think this operation is lasting two months, you're out of your mind. I would be absolutely shocked if there is ongoing this type — this level of military action happening two months from now. Listen, I'd be a little surprised if it's happening two weeks from now, to be honest with you, given the overwhelming air power of the United States.
> And as far as the objections that it's illegal for President Trump to do this, America launches military strikes on a routine basis. If you are talking about the need for congressional authorization of war — just as a legal matter, again, putting on my constitutional law hat — this has not been done since World War II. We have a wide variety of uses that have been authorized for force by Congress. Also, even under the war powers resolution, the president has 60 days to get it together. This thing is going to be over long before 60 days.
I also had Claude Code search every Ben Shapiro full episode transcript since March 1 for any mention of the constitution, legal justification, congressional authorization, presidential power, or related terms in relation to Iran, using both exact and vector search (using gptme-rag). We couldn't find any other time when he repeated this legal justification, commented on it, or offered an alternative legal justification.
I must have hallucinated my impression that Ben "keeps" saying this across multiple shows; he did say it on two occasions separated by almost an hour of content, but within the same show episode. And not offering any additional response to repeated criticisms of illegality over the next few days does give the impression that this is his current analysis of the legal situation.
It sounds like Mr. Shapiro could do with a reminder that, just as Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the US Constitution remains in full force and effect, so too does a way of changing that clause if there is broad agreement that it no longer meets the needs of the society that governing document is meant to serve: Article V of the same.
(Maybe Mr. Shapiro would prefer a system wherein the executive can simply declare war and dare the legislature to force them to face the voters over the issue! If you dig a few steps deeper on that, though, you'll rapidly realize why countries with that model aren't facing either constant declarations of war or constant elections.)
Yeah, this is very common historical myth, so I don't see any reason to think Shapiro is being dishonest here, except that his reputation is that he's smarter than this. While it is technically true that Congress has not said, "I DECLARE WAR!" Michael Scott-style since World War II, Congress has repeatedly passed bills since that that authorize the use of military force, which is all a declaration of war is anyway.
I wonder why, in Shapiro's thinking, Bush spent all that time trying to get Congress on his side. Bush expected a six-week war, and thought he had one (hence the infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech).
"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions." (Robert Wilson Lynd)
The short decisive war has, of course, been a dream of American commanders for well over two centuries: “The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching; & will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next, & the final expulsion of England from the American continent.” (Thomas Jefferson)
Is there a meta joke in here about the cunnilingus argument being preliminary to the main thrust of the blog post? Either way, I would have lost a bet on your getting from Point A to Point B.
This piece was really well thought out and well written, but I'm not certain I'm comfortable with it. If the US were an autarchy and our Great Leader could unilaterally declare war under the law, it'd be fine? Stamp "Just War" on the missiles, we're all good? Tell the bleeding children in the piles of rubble that it's okay, we're the good guys? (Obviously, contingent on the other criteria mentioned.) Maybe I'm just not comfortable with the idea of a just war on its face, but it feels like a legal/logical trick to say that if we had a worse form of government, but otherwise did everything the same, we'd be in the right.
I think the tradeoff is that, as you make it easier to declare war (meeting the "make your war legal" just war criterion), you also make it proportionally easier to start a war that fails one of the other criteria.
I am seeing now from a few of the comments that, in my insistence that evaluation by the competent authority is *necessary* for a just war, I gave the mistaken impression that I believe that this evaluation is *sufficient* for a just war. This line, in particular:
> Either way, though, the power to evaluate the just war criteria belongs to the competent authority exclusively.
...can very easily be read (maybe is *best* read?) as saying that a war that is objectively, say, futile suddenly becomes not-futile (or must be treated as not-futile) if the relevant officeholder decides to (dishonestly or stupidly) claim that it is.
However, I do not believe that. I see the just war criteria as a series of status lights. If all the lights are green, you might just have a just war on your hands, and one of those lights is "did competent authority approve all this?" But if competent authority approved it even though one of the other lights is red, then the war is still unjust.
There is an asymmetry here: you can conscientiously object to a war ratified by competent authority, but you can't go to war on your own recognizance if competent authority rejects an otherwise-just war. That asymmetry is there because war does tremendous evil, and things have to line up perfectly for it to be even remotely acceptable. Our Founding Fathers, recognizing that, put war in a locked box and handed the key to Congress. Other polities may not safeguard the war power so well, and they hurt their own people and others more frequently as a result.
Reflecting on this current moment and have some thoughts:
Regardless of the legality of war, this war in particular, wars in general...
Is our current system feasible?
If our current system is that every war (that is not immediate responses against military strikes on us) needs to be voted through Congress, does that system work in an age of mass communication, quick travel, and hyper-sonic missiles?
Congressional votes are immediate and transparent to every government across the globe in real time. There is massive incentive to sway these votes through threats and bribes. What if Iran saw we were holding a vote to go to war with it, and responded saying, "For every senator that votes to go to war, we will launch one missile at a boat in the strait of Hormuz?" Or engage in a mass shooting on US soil? It would really disincentivize the Senate from even holding a vote.
Even if nothing so dramatic happened. it still is a massive disadvantage for an adversary to see us declare war at the speed of corn growing.
If Iran saw that we were about to declare war, they would not have all been gathered in one place where they could be taken out all at once.
What's hardest for me to reconcile about recent events is that - from what I can tell - this is the optimal outcome, even if the process is incorrect.
We took out most of their leadership in a single day, killing the people most deserving of it, limiting the deaths of our own servicemen and innocent Iranians. I don't think this would have been on the table with a Congressionally-declared lawful war. If this is improper, is there another process you would accept that would keep a result like this in the realm of possibility? Maybe something for the amendment series.
From my understanding, Iran is our enemy that has been waging a low-tempo war against us for some time. They lob missiles at our bases in the region almost every year, injuring and sometimes killing our troops. They arm, train, and direct their militias in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, and Iraq to attack our allies in the region and shut down trading at sea. They created and supplied our enemies with some very inventive IEDs that killed and maimed thousands of our troops who were prosecuting our lawful war.
Do they pose an immanent threat to America? They were definitely trying to get there. Do we need to wait until after they can kill massive amounts of American civilians before their kicking us in the shins finally justifies a retaliatory strike? Or is a week before, a month before, a year before ok if you can see a clear trajectory and negotiation fails to dissuade them from turning from that path?
But that should be on Congress to decide, except Congress cannot decide it. We would lose Miami to a nuclear blaze before we get to the point of Congress agreeing on something. And after they do it will be a costly, expensive, long war because Iran will see us coming and they'll have nukes.
Proposal: Have the President petition every State Governor to send a delegate to a secret deliberative session where they all have access to top secret military briefings. The delegates make a majority decision on whether to go to war or not. The decision is not released to the public but the President acts on the decision at the most opportune time. The voting record is not released to the public but members of congress and judiciary can review it in SCIFs to confirm there was no deception.
"Congressional votes are immediate and transparent to every government across the globe in real time."
This seems like the hinge of your concern. The thinking is that Congress moves too slow and telegraphs its moves too much, so we will never get a surprise attack.
I think there are two good answers to that.
First, the U.S. military moved quite slow in this case, and telegraphed its moves. Trump told the Iranian protesters "help is on the way!", then immediately started moving U.S. military assets into position over the course of several weeks. Twitter was all over it. Donald Tusk of Poland urged all Polish citizens to leave Iran on Feb 19, over a week before we attacked. We could all see the U.S. tanker and fighter fleets swarming to the Middle East, which could only mean war: https://x.com/sentdefender/status/2023739116597236085
So did we get the element of surprise after all? I don't think we did. Everything Congress might have telegraphed was telegraphed just as effectively by the slow pace of global military logistics (which is, as you say, about the pace of corn growing). The Ayatollah knew we were likely to attack any time. We killed him anyway because our military is very, very good at killing.
Second, while Congress is slow and public, it doesn't necessarily *have* to be like that. The only thing that prevents Congress from passing a bill in 10 minutes (3 for the House, 4 to run it over to the Senate, 3 for the Senate to vote) is minority disagreement and minority procedural protections. Congress *could* go very quickly, if a sufficiently urgent need were there. It could even -- if the need was there -- privately arrange among themselves (perhaps in executive session) to enact a declaration of war at the very moment the U.S. launched its first attack.
Now, it is true that there would probably be a minority that would object to this. But that's the system working as designed. War requires national consensus. Sneaky-super-fast-war requires national superconsensus. If we don't have that, then we probably shouldn't go to war yet at all. We should instead do what we are always telling the gun-grabbers to do: get out, talk to your fellow citizens, persuade them. Even though you think it's an emergency, and even allowing that you could be right, you've got to get the people on your side to do things in a republic. That's perhaps the least reassuring part of my comment, because getting people on your side is hard and might mean we fail to act, but the alternative is what happened in Rome when Caesar Augustus came to power.
All that being said: I do not *hate* the idea of an amendment allowing Congress to declare war in secret, during executive session, if the need arises. We would lose a lot of the public debate, which is extremely valuable -- but I think we can rely on Congress to never use this power unless it was clearly necessary and extremely urgent. (Otherwise, the minority party would never agree to a secret declaration of war, and would probably leak it.)
I suspect Iran thought the military movements were a bluff to pressure the negotiations and that they could draw out the negotiation process indefinitely. They also did not expect the first attack to be in broad daylight. They had many of their top leaders meeting together above ground! I can't think of clearer evidence that they were not expecting an imminent attack, even if they should have been.
A lot of nations were surprised to see America act so decisively. After a declaration of war from Congress it would have been more inevitable.
