Trump’s War on Iran Makes a Mockery of American Democracy
Iran poses no remotely plausible threat to the United States, the Constitution prohibits presidents from going to war without congressional approval, and only 21% of Americans support Donald Trump’s attack on the country. He doesn’t care about any of that.
The primary victims of the war on Iran will be the Iranian people, as well as the populations of the other countries where fighting has already spread to. But this war will also be very bad news for the American working class. (Amir Kholousi / ISNA / AFP via Getty Images)
Late Friday night, Donald Trump announced the beginning of an open-ended war in Iran. In his rambling eight-minute speech, he rattled off a list of real and alleged Iranian crimes going back to the hostage crisis in 1979. He made very little effort, though, to make a case that the country posed such an imminent threat to the United States in 2026 that going to war was his only option. If anything, as Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic put it, the war seems so manifestly unnecessary that “even the man waging it doesn’t seem to know why he launched it.”
A week earlier, his ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, sat down for an interview with right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson. I’ve never said a kind word about Carlson before, and I don’t intend to start now, but the interview included a remarkable exchange about public opinion.
Carlson: What percentage of Americans support a war with Iran?
Huckabee: I don’t know. Do you know?
Carlson: I do. I saw the numbers yesterday. I think it was around 21 percent.
Huckabee: Okay.
Carlson: Is that enough to have a war with Iran?
Huckabee: We don’t live in a world where you have a poll taken to find out whether our police should take a particular direction.
This is a level of open indifference to the views of the population that you might expect from an eighteenth-century diplomat working for France’s prerevolutionary ancien régime. Does the overwhelming majority of the public disagree with the king’s decisions? Well, what of it? It’s not up to them!
In the lead-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, he and his administration spent several months working hard to manufacture the consent of the public. In Bush’s State of the Union address, delivered two months before the war began, he devoted dozens of paragraphs to claims that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) that he might share with al-Qaeda. His vice president, Dick Cheney, darkly warned that if Americans waited for a “smoking gun” of hard evidence about Iraq’s WMDs, the “smoking gun” might be a “mushroom cloud” over an American city.
The month before the invasion started, Bush’s secretary of state, Colin Powell, widely perceived as one of the most credible moderates within the administration, gave a speech to the United Nations Security Council laying out the case for war. Powell waved around a vial of anthrax and shared intercepted recordings from Iraqi truck drivers talking about “special trucks” that Powell assured his viewers were references to a mobile chemical weapons lab.
The whole thing was a tissue of lies. But what stands out in contrast to the war Trump just started in Iran is that the Trump administration doesn’t seem to care about manufacturing consent. Trump, Huckabee, and the rest of the gang simply don’t think the consent of the public is relevant.
Last week, Trump delivered the longest State of the Union address in American history. The transcript runs to ten thousand words. It only has two paragraphs about Iran. Three days before launching a regime change war in a country four times the size of Iraq, and with vastly greater capacity to defend itself than Iraq had in 2003, Iran seemed to be the last thing on the president’s mind.
Not only has the administration not been campaigning to drum up public approval in these last months, but they can’t bother to get their story straight. When Trump bombed Iran last year, the administration claimed that the operation had “completely” destroyed Iran’s nuclear program and set back any prospect for Iran developing the bomb for a generation. When Trump announced a war with hopelessly vague goals, a war that started with the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, the best he could do was vaguely gesture at the idea that Iran was trying to restart developing the program. But somehow, this is supposed to be a threat so grave, so urgent, that the war had to be launched right now, as negotiations between the United States and Iran were ongoing.
Trump has put great emphasis on the claim, as he said in the brief detour on Iran in his State of the Union address, that Iran has “already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.” But anyone whose memory extends all the way back to 2025 will remember that the Iranian leadership is so cautious that, even after Trump’s last surprise bombing, it contented itself with a largely symbolic retaliation, firing a few missiles at a US base in Qatar and warning Qatar in advance to ensure that they didn’t do enough damage to risk serious escalation. We’re supposed to believe that the same regime is so desperate to commit national suicide that it would have fired intercontinental ballistic missiles at the United States the moment they developed them?
Little wonder that only 21 percent of the public — in other words, only about two-thirds even of the hardcore MAGA base that can normally be counted on to back any decision the president makes — wanted a war with Iran. But the president simply doesn’t care.
In 2002, Congress voted to authorize the use of military force in Iraq. Many Democrats were haunted by their votes for the war for many years to come. This time, Trump hasn’t bothered to ask for Congress’s approval. The Constitution specifies that presidents can’t go to war without congressional authorization, but Trump’s attitude here, as it is on so many topics, seems to be, “Who’s going to stop me?”
War and Democracy
In the first day of fighting, more than a hundred and fifty young girls were slaughtered when a missile hit a school. An image of a backpack splattered in blood widely circulated on social media. In the fog of war, competing claims circulated back and forth about whose missile it was. The United States? Israel, which joined in the attack? Iran itself, accidentally hitting the school while attempting to fire back at the attackers? Current evidence points toward the US. But whatever the truth turns out to be, one thing that’s not in doubt is that incidents like that will happen over and over again if the war drags on.
The war’s primary victims will be the Iranian people, as well as the populations of the other countries where fighting has already spread to. But this war, like all the other stupid wars like it in the past, will be very bad news for the American working class.
Trump said in his speech on Friday night that we should be prepared to see “American heroes” dying in Iran. What he didn’t say, and didn’t have to say, is that we all know perfectly well who those “American heroes” will be.
War reveals the scope and savagery of a society’s inequalities in ways that very little else does. In countries that are being bombed, the rich are far more able to withdraw themselves to safe locations while the poor are left to die. In countries that send soldiers to fight overseas, the bodies coming home in the flag-draped coffins are always the children of the working class. And Trump couldn’t even be bothered with a propaganda campaign to convince them that their sacrifice was necessary.
Launching a war of aggression against a country that poses no remotely realistic threat to the United States would be outrageous even if only 21 percent of the public was against it. But what Trump is doing in Iran is even worse than that, because the obscenity of the war itself is compounded by Trump’s deep contempt for democracy.
On Saturday, Trump announced that the operation would continue “throughout the week, or as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” In other words, the fighting and the killing and the potential sacrifice of “American heroes” will last for however long he likes.
The rest of us won’t be consulted.