“There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again.” 

— George W. Bush 

When Donald Trump attacked Iran on Saturday, the stated justifications were familiar: we had to act in order to protect ourselves, the ones we are bombing are actually the aggressor, we are facing a dangerous fanatical menace, et cetera. I first became politically aware during the Bush years, and upon reading this weekend’s headlines, I got a head-spinning case of déjà vu. In 2003, I remember being told that a Middle Eastern country was pursuing weapons of mass destruction, that it was a threat to us all, and that unless we acted now, the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud. This time is different, they said. This time the threat is really real, and there was no alternative but violence.

As Noam Chomsky and I document in The Myth of American Idealism, pro-war propaganda is always the same. The enemy is always an existential threat to our freedom, attacking them is always an urgent necessity, and diplomacy is for the weak and naive. The uncanny consistency of the lies does not mean that there are never real threats. But it does mean that we have to be deeply skeptical each time we are told we are facing a New Hitler. We must scrutinize the arguments to see if they hold up, and demand evidence for the claims used to justify the resort to force. 

The Trump administration’s justifications for the attacks on Iran were a mountain of bullshit. In fact, as my colleague Stephen Prager writes, they are in many ways lazier and less persuasive than the case made by the Bush administration. But unfortunately, justifications for Trump’s illegal, aggressive actions are being repeated even by liberals and centrists who are firmly anti-Trump. You can find pro-war op-eds in the New York Times and The Atlantic, and Van Jones told CNN that Iran is not a “normal country” and thus “progressives underestimate how dangerous Iran is.” 

It is always difficult to maintain clear thinking and a commitment to intellectual rigor in a time of war. But we must try. So let us remember a few key points. 

1. The Attack Was Illegal 

Immediately after the Second World War, the United Nations was established, in order to prevent future global slaughter and promote diplomatic solutions to conflict. The UN Charter prohibits states from attacking each other, and requires force to be approved by the UN Security Council. It is one of the foundational documents of international law. The United States and Iran were among the original signers of this charter in 1945—and while Israel would not exist for another three years, it too joined the UN shortly after its founding.

Let’s be clear: Iran did not attack the United States. Iran was not planning an attack on the United States. Iran does not even possess missiles that can reach the United States. It was a plain violation of international law, then, for the U.S. to bomb Iran, a sovereign country. It makes no difference what level they had been enriching uranium at. It doesn’t even make a difference if they were trying to build a nuclear bomb. You can’t attack a country that hasn’t attacked you. The violation of international law here is obvious. (NATO’s Secretary General has said the strikes don’t violate international law, but he has given no argument for how they can possibly be consistent with the UN Charter. He only insists that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons, which is not a legal argument.) 

I realize Donald Trump and his cronies could not care less about international law. They see it as a joke. The United States is bound by no law, they think. It should pursue its “national interest” regardless of the rest of the world, or what’s written on a little piece of paper —even if that piece of paper is the UN Charter. 

But even if Trump chooses to disregard international law, it still exists. Al Capone might have had contempt for the laws of his time, but he was still a criminal. If “not feeling like following the rules” were a valid defense, the Chicago mobster might have skipped Alcatraz all together. Those of us who want to see a peaceful world—one in which international law has teeth—should never succumb to the temptation to treat it as a joke or suggestion. We should take its violation very seriously.

Donald Trump also violated domestic American law. In fact, he violated the most fundamental law there is: the Constitution. Our founding document specifically grants the power to declare war on other countries to Congress, not the president. Trump defenders try to wriggle out of this inconvenient fact by claiming that presidents can attack countries as much as they like, so long as they never say the magic words “I declare war.” But this would render the entire provision meaningless. It’s very clear that Congress needs to approve the use of force against a sovereign country, which is why George Bush had to get the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed after 9/11, and why Lyndon Johnson had to secure the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in order to invade Vietnam. 

Florida Republican Greg Steube, responding to criticism of Trump, says that “as a lawyer” he can confirm “unequivocally” that there is an exception to the Constitution—unwritten in its text, of course—that the President can make war “to defend national interests and respond to imminent threats.” As a lawyer myself, I can reply that this is bullshit. Presumably the president always thinks their decision to use force is “defending national interests.” If that were the standard, then there would be no constraint on the president’s war-making power at all. They could just declare that whatever war they wanted to wage was a defense of national interests. Denmark refuses to hand Greenland over to Trump, preventing us from mining their rare minerals? Sure, he can order military strikes. 