What this suggests to me is that Congress should sometimes declare war as a bluff! :P
The 2002 AUMF against Iraq was sort of like that. It passed in October, but Congress was pretty clear that they still wanted to avoid an actual war. They hoped that the AUMF (effectively a declaration of war) would not lead to an actual war, but would force Iraq back to the negotiating table. Of course, if that failed, the AUMF was ALSO authorization for the President to kick off an actual war, and it did fail, so he did go to war... but it took five months!
If Mr. Trump had gone to Congress seeking an declaration along these lines, he could have preserved that ambiguity, kept the timeline open, used the AUMF as leverage, and then hit the Iranian leadership when they exposed their underbellies.
I do think the Iranians were verging on suicidal to have held that meeting when they did. Can't imagine doing that while the U.S. is closing a military net around my country.
I remember experiencing the Iraq war buildup in Germany. Everyone knew the WMD stuff was bullshit. Germans wandered about the extreme rally around the flag effect and American prestige media uncritically falling in line was a theme on our news. Later nobody was at all surprised when the WMDs weren't found. I mean its theoretically conceivable that we were delusional and then turned out to be right by accident but <Insert Skinner out of touch meme here>.
I think "right by accident" happens more often in politics than one would expect, because people are not adopting beliefs independently of one another, or rationally. We often instead adopt beliefs because they usefully support other beliefs to which we are already emotionally committed, and we do it alongside our communities. This often leads large swathes of the public to believe things that are only, say, 30% likely to be true. 70% of the time, of course, they're wrong. But 30% of the time, they're right!
For example, in 2023, my QAnon friend expressed high confidence that Joe Biden would be swapped out for Kamala Harris in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and explained that everyone who was following "the real news" knew this was "the plan." Poking around some QAnon communities, I found it was true that his whole community agreed about this.
I didn't deny the possibility, but considered it pretty unlikely. (I actually made some money on PredictIt that year betting that Joe Biden would win the nom.) Now, I turned out to be wrong and my QAnon friend was right, because Biden did drop out. But I really think my friend just got lucky. (It helps that he also made a bunch of predictions that were *not* borne out by events.)
I obviously wasn't in Germany in 2002. I don't know what was in German media. My understanding is that German media *hates* Republicans, always has, and has treated all their claims with extreme skepticism since I've been alive (while absolutely *glazing* certain Democrats), so "Bush is wrong about WMD" would have fit nicely with that, regardless of the underlying evidence base.
But that's as far as I'll speculate about German media. I myself, in 2002, was *very* prone to believing things because my tribe believed them and/or because they reinforced my reflexive pro-Bush stance, so I am not the best judge of how reasonable our respective beliefs about WMD were, given evidence at the time -- a dicey proposition even at the best of times! All I can say for sure is that, whatever the reasons, you guys were definitely right and I was definitely wrong.
Whether it is possible for a soldier, even an officer, to justly engage in war when the top of the chain of command has acted in a manner that precludes the war itself from being a just war.
Whether it is moral to cheer for soldiers who are engaging in an unjust war which, if their commanders had initiated things slightly differently, might have been a just war...
Lot of things here, so we'll go from most frivolous to least frivolous.
First, typo: "President Bush very probably wanted to go to war with Iraq immediately by April 2022" should probably be 2002 instead. Though the timeline when Jeb! won the nomination in 2016 and beat Clinton would probably be better than this one, though if we didn't get Dobbs in that timeline it would not be good.
Second, oral vs. digital stimulation: while I understand that the Catholic church hasn't said anything on the topic, I do think there is a qualitative difference between putting your mouth to your spouse's genitals and applying one's fingers to the same area. Maybe I take the teleological view of such things a little too far, but it seems to me like the hand is designed for manipulation and poking around, while the mouth is built for eating, talking, and breathing, though that might just be a post hoc rationalization of my own personal squicks. Even so, I certainly wouldn't accuse someone of sinning for engaging in oral sex.
Third...I'm not entirely convinced that you're right about this being an illegal war, but I'm not convinced that you're wrong. However, at this point, now that it's started I think the best option is to take the path that the Whigs took during the Mexican-American War--that is to say, supporting the success of American arms while decrying the process that caused them to be used in the first place. Then, once the war's over and the Ayatollahs are gone we hold an impeachment and a trial with the *explicit* proviso that the only person who is at risk is POTUS. Because at this point, I think the consequences of stopping this thing before the job is done will be worse than seeing it through to the end.
(Note: lest anyone think I am a partisan on such matters, if they made me dictator and Edward Snowden fell into my hands, I would give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for exposing the NSA's shenanigans, and then have him shot for treason for running to China and Russia afterwards.)
Ope! Takes me hours to respond to substantive points, but I can thank you for finding an amusing typo right away! Thanks! Fixed.
You think THAT's an amusing typo? Search for "Tim Magazine". Get on my level, Tom.
Oh dear! I knew I should have read this over twice instead of once! (But it was soooo long by the end! Wah wah.)
Not to pile on, but I noticed the other two typos and also this one:
"I am exactly the kind of person the [sic] whose support the Trump Administration would have counted on in the public debate, if they had bothered to have a public debate."
I welcome the corrections! A pile-on just means I didn't do my job on my end well enough. Fixed.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15651899/Iran-learnt-defeat-Saddam-decide-war-end-DAVID-PATRIKARAKOS.html
"Because at this point, I think the consequences of stopping this thing before the job is done will be worse than seeing it through to the end."
The war is functionally already over--Iran won. The moment Ali Khamenei was killed, Iran devolved military command to regional commanders who operate independently of the central government. Even if you defeat, or make some sort of deal with, the central government of Iran (Mojtaba Khamenei and Masoud Pezeshkian), those regional commanders don't have to pay attention to it and can keep fighting. Unless there's the political will to put massive numbers of ground troops into Iran to root out every single one of those regional commands (and, to be fair, I don't know what command(s) the Strait of Hormuz falls under), Iran, through those regional commands, can likely keep fighting indefinitely, including attacking Tel Aviv and Haifa (Iron Dome has basically failed at this point).
The one matter on which those regional commanders might honour a deal made by the central government is allowing neutral (or Iranian-aligned) countries' ships to transit the Strait. The catch is that Iran is only allowing it if the shipments are paid for in Chinese yuan (https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/16/business/iranian-oil-exports-hormuz-strait-intl-cmd). Perhaps the EU would be able to make a deal to pay in euros, but Iran is clearly attempting to break the dominance of the US dollar in international trade, be it on oil, gas, or fertilizer, by not allowing any shipments paid for in US dollars to transit the Strait of Hormuz. (And this is to say nothing of the Houthis attempting to close the Bab-el-Mandab and, by extension, the Suez Canal! The only reason that didn't work when they tried it at the start of the Israel-Hamas war is because the US sent an aircraft carrier to rebuff their attacks, but it's far from clear that the US has the capability to do that now.)
So to this I say, what job, and what end? And is there the political will to break Iran to the point where none of those regional commanders remain standing, and the populace is too cowed to permit an insurgency? Because if not, or even if there is but the invasion fails (Afghanistan, anyone? And it will require a ground invasion), Iran wins.
You're really reaching on this one, man. The likelihood of the central government not reining in the regional commanders is zero.
Sorry, but this is pure fantasy based on wishful thinking.
Except that the whole point of the mosaic defense doctrine is to keep fighting going through decapitation strikes.
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2026/03/11/war-without-a-center-irans-mosaic-defense/
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/3/10/the-fourth-successor-how-iran-planned-to-fight-a-long-war-with-the-us-and-israel
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/iran-war-news-live-iran-says-its-defence-wont-fall-after-ali-larijanis-killing-heres-why-11230766
Killing top commanders won't work. Regional commanders have strategic autonomy and it's unclear to me whether they would stop if top IRGC commanders (on security, the IRGC is in charge, not the civilian government) tried to order a halt to operations (said regional commanders might well assume the orders are coming under duress and ignore them, since holding a gun to the head of the IRGC and forcing him to give such an order would likely be interpreted as just another form of decapitation strike).
That's why I say Iran has effectively already won, because they've made themselves too difficult to defeat in the sense of forcing them to halt all military operations from their territory.
There have been many regimes that have had this sort of plan, most notoriously the Third Reich (my apologies for Godwinning), with the "Bavarian redoubt" and " Werwolf." They usually don't work out real well.
Now, it's a possibility, but this kind of thing sounds really good but tends to break down during the implementation stage.
My understanding is that those plans were never really put into effect, whereas Iran has had decades to develop its mosaic defense doctrine (as the explainers note, following Iran-Iraq and later examining how the US and allied forces handled Afghanistan and Iraq, likely also Libya*), and it appears to be functioning right now.
*You can find various Trump tweets from 2011-2013 in which he predicted that to boost flagging poll numbers (or to compensate for his lack of diplomatic capability), Obama would attack Libya or Iran.
November 29, 2011: "In order to get elected, @BarackObama will start a war with Iran."
January 17, 2012: "@BarackObama will attack Iran in order to get re-elected."
October 9, 2012: "Now that Obama's poll numbers are in tailspin -- watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate."
September 16, 2013: "I predict that President Obama will at some point attack Iran in order to save face!"
November 10, 2013: "Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly--not skilled!"
On what you may consider a related note the current RCP polling average for the 2026 Generic Congressional Vote is D+4.9. The last time the Republican Party was ahead on that average was February 16, 2025. It has been at least D+4 for all of 2026.
(end digression)
It helps that, as those articles further note, each regional command has some autonomous weapons manufacturing capability (and especially that among those weapons is comparatively cheap drones on which the US and Israel have been spending substantially more expensive interceptors, to uncertain effect; you can find video of Iranian drones getting past Iron Dome defenses and hitting Tel Aviv). Even at the top the regime reportedly has deep lines of succession for every relevant position.
