The New York Times editors miss the mark:
If Mr. Trump wants the United States to join the Israeli war against Iran, the next step is as clear: Congress must first authorize the use of military force.
It is true that the president cannot lawfully launch a war against Iran on his own, but the editorial ignores the legal reality that the U.S. has no right to attack Iran. It doesn’t matter whether Congress votes in favor of it or not. It would still be a gross breach of international law and the U.N. Charter.
Congress made a terrible mistake and passed a resolution authorizing the use of military force against Iraq in 2002. That didn’t make the ensuing invasion legal under international law. The U.S. had no legitimate cause for war in 2003, and it doesn’t have one today. There was no international mandate for using force against Iraq, and there is no mandate to use force against Iran now.
This goes to the heart of the matter. It is obvious that the U.S. would not be acting in self-defense by bombing targets inside Iran. If the U.S. did this, it would be taking part in an unprovoked assault on another sovereign state. The U.S. should not be committing acts of aggression against other countries.
The editorial refers to having a “vital debate,” but there really shouldn’t be anything to debate here. On one side, there are warmongers determined to plunge the U.S. and the region into hell, and on the other is the vast majority of the population that wants to have nothing to do with this conflict. It is a measure of how undemocratic and unaccountable our foreign policy debates are that there is any doubt as to which side should prevail.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