What about imminent threats? Well, again, this is imagining a piece of text that isn’t actually written in the Constitution. As legal scholar Oona Hathaway explains, under the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution, “The only case in which the president is not required to seek the advance approval of Congress is when the United States has been attacked and he must act quickly to protect the country.” But in this instance, nobody has even claimed there was an “imminent threat” to the United States. Iran doesn’t have missiles that can reach the U.S., nor does it have a nuclear bomb, nor is it building a nuclear bomb. So even if we accepted the part of Rep. Steube’s standard that could even conceivably work (“imminent threats”), Trump’s conduct is unconstitutional. 

Now, the one argument you can make here is that other presidents, too, have treated both international and domestic law as mere suggestions and disregarded them at will. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that Trump’s bombing was illegal, Piers Morgan replied that “most military strikes ordered by U.S. presidents have been done without prior Congressional approval.” It’s true: Barack Obama attacked Libya without Congressional approval, for instance. But this is not an exoneration of Trump. It’s an indictment of Obama. U.S. presidents have been consistently lawless. Democrats have made Trump’s crimes easier by refusing to hold their own presidents to the letter of the law. But “this other person also violated the law and they got away with it” is simply not an effective argument in defense of criminality. 

The blatant criminality of Trump’s bombing of Iran should get him thrown out of office. Unfortunately, many Democrats actually agree with Trump (Chuck Schumer accused him of being soft on Iran!). They simply sidestep the legal question, and repeat the same mantra: Iran cannot be allowed to have nuclear weapons, with the implication that this is an argument for bombing Iran (it’s not, as we shall see).

In fact, it’s rather astonishing how anyone can discuss Trump’s attack on a sovereign country without mentioning the law. The New York Times decided to publish an op-ed from an Israeli pilot who bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981, making the case that Israel’s recent attack on Iran was equally legitimate. Unmentioned was the fact that that attack, too, was completely illegal, and was condemned at the time by the UN Security Council (including the United States!), which noted that Iraq had “the inalienable sovereign right… to establish programmes of technological and nuclear development,” and observed that Iraq was a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty while Israel was not. (The same is true with Iran today, which is also an NPT signatory and also has a right to have a peaceful nuclear program.) In this country, we are used to just discussing whether we or our allies should bomb this or that country, without any consideration of whether we are allowed to bomb them. We are the United States, so we do as we please.

2. There Was No Reason To Attack Iran

Even if one acknowledges that the attack on Iran was illegal, one could make the case that it was good—“illegal but legitimate,” to use the infamous phrase invoked to justify NATO’s illegal bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. The case made here is that Iran was building nuclear weapons, that it was a threat to the U.S., and that the threat had to be taken out with force, because there was no alternative. 

Every part of this is false. There is no evidence that Iran was building a nuclear weapon. Even Trump’s own intelligence officials have not claimed as much, and “the consensus view among U.S. intelligence agencies is that Iran hasn’t made a decision to move forward on building a bomb.” Iran appears to want to have the ability to build a bomb but without actually building one. 

In fact, even if Iran did build a nuclear bomb—which it was not doing—it would still not be a threat to the United States. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the most likely reason Iran would pursue a nuclear weapon is not because it wishes to commit suicide but because it wants the same nuclear deterrent that Israel has, in order to reduce the ability of the U.S. and Israel to threaten it: 

It would hardly be surprising if it were discovered that Iran has some kind of nuclear weapons program, perhaps contingency plans. The reasons were explained by one of Israel’s leading military historians, Martin van Creveld. He argued that Iran would be “crazy” if it were not developing a nuclear deterrent in its current predicament: with hostile forces of a violent superpower on two borders and a hostile regional power (Israel) brandishing hundreds of nuclear weapons, both calling loudly for “regime change.”

So: Iran was not building a bomb, and even if it was, it would not be a threat to the U.S. Nevertheless, one shouldn’t want Iran to have a nuclear bomb, because nuclear proliferation is dangerous. That brings us to the most central point: Bombing Iran makes Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons more, not less likely.

The absolutely crucial fact left out of all pro-war discourse is that Trump is the reason Iran is so close to the nuclear threshold. There was a deal in place, the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, under which Iran pledged never to pursue nuclear weapons and limited its uranium enrichment.  The agreement allowed inspections to certify its compliance. Iran was found to be in compliance, and maintaining uranium enrichment at the required levels. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis said, the deal was “doing what it was designed to do,” namely keep Iran from getting too close to having nuclear weapons.