From what I've read, the Bavarian Redoubt was only planned in late 1943, leaving very little time for actual implementation. Iran has been preparing the mosaic defense strategy at least since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, so they've had a lot more time to prepare for having to use it, as they have now done.
Further, as a practical matter, Iran doesn't want to stop fighting. The Supreme Leader and the IRGC are in charge on security matters, and the IRGC likely doesn't want to stop (the designation of the group as a terrorist entity and Hegseth's suggestion of a "no quarter" order remove any incentive on the IRGC's part to surrender), while the new Supreme Leader just saw pretty much his entire family killed in the strikes that killed his father. Iran at this point has no reason to accept any sort of ceasefire; the US and Israel attacked while negotiations (in which, from reports, Iran had offered to accept terms far stricter than those negotiated in the JCPOA) so they view those belligerents as operating entirely in bad faith diplomatically, and any ceasefire would just serve to benefit the US and Israel by giving them time to replenish their weapons stockpiles. Iran would much rather maintain military pressure on Israel through cheap drones from decentralized commands, and economic pressure on the United States by blockading the Strait of Hormuz to shipments paid for in USD (and create diplomatic pressure from everywhere else by threatening a global energy and food crisis, and general depression).
Iran wins by surviving, and its weapons are cheap drones and economics. Right now I see no path for the US and Israel to prevent them from continuing to use these weapons, and hence, in my view, Iran has already won.
We will see; I question how long they will continue to operate, especially if the administration starts making offers to non-IRGC forces.
And, again, I get that you don't want Trump to succeed at something, but this really does seem like you're grasping at anything. (Especially with that line about "uncertain effect" regarding the effectiveness of antidrone defenses--total Israeli dead right now is less than two dozen.)
I've always doubted whether AUMF's are in fact a Constitutional exercise of Congress's power to declare war. As a Ron Paul fan back in Bush's term, I was nodding along when I read his speech against the Iraq AUMF: "This is not a resolution to declare war. We know that. This is a resolution that does something much different. This resolution transfers the responsibility, the authority, and the power of the Congress to the President so he can declare war when and if he wants to."
That said, in practice I need to agree you're correct. You make an excellent point that AUMF's (when sufficiently precise) do in fact serve the same role in the public debate. Which, sadly, is lacking here.
I'm praying too that this illegal war will at least bring about good in the end. I agree, it's definitely possible.
Doesn't the war powers resolution specifically say it doesn't authorise anything or add to the president's power? Sot it can't be the thing that authorised repelling invasions or other self-defence.
"Nothing in this joint resolution—
(1) is intended to alter the constitutional authority of the Congress or of the President, or the provisions of existing treaties; or
(2) shall be construed as granting any authority to the President with respect to the introduction of United States Armed Forces
into hostilities or into situations wherein involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances which authority he would not have had in the absence of this joint resolution."
This is in response to the claim of statutory authority in footnote 15
But the WPR also says:
"The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces."
I think you are correct that Congress thought he had Power #3 already. If they thought this power was new, they would have said, "We are intending to give the President this new power, and we are leaving everything else the same." I also think it's quite likely that the President *did* already have that power immediately from the Constitution.
But, in the alternative, I assume arguendo that Congress at the time was wrong, and that the President actually did *not* actually have Power #3 immediately from the Constitution (even though they believed he did). If that's the case, the War Powers Resolution says, "We are not trying to add anything to his constitutional authority," right before directly adding something to his constitutional authority.
I tend to think that the more specific grant of power is controlling over the more general denial, especially if it becomes clear that Congress was confused about the existing constitutional authority. In that world, I would read 50 USC 1547(d) as restricting expansive readings of 1541(c), but not as nullifying it, or any part of it. I would thus interpret the War Powers Resolution as giving the President new authority to use military force during a "a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces," but I would construe all those terms as narrowly as possible because of 1547(d).
You make a good point, though, that a different case could be made, and I didn't give any thought to that in the article.
I think general language limiting construction has priority over any inconsistent language, even if specific. Otherwise, no construction clause would ever do anything. That is the entire point of provisions on construction, by their nature they affect the whole thing whose construction they regulate.
Nothing in this resolution means nothing in this resolution, not something. Such language is intended to override any accidental grant of power. It seems to me to be rather strong language, and intended to override any contrary provision.
I would say that a construction clause is of a different kind, not simply a general provision, but it has priority over any substantive provision, because any substantive provision has to be construed according to it.
Then -- assuming arguendo the President has no inherent constitutional authority to defend the nation against attack -- what do you make of 1541(c)? Does 1547(d) just nullify that last power?
When a statute's rule of construction tells me to read a provision a certain way, of course I comply. When a statute's rule of construction tells me to ignore a different provision of the same legislative completely, it makes me think the rule of construction must not mean what it seems to mean.
Let me put it this way (assuming arguendo there is no inherent power): Congress may have been confused or wrong about constitutional authority, but it was not confused about whether it wanted to give the president additional powers.
It did not want to give additional powers, which is why it put in the rule of construction, in case it accidentally appeared to give him additional powers.
The rule of construction is primary (and in this case IMO quite explicit). You have to interpret other provisions in accordance with it.
You are trying to interpret the rule of construction in accordance with the other provisions, which is IMO nonsensical, you can not construe anything without following the rule of construction first. You are attempting to construe the resolution by yourself, and only then apply the rule of construction, while you should only look at it through the rule. Congress did not intend this, and it defeats the point of rules of construction.
Rules of construction are primary, and it is conceptually incoherent to attempt to construe them or harmonise them.
So, yes, it does nullify it. This is precisely the kind of situation Congresss adopted the rule to avoid.
I agree.
Consider the 11th Amendment, which uses the same word "construe": "The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State."
What if you say the federal judicial power did extend there under the terms of the original Constitution? As the Supreme Court had said before this Amendment? Well, the answer everyone's agreed ever since then is, it doesn't anymore. The rule of construction added in the 11th Amendment trumps everything in the original Constitution, no matter how clearly stating otherwise.
Sure, but this is an amendment. I don't deny that, when a law provides a rule that contradicts previous law (or a previous interpretation of law), it nullifes or repeals the prior enactment.
But this is more like if we passed an amendment that said, "The President may be impeached for maladministration. Nothing in this amendment shall be taken to expand the impeachment power." Verba cum effectu
sunt accipienda kicks in here, and I am left trying to give priority to two different parts of the same enactment that appear on their surface to directly contradict.
I appreciate Sathya's frank biting of the bullet and just saying he thinks the rule of construction nullifies the more specific provision, but I don't think that's the only reasonable answer to this hypothetical.
I miss George W. Bush too, James. Of all the U.S. Presidents in my lifetime whom I remember, and Clinton is the first one I remember, GWB is the only one I trusted and whom I thought was doing what he thought actually advanced the common good. I have not had that sense from ANY of his successors, nor from Bill Clinton, his immediate predecessor, either.
And I, too, believe the current Iran War is unjust and illegal and I would have voted for the War Powers resolution and asked my U.S. Senators and Congresswoman to vote for it (thankfully, all 3 of them did so).
I, too, initially supported the Iraq War but now I think the Iraq War was indeed unjust and a mistake.
So you know you have to post your response to whoever it was, because I rarely see you lose your temper in an argument and my curiosity is endless
I'm afraid I'm going to take that chat to my confessor and no one else. I really should have been better, and I, although I am still convinced I was *correct*, I am not persuasive or attractive.
Still feel my hand twitch when I think of his OP, though. Turns out that's a Shiri's Scissor statement for me, which definitely makes me a weirdo.
If you take iraqs GDP per capita in 1988 and apply a 3% growth rate, it’s double what it is now. Iraq saw some gains right after the invasion because sanctions ended, but it’s basically stalled for a decade.
What was the point of it all? Once you expelled him from Kuwait, what did sanctioning his people and impoverishing them for a decade accomplish?
He didn’t have WMDs. He basically learned his lesson and left us alone after the gulf war.
The Middle East has a low average iq and high rates of cousin marriage. Of course it’s going to be ruled by dictators! You’re never going to sub that out. The best you can do is convince them not to fuck with America.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/cousin-marriage-conundrum/
Jumping up and down screaming "I have not learned my lesson" is a good sign that you didn't learn your lesson. Even if you secretly did in your heart of hearts, you can't expect anyone to act accordingly.
It’s obvious that bush and co knew the truth and did it anyway because they thought it polled well and it was part of their personal life narrative.
I don’t want this to come off as a gotcha because I’m sure you’ve thought it through (and catholic thinkers most certainly have) and I’m mostly curious what the line is:
You usually talk about the sanctity of life when it comes to abortion, that abortion should be generally disallowed for the same reason we categorically disallow murder. In another post you disparaged Roe v Wade for having allowed the US to ”solve some really serious problems by killing a child”. In that same post, you argue against the death penalty, too.
But in this case, children’s lives are explicitly subject to a consequentialist ledger — this one or these twenty or these ten thousand children may have to be murdered for a greater good.
The question then obviously becomes: who gets to make the judgement on which way the ledger points? Ie, to whom does the choice belong? When it comes to murder by military force of children faraway, that’s apparently congress after spirited public debate. In other words, the American people.
But why should this be so? Why should the American people get to make the choice about violent murder of Iranian or Iraqi children, but choice otherwise be entirely disallowed, for example, when made by an American mother?
Is the US public really deemed to have the faculties and moral clarity to decide how to weigh the certain death of Middle Eastern children against the sprawling possible outcomes of war? If so, why would that level of trust not be extended to members of the US public about their own unborn?
