Under Donald Trump, Congress moved swiftly to block a president from starting a war with Iran. As Joe Biden allows the country to be dragged into such a war, criticism is nearly nonexistent.
Joe Biden meets with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office, July 2024. (Samuel Corum / Sipa / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Democratic politics at the start of this century revolved around opposition to a Republican president’s claim to the king-like power of unilaterally entering wars, including with Iran. A little more than two decades later, it’s a Democratic president who now seems to be unilaterally bringing the country toward a war with that same country.
Somewhat lost in the madness of the election news cycle and the daily horrors of Israel’s rampage through the Middle East is that President Joe Biden is, with no legal authority and without even bothering to consult Congress, taking steps that are bringing us closer and closer to a disastrous US-Iran war.
This week, his administration announced it is putting boots on the ground in Israel, one hundred troops to man a missile defense system to protect Israel from a likely retaliatory attack from Iran. If that attack happens and any of those US servicemembers are killed as a result, you can expect a stadium’s worth of calls for the United States to attack Iran, which Biden and his vice president will have to somehow resist.
Not only is Biden risking war and putting American lives in harm’s way with this unilateral move; perhaps worse, he’s doing it entirely to bail Israel out of its own stupidity and recklessness.
The reason why Israel is even facing this threat is because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has wanted the United States to fight Iran for decades and has realized perpetual war is his ticket to staying in power, has repeatedly launched attacks on Iran that he knows will provoke it into hitting back. Making this worse is Israeli leadership’s insistence on always having the last word in these tit-for-tat exchanges, even when it’s the one that started it. Which is where we are now, with Israel currently planning to retaliate against what was, in the first place, an Iranian retaliation against an Israeli attack launched three months ago.
As part of helping with these suicidal efforts, the Biden administration has been advising Israel on how to carry out this next attack on Iran. It has reportedly even offered to give US intelligence for the strikes and to carry out its own air strikes inside Iran and on Iranian targets to help it out.
You read that right: according to NBC News’s reporting, the president is not just moving US troops into harm’s way and risking war — he also casually floated attacking a foreign country with absolutely no legal justification.
Biden’s actions are already raising legal objections.
“They’ve been sent there, I think, with no clear consultation with Congress, with no clear legal justification,” former US Army major Harrison Mann said about the news of US troops being deployed in Israel, reminding the public that the White House “either need[s] an authorization from Congress, or there needs to be some urgent and imminent self-defense threat” to justify what they’re doing.
Mann summed up the absurdity of the situation by noting that, “in this case, the supposed self-defense threat is an Iranian missile attack. But the irony here is the Iranian missile attack is only going to happen if we help Israel strike Iran first.”
Where is the Democratic outrage as a Democratic president not only makes the US government party to a far-right genocide in the Middle East but toys with embroiling the country in a war with Iran?
“Nothing in current law authorizes the United States to conduct offensive military action against Iran,” read an October 13 statement from a group of progressive lawmakers. “We risk becoming entangled in another catastrophic war that will inevitably harm innocent civilians and may cost billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.”
But in truth, these are outliers. For the most part, all of Biden’s lawless actions have been met with little challenge in the media and absolutely no concrete, legislative pushback in Washington — including, as I found when I contacted them, from many of the lawmakers who led on passing several War Powers Resolutions (WPR) under Donald Trump.
When Unilateral War-Making Mattered
Passed into law to prevent the likes of Richard Nixon’s secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia from happening again, the WPR was left sitting dormant by Congress for decades — until Trump came along. Suddenly, the WPR and the president’s legal war-making authority were hot topics.
When Trump fired missiles at Syria with absolutely no legal basis in 2017, he predictably got a lot of praise from a war-loving Washington, but also a surprising amount of pushback. Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress criticized the strikes and their lack of legal authorization, while then House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi demanded that Congress meet to debate Trump’s decision to potentially endanger US troops. Liberal-leaning outlets like CNN and the New York Times suggested Trump’s legal reasoning was dubious, if not outright false.
Things kicked up another notch with Trump’s escalating verbal threats against North Korea, which brought up the very real threat of a nuclear war breaking out. One Republican senator, Jim Risch, raised the alarm about Trump’s seriousness about starting war with the country, while another, Senator Bob Corker, talked about passing legislation that would stop Trump from launching a first nuclear strike, which two Democratic members of Congress eventually introduced.
Everyone from the American Civil Liberties Union and the International Institute for Strategic Studies to the Washington Post and the Atlantic reminded us that presidents could not decide on their own to take the country to war, and that Congress could step in to restrain what seemed like an increasingly unhinged leader.
