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.
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