I'm neither Mr. Heaney nor Catholic, but I think this is the line of thought:
Children dying in war is something that is going to happen, but it is not murder unless the person killing them is doing so deliberately. It is tragic, and is one of the reasons why you shouldn't go to war unless it is absolutely necessary, but it isn't murder.
Abortion, on the other hand, is the deliberate killing of a child, and is, therefore, murder.
To be fair, this is not really the point of the article, and so is debating something of a side point James makes. So I don't expect or feel obligated for James to respond on this point. And I will add that, despite coming from a different political viewpoint, I tend to agree with the article's thesis.
With that caveat, I do think this is a fair question for someone to ask in general, and I'm not sure Tom's response goes far enough, for the reasons below.
Generally speaking, murder comes in two flavors: intentional murder and depraved heart murder (sometimes called first degree and second degree). https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/malice. Intentional murder is the sort of deliberate killing Tom references. But depraved heart murder is when someone's actions created a substantial risk of death but engaged in those actions nonetheless, and they in fact resulted in a killing. So because we know these deaths are "something that is going to happen" the sort of accidental killing in war of a civilian could still qualify as a depraved heart murder, even if it wasn't deliberate.
The key point is this: both intentional and deprived heart murder require some element of the killing being unjustified. You can see the sample definitions at the link above both include either "without justification" or "unjustified" as part of their definition. So, under either framework of intent. we end up either way at a question of whether a killing is justified or not. However you determine the justification, you will draw your line for murder.
Whether James feels compelled to answer regarding his justifications for abortion as opposed to war, I think he (and readers who agree with this article) would agree that, at least under the American constitutional system, those justifications need to be debated and determined by the people's representatives, and not unilaterally determined by a would-be king.
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This is a fair question. I remember we had a (frankly pretty terrible) religion textbook in my senior year of high school, and you've compelled me to go look it up again just so I can accurately quote a passage that always stuck in my head:
> Christine Gudorf... points out that "the Catholic church uses proportional consequentialism in public-realm issues, and a deontological natural law approach in private-realm issues." She continues: "When we consider the methodological inconsistency between the church's treatment of war and abortion, it is small wonder that feminists charge the church with misogyny because of its apparent distrust of women as moral decision makers. Women with the medical option of abortion seem, in the bishops' eyes, to be a greater danger to life than men armed with tanks, missiles, and bombs."
I bring this up because the way Gudorf sees it is an easy way to interpret my position, especially from the outside. (Of course, Gudorf is talking about the Catholic Church, not James Heaney, but she might as well be talking about James Heaney because I do the same thing.) However, Gudorf's interpretation of what we're up to is completely wrong. (It was a bad textbook.)
As a starting matter, I would say this: given the dignity of life, the case for pacifism is actually quite strong. I would probably advise anyone who is just starting out in a belief system that embraces universal human dignity (such as Christianity) to start *there,* with absolute pacifism, and only build on it once you've grown into things a little bit and can see more clearly where the moral lines are drawn. I don't think pacifism is quite correct, but I think it's a hell of a lot less dangerous (to yourself and others) than the opposite error.
I also think that I am prone to the opposite error, so take what I am about to say with any grains of salt you might like to add to it. My support for the unborn has never made me worry about giving an account of myself to the Lord after my death. My support for particular wars -- and even for war in general -- has. I suspect I would be a bad soldier, because I would hesitate constantly about any actual use of violence against an enemy, and the enemy would kill me while I fretted.
(The Catholic Church, for what it is worth, seems to have a similar hesitancy. The teaching that murder is wrong and abortion is murder is considered infallible. The Just War Theory, however, remains a "theory," a popular and well-attested theological framework for thinking about war, but never a doctrine.)
Having given all those cautions, I do think wars *can be* just, and, to illustrate why, I'll give an example of a just abortion -- because I think abortions *can be* just as well, under certain extreme circumstances.
Consider a mother with an ectopic pregnancy. She has a tiny little guy growing in her fallopian tube. This is a medical crisis. Her baby cannot survive in the fallopian tube. There is no currently-known medical treatment that has any chance of successfully moving him from the fallopian tube into the uterus. She cannot save him. Worse, if she simply lets nature take its course, her fallopian tube will explode, and (at least without swift intervention) she will die of internal hemorrhaging.
Now suppose there are two treatments available to her. The first is salpingectomy, the removal of her fallopian tube with the living child still inside it. The second is zethotrexate, a medicine that poisons the child to death, which causes the surrounding pregnancy tissue to dissipate and the child's corpse to pass from the body. (I am using the fictional "zethotrexate" rather than the actual drug, methotrexate, to sidestep certain ambiguities about methotrexate's real-world mechanism of action. The fictional zethotrexate is pure poison. Like rat poison, but for fallopian-tube fetuses.) The zethotrexate has lower risks to the mother than salpingectomy and preserves more of her fertility (both of which are good things).
Given my view that humans are so important that we have a duty to avoid intentionally taking an innocent life under any circumstances, I would say that using the zethotrexate is a moral error. The zethotrexate saves the mother only by means of killing the child. If the child somehow survives the zethotrexate, it's not a miracle. Instead, it's a crisis, because the baby's survival means the problem remains (Mom is still in danger). It is not okay to kill an innocent, not even to save another, and zethotrexate, in this situation, saves only by killing.
However, I think the salpingectomy is morally acceptable -- even morally praiseworthy. The salpingectomy does no violence to the child, and it accomplishes a great good by saving the mother.
Now, to be clear, the child is definitely going to die after the salpingectomy. Ectopic pregnancies usually come out in the first trimester. We are, at best, *decades* away from advancing medical science enough to make a first-trimester child medically viable. In a *sense,* we are killing this child. However:
1. We aren't attacking the child by an act of violence direct at the child, which would be, in my view, impermissible.
2. We foresee the child's death, but we do not intend it. By this I do not simply mean that we don't *want* the child to die or that we regret his dying (although both things are true), but that his death is in no way a means to our ends. If, after the salpingectomy, the baby somehow (by an absolute miracle) lived on in an incubator (impossible with current medical science), grew to full term, and went home with Mom & Dad after seven months, that would not be a crisis, but a profound joy.
3. We have a legitimate end in mind, and that end *is* directly intended. (The salpingectomy does *not* directly kill the baby, but it *does* directly save mom, which is an important good in itself.)
4. Our legitimate end (evaluated here through a consequentialist lens) outweighs the foreseen but unintended bad consequence, at least compared to all realistic counterfactuals that lack those bad consequences. ("Mom lives and baby dies" would not always meet this criterion, but, in this case, there are two possible outcomes: mom lives and baby dies, or both mom and baby die. The former is clearly a better set of consequences.)
Even the Catholic Church, perhaps the most anti-abortion institution on Earth, allows treatment in this case. (They refer to this salpingectomy and other, similar procedures as "indirect abortion," and absolutely condemn only direct abortion, where the death of the child is willed as a means to an end.)
[CONTINUED IN NEXT REPLY]
[PART 2 OF 2, CONTINUED FROM PARENT]
This framework seems to fit a widespread moral intuition (which says that you can save the mom in this case since her baby's going to die anyway), into a moral framework that acknowledges the intuition without just going Full Consequentialist: yes, you can save mom at the cost of baby's life, but only under certain conditions (which might rarely, or never, obtain).
From this framework, we can begin to glimpse the outline of a moral framework within which a war could at least theoretically be morally acceptable -- or even, conceivably, morally praiseworthy. (Cards on the table, this is just the double effect framework, which annoyed Judith Jarvis Thomson so much she invented the trolley problem to problematize it.)
I will assume for the sake of shortening this comment that we each accept the principle of self-defense: if someone, acting from malice, violently attacks me or another innocent without cause, I can use violence to protect myself or that innocent. Out of respect for the attacker's life, I ought to use the minimum force that will reliably disable his attack, but minimum force may still be lethal. (The principle of self-defense assumes that our absolute obligation to avoid taking the lives of the innocent does not extend to the guilty. This requires several extra steps, not least of them establishing what "guilty" means, but, since basically everyone holds this view and this comment is already extremely long, I'm skipping it.)
Now suppose a bad man is about to launch a missile at my house, which will almost certainly kill me and my four-person family. I only have one means of stopping him: a madman planted a bomb under the bad guy's missile launcher and, through a series of misadventures, I ended up in possession of the remote control. Unfortunately, the bad guy has kidnapped his work crush. She is being held prisoner at the launch site. If I detonate the bomb, I will almost certainly destroy the missile launcher (which is also what I intend). However, it is very likely that I will also kill the bad guy and/or the bad guy's perfectly innocent crush. May I detonate the bomb?
The double effect framework suggests that I can. The act of destroying the launcher is legitimate. We do not intend the death of the innocent woman. If she survives the bombing, we will in fact be overjoyed. If she is injured, we will get her (and even the bad guy) all necessary medical aid as quickly as possible; her death is certainly not a means to our end and we fervently don't desire it. We seem to have no other options; we can see the bad man is literally typing in the launch code at this very moment, and it will strike my house seconds later. In all realistic scenarios where I don't detonate the bomb, my family, including two children, are all about to die. There's one of her and four of us. I do not breach the moral law by detonating the bomb (although, if she dies, it may scar my conscience for life). (This analysis would come out differently if the bad guy had ten human shields instead of one, though.)
A just war, conducted justly, is -- or at least should be -- a scaled-up version of this silly hypothetical. You act defensively, against a clear and grave threat, you try everything else to address it first, and, when you fire ze missiles, you never ever ever will anyone else's death as a means to your legitimate ends. (Again, this would probably make me a very bad infantryman.) (It also disagrees in important ways with certain commonplace beliefs about how one ought to act in war.)