It arguably reached its climax with Saudi Arabia’s US-supplied war on Yemen, which Trump had inherited from Barack Obama but escalated by increasing arms sales to the Saudi government and deepening US support for the Saudi-led campaign, even weighing direct involvement. The sheer human carnage of the war — which by late 2018 was estimated to have killed fifty-six thousand people (civilians and combatants) in combat and led to the deaths of eighty-five thousand children under five years old from malnutrition — resulted in a growing public outcry against US support and, in turn, congressional action to end it.
A bipartisan, cross-ideological coalition of congresspeople — independent Bernie Sanders, Republican Mike Lee, and Democrat Chris Murphy in the Senate and Democrat Ro Khanna and a host of bipartisan cosponsors in the House — began pushing a War Powers Resolution to that end, ignoring the Trump administration’s “certification” of the Saudi-led coalition’s nonexistent efforts to limit civilian casualties. In a historic first, the measure passed both chambers of Congress after more than a year of trying, largely supported by Democrats.
Though Trump vetoed it, the move by Congress pushed the Trump administration to pressure the Saudi government to put an end to the war. Even unrepentant warmongers like Senator Lindsey Graham turned against it, and the move helped lay the groundwork for the eventual, imperfect cease-fire that has reigned for the past few years.
But that wasn’t the last of it. Having finally reasserted its war-making authority with the Yemen WPR, Congress then acted swiftly to stop Trump from taking the country over the edge into war with Iran.
When Trump recklessly very nearly started a war with Iran in early 2020, unilaterally sending troops to Kuwait and tweeting that he might “quickly & fully strike back, & perhaps in a disproportionate manner,” Congress sprang into action. Senator Tim Kaine introduced his WPR within hours of Trump’s January 3 assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, while Sanders and a number of progressives introduced their own No War Against Iran Act.
Pelosi, as House Speaker, warned that “members of Congress have serious, urgent concerns about the administration’s decision to engage in hostilities against Iran and about its lack of strategy moving forward.” Within a week of Soleimani’s killing, the House was set to vote. Once again, both chambers, even the Republican-controlled Senate, voted to preemptively restrain Trump from dragging the United States into another war, this time against Iran.
“The resolution just says no war with Iran, unless you come and make that case to Congress,” Kaine said when the measure passed the Senate. “But if we’re not even willing to have that discussion, we shouldn’t be forcing people to risk their lives,” he added, pointing out that avoiding such a war would be consistent with what Trump had promised the public.
“We need congressional authorization. We’ve been lied to by the Pentagon for years regarding a war that has gone on two decades. That’s long enough. . . . We don’t want any more wars without the people’s elected representatives being able to debate,” said Senator Lee, who also voted for the measure.
Pelosi, meanwhile, affirmed that whether or not Trump eventually vetoed the measure, which he did, his signature on the bill was irrelevant because “this is a statement of the Congress of the United States.”
Perverse and Absurd
All of which brings up the obvious question: Where is any of this outrage and energy now, especially on the Democratic side, as a different president not only makes the US government party to a far-right genocide in the Middle East but toys with embroiling the country in a war with Iran?
Jacobin put the question to those members of Congress who led on previous efforts to restrain Trump, including Senators Sanders, Mike Lee, Kaine, and Murphy and Representatives Khanna, Pelosi, and Barbara Lee. We received no reply, though Representative Lee’s office did point to the October 13 statement from progressive lawmakers and to a tweet two days earlier from the congresswoman in which she pointed out that “Congress hasn’t approved” a war with Iran and urged the White House “to seek diplomacy and dialogue” instead.
In other words, more than a week after we found out the president was weighing up US air strikes on Iran, and days after he announced a unilateral troop deployment that could trigger war with Iran, there are no plans in motion from some of Congress’s leading antiwar voices to even introduce a WPR, as they did mere hours and days after Trump’s unilateral moves against Iran. As this compilation of Democratic statements about Trump’s actions from 2020 shows, even the rhetorical criticisms are far fewer and more muted.
And that’s not even to mention a WPR to halt the now more than yearlong abomination in Gaza being directly fueled by the president (though Sanders has announced plans to introduce a bill banning the sale of offensive weapons to Israel when Congress returns).
But it’s not just elected officials who are missing in action here. The lack of legal authorization for Biden’s actions, let alone specific talk of a WPR, is completely absent from media coverage outside of outlets like Democracy Now! and the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft. Law professors aren’t coming out of the woodwork to tell us Biden is acting outside of his legal bounds. Reporters don’t even bother to raise the issue in briefings with officials.
It is an unhealthy and perverse state of affairs that the US Congress is only willing to block a president unilaterally dragging the country into war when it has elected a far-right authoritarian. It’s an alarming omen for the state of US democracy and the country’s liberal institutions. Depending on how the next few weeks play out, it may well earn a damning verdict from history.