Trump blew up the deal. He pulled the U.S. from the agreement in 2018, claiming it was a “bad deal,” and then Iran started violating its terms, because there wasn’t a deal to comply with any more. Iran started enriching uranium at levels much closer to that required to make nuclear weapons. It doesn’t appear that Iran was trying to build a bomb, but rather, trying to show that because it was no longer bound by the agreement, it would get closer in its abilities to make one. In other words: Trump fucked this up. He put us in this situation with his stupid termination of a deal that was working. He is a moron, plain and simple, who created the very situation he said he wanted to stop. The JCPOA was keeping Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons, and thanks to Trump’s blundering, Iran got closer to having nuclear weapons than it otherwise would have.

So to everyone repeating that “Iran cannot be allowed to have nuclear weapons,” there was an easy path to this: Trump shouldn’t have tanked the deal that was carefully negotiated to prevent that outcome—a deal that Iran was complying with. But there’s actually an even easier path. As my colleague Alex Skopic points out, the “elephant in the room” in discussions of the “Iranian nuclear threat” is the Israeli nuclear threat. Israel has a secret, undeclared nuclear weapons stash. Iran has made it clear that their preferred outcome is an agreement whereby both Israel and Iran agree not to have nuclear weapons, and the entire Middle East is turned into a nuclear-free zone. 

This would obviously be the ideal outcome, because nuclear weapons are a horror. But this simple solution is unmentionable in the United States. That means, however, that when we discuss Iranian nukes, we are not really discussing whether “Iran should be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.” If we wanted to avoid that outcome, we would simply discuss turning the Middle East into a nuclear weapon free zone, as Iran wants to do. Instead, we are discussing whether Iran, and only Iran, should be allowed to possess a nuclear deterrent given that hostile nuclear states, Israel and the United States, are threatening it with regime change. Those who justify the use of violent force are not saying that “there is no alternative” to striking Iran, if you really want it to remain nuke-free. They’re saying that there is no alternative if you want Iran to remain nuke-free while keeping Israel’s program intact. We could easily place Israel’s nuclear program on the bargaining table. But we’re not.

So war is totally unnecessary. It is only necessary under the assumption that we must protect Israel’s right to an illegal secret nuclear weapons program. If you do not share that assumption (and I do not), then there was no justification whatsoever for Trump’s strikes on Iran. I, too, believe that “Iran should never have a nuclear weapon.” That’s exactly why I accept Iran’s own proposal for ridding the whole region of nukes. The issue is whether we should avoid an Iranian nuclear weapon through violence or by turning the Middle East into a nuclear weapons free zone. That is the debate that should be had.

3. War Propaganda Never Changes

“Falsehood is a recognized and extremely useful weapon in warfare, and every country uses it quite deliberately to deceive its own people, to attract neutrals, and to mislead the enemy. The ignorant and innocent masses in each country are unaware at the time that they are being misled, and [only] when it is all over are the falsehoods discovered and exposed. As it is all past history and the desired effect has [already] been produced by the stories and statements, no one troubles to investigate the facts and establish the truth.”  

— Arthur Posonby, Falsehood in War-Time, 1929

Media critic Norman Solomon, author of the excellent books War Made Easy and War Made Invisible, has done a great job cataloguing common pro-war U.S. propaganda talking points. Among them are “This Guy Is a Modern-Day Hitler” and “They Are The Aggressors, Not Us.” As Solomon points out, it is remarkable how shameless war propaganda can be. David Frum of the Atlantic (who coined the propaganda term “axis of evil”) had the audacity to call our recent strikes on a sovereign country a “war launched by the rulers of Iran,” even though Iran plainly didn’t launch the war. 

I got a good training in how to see through this type of bullshit during the Bush years, when Frum was turning his talents towards exhorting us to wreck a different Middle Eastern country. But it’s sad to me how little we’ve learned. We still hear all the same fake compassion for the human rights of the people we’re bombing, despite the fact that anti-regime Iranians are undermined by the U.S. strikes, just as anti-Taliban Afghans were undermined by the U.S. war there in 2001. (If Iran’s oppression of women concerns you so much, what do you think of U.S. ally Saudi Arabia?) We hear the same evidence-free claims of an immediate threat. The same suggestion that while we are cool and deliberative, our enemies are homicidal fanatics for whom the logic of deterrence does not apply. 

I grow weary of this nonsense. And while, as of this writing, apparently a cease-fire is in place between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, I am certain that it is only a matter of time until the next flare-up of war propaganda, especially since the U.S. (predictably) did not actually destroy Iran’s nuclear program and will likely make Iran even more determined to pursue it. Then, another indefensible, illegal, civilian-massacring bombing will be justified by those who pretend to be motivated by eliminating threats, while in fact creating those threats themselves through their bellicosity and imbecility.