You might know that, simply because war is huge and terrible and mistakes get made, you are almost certainly going to kill innocents by accident in the process of disabling the bad guy from harming you. However, you do what you can to prevent that, and you weigh the possibility of civilian deaths *very, very seriously* before you take the first violent step. You make sure that what you're doing will save more lives than it cost. If you ever actually "murder" any children far away -- that is, deliberately killing them by direct intention, or, as @River Allen suggests, by depraved indifference to their welfare and/or proportionality -- then you are doing evil, and no degree of state sanction can expiate that.
On that point, I did not mean to imply at any point here that the American people / Congress gets to decide all this and its judgment is infallible. It is my view that Congress's approval is *necessary* for any war to be just, because they hold the care for the common good in this respect, but Congress's approval is not *sufficient*. Congress could authorize a war that is clearly unjust for some other reason, and, as citizens, we would not be bound to defer to their judgment. We may even be obligated to conscientiously object, or, in extreme cases, actively resist. (OTOH, we *are* bound by Congress's judgment if it decides *not* to authorize a war. It's asymmetrical because you need a green light from all criteria for a war to be just, so just one red light derails your war. War is morally prohibited by default.)
Indeed, if the Iraq War taught us anything, it's that the American people's evaluation of the proportionality criterion is anything but infallible.
Does that address some of your concerns? Your questions were wide-ranging and my answer even moreso.
Fantastic Article. Would it be in terribly bad taste for me to use your comment section to share my own recent article on the illegal and unconstitutional nature of Trump's military actions in Iran? You know, this article right here... https://constitutionallaw.substack.com/p/separation-of-wars-not-just-powers-27a
Because I would hate to shamelessly self-promote my own work, like the fine article linked above, if this is not the proper place for self-promotion... What am I talking about? That would obviously make me a ridiculously selfish person. I hope no one who sees this comment goes and reads the exceptionally thoughtful and entertaining article linked above.
>As a result, America spent a full year talking, as a nation, about the just war criteria as applied to Iraq. We had raging national debates, including on the floor of Congress, about whether the cause was just, about its proportionality, about alternatives. Every point of the just war theory was litigated in endless detail at water coolers and dinner tables across the country. We spent months arguing whether a new war would be self-defensive enforcement of the terms of the Persian Gulf cease-fire (good), or a new preemptive war of aggression (bad).
I don't think we could do this anymore. I don't think we have the kind of polity necessary for a Democracy anymore. Maybe we can manage a Republic, but in a Republic leaders wouldn't necessarily act on the wishes of their constituents, but on what they deem to be their best interests.
This has been a weird week for me. I am another one of the dozens of Americans who thought Iran needed to go down for a long time. I was absolutely enraged that Trump promised to interfere if the Iranian government harmed protestors at the beginning of the year, which lead to bold protests where tens of thousands of people died. Then Trump does something about it and I don't feel like it's fair for me to be mad about it.
I noted a few weeks ago how strange it is that Trump isn't doing propaganda:
"I remember more buildup before the Iraq war.
"Not military buildup, no one was tracking military airplanes movements on the internet.
"But propaganda buildup. Americans hated Terrorists, Muslim Extremism, and the backwards sheepherders who dared spit in our eye well before we invaded Iraq.
"That faded over time and the will to fight went away.
"For Iran, I think Trump forgot to do the propaganda? How many Americans really hate and fear the Ayatollahs? Don't get me wrong, the world will be better with them gone. But how many Americans are looking at their sons and thinking, "Even if this little guy becomes maimed and killed, it would have been worth it if victory is achieved?""
It isn't intuitive to me that the Governor of Texas couldn't morally send his National Guard into Mexico and wage war on Cartels that harmed Texan citizens. He probably shouldn't do this because of the diplomatic and political blowback, but those are prudential determinations. I don't see it being obviously morally wrong.
Various points:
First: What do you make of reports that some military commanders are saying that this war is an attempt to bring about the prophecies in the Book of Revelation? (Prophecies which, among other things, include the extermination of all Jews, mostly through death with a relative handful through forced conversion.)
https://jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/us-troops-were-told-iran-war-is-for
You note that the religious leaders in Iran may well want to bring about some sort of apocalypse; that may be so; but it seems like some leaders on the US side want the same.
Also, Pete Hegseth has a Deus Vult tattoo. Here's Hegseth himself showing it off and calling for an "#AmericanCrusade": https://www.instagram.com/reel/CAYcBE8lYJV/. (Chris Van Hollen claimed on the floor of the US Senate that Hegseth once, about a decade ago, went on a drunken bender and chanted "Kill all Muslims!" https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-171/issue-15/senate-section/article/S356-1)
Second: One bit of speculation on these events that I've seen is that Donald is being coerced into attacking Iran. It seems very plausible to me that, somewhere, there is video of him raping an underage, probably even prepubescent, girl, and the threat of its release is what is pushing him into doing this. (I've even seen some reports that there were similar attempts to coerce Clinton using his raping of Monica Lewinsky.)
(The video you can find is one of Ivanka Trump giving a tour of her childhood home in New York. You only need to watch the first minute or so of it. The first thirty seconds have her showing off the various posters and memorabilia she had, stuff from boy bands and the like. She's reasonably chipper and upbeat when talking about that. The next scene has her standing next to her childhood bed. The change in tone and demeanour is startling, and she's pretty quick to change the topic to point out the view from the window. I doubt there's any video of anything that happened on that bed, but it would not at all surprise me if something did--and of course Donald has outright said, in front of her, that he would date her if she wasn't his daughter.)
Third: Never mind the "we'll be greeted as liberators" talking point; Donald has said outright that he'd be OK with Iran remaining an authoritarian theocracy as long as the new leaders treat the US and Israel well: https://www.kurdistan24.net/en/story/898475/trump-says-religious-leader-could-govern-iran-if-fair-and-just-and-cooperative-with-us-and-allies
I've also seen the case made that the intent here is not to reform Iran into an ally of the US and Israel (which it may or may not have been prior to the 1979 Revolution, when the Shah was more or less a dictator, after the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh* when he planned to nationalize Iranian oil reserves) but rather to shatter it into a failed state so it can't exert any influence of any sort on the region. (I've also heard reports that leaders in Tehran have devolved political and military command and control to regional leaders, which means that any attempt at a peace deal is impossible now.)
*I lived with someone from Iran for three years when pursuing doctoral work. According to him, when Mosaddegh died (1967-03-05), the official explanation for why flags flew at half-mast in the country was not to mourn Mosaddegh, because the current regime was set up in the wake of his overthrow, so officially honouring him would have been out of the question, but on the other hand, he was a former Prime Minister, so he couldn't not be honoured. Instead, the official reason for Iranian flags flying at half-mast was the death of Georges Vanier, Governor General of Canada, who died in office on the same day--but everyone knew it was actually for Mosaddegh.
(A little over a decade later, staff at the Canadian Embassy in Tehran forged passports to help evacuate US personnel from their embassy during the Revolution, which would have caused a major diplomatic scandal had it been discovered at the time. The thanks we got for this is "51st state" and "they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines".)
Fourth: Under the legal standard just set by the killing of Ali Khamenei (for whom I shed absolutely no tears: https://bsky.app/profile/cristianfarias.com/post/3mbjlwkmb6c24), the threats Donald has made against Canadian (and Danish, and Panamanian, and I've lost track of who else's) sovereignty would seem to justify any of those countries (especially us, we're right next door with a long land border and very vulnerable to an invasion) bombing the crap out of DC (and maybe Palm Beach) and killing Donald (not just kidnapping him, as one could argue could be justified after the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro). (I would also shed absolutely no tears for Donald's death. For that matter, I would also shed no tears for Maduro's.) For what should be very obvious reasons I would not support this (on the other hand, I am absolutely in favour of imposing a Dayton Agreement-style arrangement on the United States, should its ostensible allies--Tarnak Farm was enemy fire--ever be in a position to force those terms on it), but it seems to me that it would be a straightforward implementation of the precedent just set.
Fifth: If you want to support open opposition to the US invasion of Iran, buy some Spanish cheeses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Protected_Designation_of_Origin_products_by_country#Spainhttps://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-aircraft-leave-spain-after-government-says-bases-cannot-be-used-iran-attacks-2026-03-02/
Sixth: Donald is basically Lord Farquaad when it comes to his attitude toward the military.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/shrek/images/d/dd/Farquaad_sacrifice_quote.jpg
Seventh: Cuba is next. (I will also shed no tears for Díaz-Canal.)
Eighth: Given that this war might give yet another reason for some in the US to want to get out, then on the one hand I hope you can join me in laughing at Jesse Ventura's suggestion that Minnesota attempt to secede from the US to join Canada (https://www.mlive.com/news/2026/01/former-minnesota-governor-says-state-should-seek-to-become-part-of-canada.html), but on the other hand I would note that there is a broader legal pathway to Canadian citizenship now: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bill-c-3-canadian-citizenship-by-descent-american-interest-9.7112724
EDIT: On impeachment and conviction, I'm going to quote myself from elsewhere:
"What's needed is not impeachment.
"What's needed is a vote of no confidence.
"A pity the US developed its political system before it had better examples."
"In a healthy representative democracy, an executive purporting to declare war unilaterally would be stripped of executive authority by a straightforward vote of no confidence by the legislative body directly representative of the people.
"(By implication I do not consider presidential systems to be healthy representative democracies. The combination of de jure power, democratic mandate and permanence in office is too dangerous.)
"(I also freely concede that there is substance to many of the criticisms made of parliamentary systems, but given the shitshow I'm seeing to my south I'm very glad I live with one of those than the nightmare less than a hundred kilometres away from me.)"
Note: I did err in the second comment. The matter of declaring war, at least in the Commonwealth realms, is part of the royal prerogative and therefore does not require approval by Parliament. However, the prerogative (outside of some very limited circumstances, of which declaring war is not one) is only exercised on the advice of the ministers of the Crown, and the lower House can remove those ministers by simple majority vote. An executive purporting to declare war when a majority of the lower House is opposed to such declaration, therefore, should be removed in a straightforward vote of no confidence.
(1) I have been hearing about these supposed military commanders and cabinet officials who believe themselves to be fulfilling Revelation since I was a babe watching the Iraq War buildup. It's rumored every single time a Republican President takes military action within 2,000 miles of Megiddo, or even supports some Israeli action in the area.
I've never actually met anyone who actually believes some U.S. war is fulfilling biblical prophecy. Even my QAnon friend, who is quite clear that Trump is a divinely appointed vindicator opposing a global satanic pedophile cult, has not suggested that any U.S. military action is designed to bring about the second coming. They are out there, perhaps, "outside my ken," as Pauline Kael put it in her famous 1972 quote, but I don't know them, I don't see them show up in polling, and they're oft-rumored but never revealed. *Maybe* this is just a side effect of my hanging out in more Catholic-coded spaces (even the Protestants at Federalist Society events talk like Catholics, if you don't mind me wildly stereotyping), and I don't have as good visibility into them as you do because we tend not to see the nuts on our own side... but, nevertheless, I have developed a fairly high prior that rumors to this effect are always false. That prior can be overcome by evidence, but it hasn't been at this time, at least not for me.
Deus vult is a memey thing to say on the Christian Right at the moment. As a matter of fact, the thing I wrote on Reddit that *specifically* set off my interlocutor was, "Husbands, go down on your wives! Deus vult!" It is not something I want to see tattooed on the Secretary of War, but neither do I read much into it other than "this guy spends way too much time online."
(2) I have a similar thought process on this one. I thought the Donald Trump pee tape kompromat theory was very plausible. I guess it's impossible to *prove* it doesn't exist, but for various reasons, I no longer think it is at all plausible. It now seems to me that it was the basest sort of rumor started by people who should have known better that took on a life of its own, not because of the evidence, but because it fueled the most desperately-held belief of progressives: that Donald Trump is just one revelation away from toppling.
The "Trump is just deflecting from Epstein because there's proof he's a kiddy-diddler lurking in the wings" seems to me to fill a similar niche, and I updated after the pee tape was discredited to require strong evidence for me to buy in. Haven't seen it.
That said, like the Mueller investigation, the Epstein case is now too tangled and politicized for me to be able to parse it, so I have given up trying to predict what will come of it.
(7) I think Cuba would be next if this went well. I have my doubts.
(8) I am mulling the vote of no-confidence as an alternative to impeachment for Some Constitutional Amendments, since it is obvious that impeachment is a dead letter. No doubt I will want to put some filthy American spin on it, but maybe I'll restrain myself for the sake of Keep It Simple Stupid.
(1) What I know about the reports concerning end-times preaching in the US military is what's in Larsen's article about complaints to the MRFF. How credible those complaints are is, of course, another matter.
As for Hegseth's tattoo, if you notice, that Instagram post was from May 2020. The post was specifically to promote his book "American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free", released that same month, which he says ends with those two words. Maybe "Deus Vult" has been a meme on the Christian right for six years, I wouldn't know, but it's not some recent thing for Hegseth.
(2) At this point I genuinely think there is a segment of the US population which could watch a video of Donald raping a prepubescent girl and then turn around and argue that it's perfectly OK to do that. (See here for a transcription of a conversation in which a Trump supporter asks why it's wrong to rape children: https://decivitate.jamesjheaney.com/p/a-woman-has-died/comment/211162691 Note also there the remark Miller made about Greenland, and I would add further that the member of the Folketing whom I quoted as responding is a conservative, sitting in opposition to the current government.) Maybe I have too low an opinion of politicians, but I doubt you could even get two-thirds of the current US Senate to convict over such a video. (Yes, it would not have been misconduct in office, but the articles of impeachment would more likely allege a violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, claiming that the video is also in the files and has not been released pursuant to that law, with the victim properly blurred but the perpetrator on full display, and that Donald abrogated his responsibility to direct the Department of Justice to comply fully with the law.)
Notably this segment does not include people like the "QAnon Shaman", who turned on Donald over the Epstein question: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/qanon-shaman-spills-bs-made-014348385.html
I don't think I ever really believed the pee tape speculation, but on the Epstein question, just consider that the man is named tens of thousands of times in the released files, and at least one member of Congress has claimed (without other members claiming otherwise, to my knowledge) that in the unredacted files he is named roughly a million times. (It's not entirely partisan, as well; keep in mind that just to force a vote on releasing the files, Thomas Massie, Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene all signed on, to give the bill 218 co-sponsors in the House; meanwhile, Adelita Grijalva was the 218th co-sponsor and she was not sworn in for seven weeks following her victory in a special election, with no apparent impediment to doing so, as I recall, as even though the government was shut down for much of that time, the shutdown only started a week after she won her seat, so she could have been sworn in then even if the shutdown precluded her being sworn in while it was ongoing.)
(7) I think Cuba is next even if this doesn't go well. The current blockade is crippling that country, and backing down would make Donald look weak.
(9) (I meant to include "Ninth" in my edit but forgot, point 8 is about Jesse Ventura saying silly things.) Keep in mind that a large part of the reason the confidence mechanism does not result in constant instability even in hung Parliaments (at least these days; Weimar Germany is another matter) is because, usually (especially in monarchies), bringing down the government also necessitates triggering a general election, putting at risk the political careers of everyone who just voted to turf out the government! (The proper functioning of a parliamentary system relies, in effect, on channelling the base self-interest of the politicians to produce stable governance. Whether it produces good governance likely depends on whether you happen to agree with the policies of the current government.) Arguably France's recent parade of Prime Ministers occurred in part because the Assemblée nationale did not have to risk re-election to defeat Macron's picks.
(I know you already covered electing the President, but Suriname's model would seem to me what you'd want if you're following the KISS principle.)
Forgive me, but the "a Trump supporter asked why raping children is wrong, therefore Trump supporters would not turn on him if it were definitively shown that he raped a child" is a classic example of nutpicking. I'm pretty sure that, for example, if we took a poll of NAMBLA members we would find *at least* one Democrat, and probably more. This would not, in fact, prove that Democrats as a whole are down with pederasty.
That isn't what I said. Some of Trump's supporters have turned on him just over his initial refusal to release the files. That's what turned the "QAnon Shaman" against him. I have no doubt he would lose much of his current support (already significantly diminished compared to November 2024) were proof such as a video of his raping a minor to come out. I also have no doubt that the view expressed by that caller in the transcribed conversation is not an entirely isolated case and so there is a segment of the population which would not turn on him over the matter.
As for something like NAMBLA membership cutting across ideological lines, that I don't doubt is true, but it's not relevant to what I said.
No, it's actually pretty relevant. That you brought that fellow in *at all* as a response to "We don't know exactly how this would play out" indicates that you're of the opinion that enough Trump supporters to be politically relevant would be okay with Trump being a pedophile because of some rando. This is, to put it mildly, libel based on nutpicking, as I pointed out.
Speaking of Cuba: https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/us-ramps-up-fuel-exports-to-cubas-private-sector-reuters/
In Cuba, both hotels and hospitals have generators to keep functioning in the event of blackouts. Of course, those generators themselves need fuel.
Many hotels in Cuba are privately owned; hospitals, on the other hand, are government-owned, as part of, I believe, a single-provider healthcare system.
One major effect of the US government policy described in the above article, permitting private businesses in Cuba to import fuel while government entities cannot, therefore, is to permit hotels to have power while hospitals cannot, allowing visitors to the island some degree of comfort while those needing medical care cannot receive it.
(There is reporting that many patients on ventilators have died as a result of the current US blockade which is denying fuel to hospitals so that they cannot run their generators, but I cannot confirm the extent of its veracity.)
James,
Let me begin with where we agree. I agree that our current war with Iran is unlawful under the Constitution and that it may also constitute a war crime as a war of aggression. I agree that the war in Iraq was as lawful as it was disastrous.
Where we disagree.
You fail to recognize that at least 500,000 human beings died from direct and indirect consequences of the war in Iraq.
2006 Lancet Study (655,000 estimate):
Full Title: Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey
URL: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1618872/
The 2013 PLOS Medicine Study (approx. 500,000 estimate):
Full Title: Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation
URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001533T
The suffering we caused by our invasion is orders of magnitude greater than the suffering caused by SH and his regime. So I do not believe that it is legitimate to argue that the war was justified on the basis of how it improved the lives of the Iraqi people.
I do not believe that there was ever any evidence offered by the Bush administration that an attack was likely in the near future. So while the war was lawful under our constitution, it was not under international law or the Charter of the United Nations. But of course, this was after the surprise attack on 9/11, so that might be a good excuse for jumping the gun.
You may not believe in international law, but that is the true origin of the first prosecution for a war of aggression against Nazi Germany's leadership at the Nuremberg trials. Chief U.S. Prosecutor (and Supreme Court Justice) Robert H. Jackson just declared it to be so and made it a fundamental principle of international criminal law.
I could be wrong (I frequently am) but I do not believe that there are any dots connecting Catholic theology to the development of this area of law under any treaty or convention. Nor was this principle accepted prior to the end of WWII. If anything, the horror of WWII alone was sufficient to bring about this watershed change in thinking.
One final thing. Two "men" might reach different conclusions?
I suggest you consider using "Reasonable people might disagree..."
It may not be a big thing to us old guys, but it is to our female pilots bombing Iran right now.
Despite the foregoing, I love the essay.
Your research and writing are superb.
You're the only one I spend so much time writing responses to.
Jon
PS
Look for Hammentaschen next week.
Purim was last Tuesday, so I am a little behind.
Another celebration of our victory over--this time the Persians--what a coincidence.
As the saying goes.
"They tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat."
Hey, Jon, thanks as always for the thoughts!
I thought the Lancet study was b.s. when it came out. I recall combing through it a bit and roasting it, but this was 20 years ago, before I had a blog, so I have no clear idea whether my thinking was justified (and no strong desire to revisit it).
But I also recall that the figure I had in reply to the Lancet study was that Saddam Hussein's regime had directly or indirectly brought about well over a million deaths. The war, too, would eventually end (and it did), but Saddam's dictatorship would have just kept killing (directly and indirectly) indefinitely, as he would hand the regime on to his sons. So, even taking the Lancet study at face value, we were still saving a lot of people on net, or thus was my view in about 2006. I remember yelling at my tenth grade Christian Morality teacher, who cited the Lancet study in class, that he wasn't comparing reality to the actual counterfactual where Saddam remained in power, but to a fantasy utopia where nothing bad happened in Iraq, although I don't think I put it as well as that.
(I never seriously engaged with the PLOS study, since by 2013 the war was over. But, FWIW, I thought its estimate of 405,000 excess deaths over 8 years *much* more initially plausible than the Lancet's 655,000 excess deaths over 3 years.)
It is, of course, certainly true that, when the war *started*, the idea that even 100,000 people could die was unthinkable to me -- unless Saddam used his WMD, which I fully believed he had.
As for international law, it was my view (and, as I understand it, the view of the U.S. government) that the 2003 Iraq War was not a new war at all (for international law purposes, anyway), but rather a continuation of the 1991 Persian Gulf War (which had international authorization) in order to enforce the terms of the broken cease-fire. Obviously, France didn't agree with the U.S.'s view on this! But I don't think that's an implausible position, and so I think it's fairly difficult to call the war illegal under what was considered international law at the time.
As I said, I don't have a great desire to relitigate the Iraq War, a painful error that I spent far, far too much debating while it was going on. I am, for the most part, happy to agree to disagree on any of these points, since it's all twenty years ago now. But I thought I owed my key Hammentaschen hookup at least a limited explanation for what the heck I was thinking! :)
I was under the impression that Congress had, at some point in the past few decades, given the Executive the power to perform war-like operations for 30 (or was it 90?) days without authorization from Congress.
At least, this is what Ben Shapiro keeps saying and I haven’t heard an opponent of this war argue otherwise, so I have tentatively believed him so far, since I haven’t had time to do my own research.
The fact that you haven’t talked about it either makes me wonder: is this such a big blind spot for opponents that even you (with whom I seem to share a bit of an obsession with representing the other side seriously and charitably) have missed it, or has Ben been lying about this?
Ben has been conflating political fait accompli with legality since 2017, but he usually uses couching language so it’s not hard to tell them apart if you pay attention. But I don’t recall him using couching language this time.
This is a common myth. It is possible Ben Shapiro believes it in good faith. I am not hostile to him (grateful, even for his criticisms of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson), but, if he is claiming what you say he is claiming, he is wrong.
The War Powers Resolution was an attempt to reign in the executive branch's war powers run amok. Congress basically wanted to pass a law saying, "Yes, the President has to come to Congress to get a declaration of war / AUMF before he can start a war."
However, Congress recognized that there would be times when the President is forced to respond to a direct "attack on the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces." (50 USC 1541) If Congress made no provision for these cases, then the War Powers Resolution would essentially tell the President that, even if our troops are under attack, the Soviets are paradropping troops into Kansas, the U.S. military is forbidden to respond in any way, even to return fire, until Congress has convened and passed a declaration of war. Most people think this restriction would have been unconstitutional, but, worse, everyone agrees it would have been crazy. When the enemy starts a surprise attack on our troops, the President must be able to order an immediate response.
So the War Powers Resolution carves out an exception *for that narrow class of situations*: if the U.S. is attacked, or if the President so much as deploys troops into a region where they're *likely* to be attacked, he can deploy troops, but he has to notify Congress. Congress must then affirmatively authorize the operation within 60 days, or the operation terminates. This structure was intended to allow the President to respond to attacks, while leaving Congress's joint, affirmative authorization in the driver's seat.
Now, Congress, at this point in history (the 1970s), did not trust the President the slightest bit to follow the spirit of the law, and rightly so, so they spelled out in exacting detail what situations trigger this reporting requirement (50 USC 1543). But they are also very clear that this new requirement a *constraint* on the President's existing limited powers under the Constitution, not an *authorization* to do anything he couldn't do before (50 USC 1541, 50 USC 1547) -- like unilaterally start a war with Iran.
Somehow, this 60-day limitation on defensive military operations memetically transformed into a 60-day blank check to bomb anyone, anywhere in the world, as long as you're in and out in 60 days. This is perfect nonsense, and I don't know where it came from, or when the idea took hold, but it is widely believed and it drives me up the wall that smart, prominent voices like Ben Shapiro are still spreading it. It's widespread enough that I probably should have included a section about it in the article. Someone I love innocently asked me about it last night and I literally started jumping up and down with outrage yelling, "The War Powers Resolution doesn't say that at all! You've been lied to!" I had to blush afterward, because I didn't know I felt quite that strongly about it until I was in midair. (And obviously not my interlocutor's fault at all.)
Claude Code and yt-dlp to the rescue! ChatGPT and regular Claude don't have access to YouTube transcripts—probably due to ToS issues—and Gemini 3 Pro (!) repeatedly hallucinated answers—get it together, Google!
I found the quote in Ben Shapiro's live show hours after the war started on Saturday, March 1:
31:26–32:19 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVl6qIBJ6os&t=1886s:
> And now there have been questions raised about the legality of this action. Let us be clear about military action. My favorite is when people start citing the war-making power of Congress under the Constitution. Cool beans, guys. You know, when the last actually declared war of the United States was? Like, full-scale declared war of the United States — it was World War II. That is not the way that war has been done in the United States for a very long time, because the opportunity is simply too quick. You got to move fast. And so there is something called the War Powers Resolution. It requires the executive branch to go justify its action before Congress within 60 days of military action beginning. If you think this operation is lasting two months, you're out of your mind. I would be absolutely shocked if there is ongoing this type — this level of military action happening two months from now. Listen, I'd be a little surprised if it's happening two weeks from now, to be honest with you, given the overwhelming air power of the United States.
1:22:40–1:23:08 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVl6qIBJ6os&t=4960s:
> And as far as the objections that it's illegal for President Trump to do this, America launches military strikes on a routine basis. If you are talking about the need for congressional authorization of war — just as a legal matter, again, putting on my constitutional law hat — this has not been done since World War II. We have a wide variety of uses that have been authorized for force by Congress. Also, even under the war powers resolution, the president has 60 days to get it together. This thing is going to be over long before 60 days.
I also had Claude Code search every Ben Shapiro full episode transcript since March 1 for any mention of the constitution, legal justification, congressional authorization, presidential power, or related terms in relation to Iran, using both exact and vector search (using gptme-rag). We couldn't find any other time when he repeated this legal justification, commented on it, or offered an alternative legal justification.
I must have hallucinated my impression that Ben "keeps" saying this across multiple shows; he did say it on two occasions separated by almost an hour of content, but within the same show episode. And not offering any additional response to repeated criticisms of illegality over the next few days does give the impression that this is his current analysis of the legal situation.
It sounds like Mr. Shapiro could do with a reminder that, just as Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the US Constitution remains in full force and effect, so too does a way of changing that clause if there is broad agreement that it no longer meets the needs of the society that governing document is meant to serve: Article V of the same.
(Maybe Mr. Shapiro would prefer a system wherein the executive can simply declare war and dare the legislature to force them to face the voters over the issue! If you dig a few steps deeper on that, though, you'll rapidly realize why countries with that model aren't facing either constant declarations of war or constant elections.)
Yeah, this is very common historical myth, so I don't see any reason to think Shapiro is being dishonest here, except that his reputation is that he's smarter than this. While it is technically true that Congress has not said, "I DECLARE WAR!" Michael Scott-style since World War II, Congress has repeatedly passed bills since that that authorize the use of military force, which is all a declaration of war is anyway.
I wonder why, in Shapiro's thinking, Bush spent all that time trying to get Congress on his side. Bush expected a six-week war, and thought he had one (hence the infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech).
"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions." (Robert Wilson Lynd)
The short decisive war has, of course, been a dream of American commanders for well over two centuries: “The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching; & will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next, & the final expulsion of England from the American continent.” (Thomas Jefferson)
Anyway, good job hunting it up, and thanks for doing so!
Is there a meta joke in here about the cunnilingus argument being preliminary to the main thrust of the blog post? Either way, I would have lost a bet on your getting from Point A to Point B.
This piece was really well thought out and well written, but I'm not certain I'm comfortable with it. If the US were an autarchy and our Great Leader could unilaterally declare war under the law, it'd be fine? Stamp "Just War" on the missiles, we're all good? Tell the bleeding children in the piles of rubble that it's okay, we're the good guys? (Obviously, contingent on the other criteria mentioned.) Maybe I'm just not comfortable with the idea of a just war on its face, but it feels like a legal/logical trick to say that if we had a worse form of government, but otherwise did everything the same, we'd be in the right.
I think the tradeoff is that, as you make it easier to declare war (meeting the "make your war legal" just war criterion), you also make it proportionally easier to start a war that fails one of the other criteria.
I am seeing now from a few of the comments that, in my insistence that evaluation by the competent authority is *necessary* for a just war, I gave the mistaken impression that I believe that this evaluation is *sufficient* for a just war. This line, in particular:
> Either way, though, the power to evaluate the just war criteria belongs to the competent authority exclusively.
...can very easily be read (maybe is *best* read?) as saying that a war that is objectively, say, futile suddenly becomes not-futile (or must be treated as not-futile) if the relevant officeholder decides to (dishonestly or stupidly) claim that it is.
However, I do not believe that. I see the just war criteria as a series of status lights. If all the lights are green, you might just have a just war on your hands, and one of those lights is "did competent authority approve all this?" But if competent authority approved it even though one of the other lights is red, then the war is still unjust.
There is an asymmetry here: you can conscientiously object to a war ratified by competent authority, but you can't go to war on your own recognizance if competent authority rejects an otherwise-just war. That asymmetry is there because war does tremendous evil, and things have to line up perfectly for it to be even remotely acceptable. Our Founding Fathers, recognizing that, put war in a locked box and handed the key to Congress. Other polities may not safeguard the war power so well, and they hurt their own people and others more frequently as a result.
Reflecting on this current moment and have some thoughts:
Regardless of the legality of war, this war in particular, wars in general...
Is our current system feasible?
If our current system is that every war (that is not immediate responses against military strikes on us) needs to be voted through Congress, does that system work in an age of mass communication, quick travel, and hyper-sonic missiles?
Congressional votes are immediate and transparent to every government across the globe in real time. There is massive incentive to sway these votes through threats and bribes. What if Iran saw we were holding a vote to go to war with it, and responded saying, "For every senator that votes to go to war, we will launch one missile at a boat in the strait of Hormuz?" Or engage in a mass shooting on US soil? It would really disincentivize the Senate from even holding a vote.
Even if nothing so dramatic happened. it still is a massive disadvantage for an adversary to see us declare war at the speed of corn growing.
If Iran saw that we were about to declare war, they would not have all been gathered in one place where they could be taken out all at once.
What's hardest for me to reconcile about recent events is that - from what I can tell - this is the optimal outcome, even if the process is incorrect.
We took out most of their leadership in a single day, killing the people most deserving of it, limiting the deaths of our own servicemen and innocent Iranians. I don't think this would have been on the table with a Congressionally-declared lawful war. If this is improper, is there another process you would accept that would keep a result like this in the realm of possibility? Maybe something for the amendment series.
From my understanding, Iran is our enemy that has been waging a low-tempo war against us for some time. They lob missiles at our bases in the region almost every year, injuring and sometimes killing our troops. They arm, train, and direct their militias in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, and Iraq to attack our allies in the region and shut down trading at sea. They created and supplied our enemies with some very inventive IEDs that killed and maimed thousands of our troops who were prosecuting our lawful war.
Do they pose an immanent threat to America? They were definitely trying to get there. Do we need to wait until after they can kill massive amounts of American civilians before their kicking us in the shins finally justifies a retaliatory strike? Or is a week before, a month before, a year before ok if you can see a clear trajectory and negotiation fails to dissuade them from turning from that path?
But that should be on Congress to decide, except Congress cannot decide it. We would lose Miami to a nuclear blaze before we get to the point of Congress agreeing on something. And after they do it will be a costly, expensive, long war because Iran will see us coming and they'll have nukes.
Proposal: Have the President petition every State Governor to send a delegate to a secret deliberative session where they all have access to top secret military briefings. The delegates make a majority decision on whether to go to war or not. The decision is not released to the public but the President acts on the decision at the most opportune time. The voting record is not released to the public but members of congress and judiciary can review it in SCIFs to confirm there was no deception.
"Congressional votes are immediate and transparent to every government across the globe in real time."
This seems like the hinge of your concern. The thinking is that Congress moves too slow and telegraphs its moves too much, so we will never get a surprise attack.
I think there are two good answers to that.
First, the U.S. military moved quite slow in this case, and telegraphed its moves. Trump told the Iranian protesters "help is on the way!", then immediately started moving U.S. military assets into position over the course of several weeks. Twitter was all over it. Donald Tusk of Poland urged all Polish citizens to leave Iran on Feb 19, over a week before we attacked. We could all see the U.S. tanker and fighter fleets swarming to the Middle East, which could only mean war: https://x.com/sentdefender/status/2023739116597236085
So did we get the element of surprise after all? I don't think we did. Everything Congress might have telegraphed was telegraphed just as effectively by the slow pace of global military logistics (which is, as you say, about the pace of corn growing). The Ayatollah knew we were likely to attack any time. We killed him anyway because our military is very, very good at killing.
Second, while Congress is slow and public, it doesn't necessarily *have* to be like that. The only thing that prevents Congress from passing a bill in 10 minutes (3 for the House, 4 to run it over to the Senate, 3 for the Senate to vote) is minority disagreement and minority procedural protections. Congress *could* go very quickly, if a sufficiently urgent need were there. It could even -- if the need was there -- privately arrange among themselves (perhaps in executive session) to enact a declaration of war at the very moment the U.S. launched its first attack.
Now, it is true that there would probably be a minority that would object to this. But that's the system working as designed. War requires national consensus. Sneaky-super-fast-war requires national superconsensus. If we don't have that, then we probably shouldn't go to war yet at all. We should instead do what we are always telling the gun-grabbers to do: get out, talk to your fellow citizens, persuade them. Even though you think it's an emergency, and even allowing that you could be right, you've got to get the people on your side to do things in a republic. That's perhaps the least reassuring part of my comment, because getting people on your side is hard and might mean we fail to act, but the alternative is what happened in Rome when Caesar Augustus came to power.
All that being said: I do not *hate* the idea of an amendment allowing Congress to declare war in secret, during executive session, if the need arises. We would lose a lot of the public debate, which is extremely valuable -- but I think we can rely on Congress to never use this power unless it was clearly necessary and extremely urgent. (Otherwise, the minority party would never agree to a secret declaration of war, and would probably leak it.)
I suspect Iran thought the military movements were a bluff to pressure the negotiations and that they could draw out the negotiation process indefinitely. They also did not expect the first attack to be in broad daylight. They had many of their top leaders meeting together above ground! I can't think of clearer evidence that they were not expecting an imminent attack, even if they should have been.
A lot of nations were surprised to see America act so decisively. After a declaration of war from Congress it would have been more inevitable.
What this suggests to me is that Congress should sometimes declare war as a bluff! :P
The 2002 AUMF against Iraq was sort of like that. It passed in October, but Congress was pretty clear that they still wanted to avoid an actual war. They hoped that the AUMF (effectively a declaration of war) would not lead to an actual war, but would force Iraq back to the negotiating table. Of course, if that failed, the AUMF was ALSO authorization for the President to kick off an actual war, and it did fail, so he did go to war... but it took five months!
If Mr. Trump had gone to Congress seeking an declaration along these lines, he could have preserved that ambiguity, kept the timeline open, used the AUMF as leverage, and then hit the Iranian leadership when they exposed their underbellies.
I do think the Iranians were verging on suicidal to have held that meeting when they did. Can't imagine doing that while the U.S. is closing a military net around my country.
I remember experiencing the Iraq war buildup in Germany. Everyone knew the WMD stuff was bullshit. Germans wandered about the extreme rally around the flag effect and American prestige media uncritically falling in line was a theme on our news. Later nobody was at all surprised when the WMDs weren't found. I mean its theoretically conceivable that we were delusional and then turned out to be right by accident but <Insert Skinner out of touch meme here>.
I think "right by accident" happens more often in politics than one would expect, because people are not adopting beliefs independently of one another, or rationally. We often instead adopt beliefs because they usefully support other beliefs to which we are already emotionally committed, and we do it alongside our communities. This often leads large swathes of the public to believe things that are only, say, 30% likely to be true. 70% of the time, of course, they're wrong. But 30% of the time, they're right!
For example, in 2023, my QAnon friend expressed high confidence that Joe Biden would be swapped out for Kamala Harris in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and explained that everyone who was following "the real news" knew this was "the plan." Poking around some QAnon communities, I found it was true that his whole community agreed about this.
I didn't deny the possibility, but considered it pretty unlikely. (I actually made some money on PredictIt that year betting that Joe Biden would win the nom.) Now, I turned out to be wrong and my QAnon friend was right, because Biden did drop out. But I really think my friend just got lucky. (It helps that he also made a bunch of predictions that were *not* borne out by events.)
I obviously wasn't in Germany in 2002. I don't know what was in German media. My understanding is that German media *hates* Republicans, always has, and has treated all their claims with extreme skepticism since I've been alive (while absolutely *glazing* certain Democrats), so "Bush is wrong about WMD" would have fit nicely with that, regardless of the underlying evidence base.
But that's as far as I'll speculate about German media. I myself, in 2002, was *very* prone to believing things because my tribe believed them and/or because they reinforced my reflexive pro-Bush stance, so I am not the best judge of how reasonable our respective beliefs about WMD were, given evidence at the time -- a dicey proposition even at the best of times! All I can say for sure is that, whatever the reasons, you guys were definitely right and I was definitely wrong.
Dubitum:
Whether it is possible for a soldier, even an officer, to justly engage in war when the top of the chain of command has acted in a manner that precludes the war itself from being a just war.
Additional Dubitum:
Whether it is moral to cheer for soldiers who are engaging in an unjust war which, if their commanders had initiated things slightly differently, might have been a just war...