There Are Illegalities and Illegalities

The recent attacks on Iran raise multiple concerns: strategic, political, and legal.  Curmie thinks the raids were stupid and sincerely hopes they’ll prove as disastrous for the Trump regime as they already have for the nation’s standing as a promoter of peace.  But what he really wants to talk about is that last item: were they legal?

There are two independent facets to that question.  The first is the one that’s been noised about by a good share of the left-leaning press: that Trump lacked Congressional approval and that the assault was therefore illegal.  Curmie thinks so, but there’s a little wiggle room.  It all boils down to what the War Powers Act actually was intended to do… and to what it says, which may be different things.  Neither Congress nor SCOTUS has seen fit to clarify the terms.

The obvious intent was to allow the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to respond to exigencies: imminent threats, that sort of thing.  The Trump administration can’t seem to get its story straight about what prompted this particular action, which is why Curmie is more than a little suspicious that these shenanigans aren’t entirely on the up-and-up.  Did we go along with this because Israel was going to do it, anyway, as Marco Rubio first argued?  Or was it something else, since he subsequently denied saying what he’s on tape saying?  Was it to stop Iran’s nuclear program, the one that was supposedly “obliterated” last year?  Or to respond to an Iranian threat that’s presumably been imminent for <checks notes> 47 years?  Curmie raises a skeptical eyebrow.

Whatever squishiness there might be in the wording of the War Powers Act, Curmie is pretty much convinced that yes, this was illegal.  The response from Trumpian apologists has been to accuse Democrats of hypocrisy because they were perfectly willing to allow President Obama to bomb Libya back in 2011, casually omitting the fact the two incidents are pretty much parallel: a POTUS of one party uses what may or may not be legitimate authority to execute a military mission, and the other party starts screaming about illegality, even unconstitutionality.  Are the Democrats being two-faced?  Of course they are!  Are the Republicans just as bad?  Yep.

But Curmie hears the GOP sycophants wondering “where was all this liberal concern for restricting the power of the presidency in such cases when Obama was in office?”  Right here, is where.  Here’s the central paragraph of what Curmie wrote 15 years ago:

The administration’s case, one which ignored the objections of Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and of Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, is founded on three independent premises, none of which stand up to much scrutiny. The first is that an offensive mission involving drone attacks, sustained bombing, and occasional casualties doesn’t really constitute “hostilities.” The second is that, despite the fact that participation in a NATO-run, UN-sanctioned, mission to protect civilians has morphed into an aggressive attack on Colonel Qaddafi’s compound, the military and geo-political missions have not merged. The third is the apparent assertion that since the mission has taken longer than expected (and that’s never happened before, right?), we should really only be looking at how long the campaign was supposed to last. Add to that the extreme rarity of any White House over-riding the opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel, and the Obama administration has a mess on its hands… or perhaps on its shoes, because they’ve really stepped in something.

Moving on to the second part of the critique of present-day hostilities.  Let’s talk about bombing that elementary school in Minab, killing scores of little girls aged 7-12, which according to the best information we have, was perpetrated by American forces.  This is about as clear a violation of international law, not to mention common decency, as it’s possible to imagine.  It is unmistakably a war crime.  Yes, Gentle Reader, mistakes happen: “fog of war” and all that.  Bullshit.  At best, this was a manifestation of breathtaking recklessness and incompetence.  At worst, it was such an intentional infliction of pain and suffering on young girls that you’d think it was ordered by one of those pervs whose name keeps appearing in the Epstein files.  Oh… wait…

What’s the excuse?  Why aren’t the so-called journalists asking how such an atrocity can happen?  Were we just lobbing bombs into populated areas with no regard for what or who might be on the receiving end?  Was the reported death of Ayatollah Khameini therefore just blind luck?  After all, if you can target a particular area to attack, you can similarly identify a different area not to attack.  Or did some idiot like Pete Hegseth decide to demonstrate his manliness by asserting his absolute authority over a bunch of elementary schoolers.  They might have been in math class, learning about Arabic numerals, after all.  Another explanation is that this was a “precise targeting”: the school building used to be an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base, you see.  Ya might wanna check that shit out next time...

When the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed by American forces in 1999, President Clinton apologized to the Chinese President Jiang Zemin promptly and profusely, claiming that the incident was accidental.  Given that there was no rational reason to attack the embassy, Clinton was probably telling the truth, even if the Chinese tried to spin the story to their geopolitical advantage.  There’s no reason to bomb an elementary school in Iran in 2026, either.  The difference between the events is two-fold.  First, Clinton, unlike Trump, was willing to admit to a mistake, and even to take responsibility for something that is extremely unlikely to have been under his direct control.  Secondly, whereas Bill Clinton is hardly an exemplar of truth-telling, his sanity has never been in question.

There are reports that Iran was negotiating with the US when the attacks occurred.  Perhaps that’s true; perhaps it’s leftie spin (or worse).  But there is no question that the logistics of the mission, from choosing targets to strategies for removing Americans from sites likely to be struck by the inevitable retaliation (“get on a commercial plane at your own expense at an airport that’s closed” isn’t terribly helpful advice), were an absolute disaster.  That’s what happens when you choose cabinet members based on sycophancy rather than relevant experience, intelligence, or… you know… competence.

We can hope that the Iranian people will soon be better off, that the military exercise will achieve its purported goal.  It’s not likely, given the history of other attempts at regime change, but it’s not impossible.  It is also possible that new evidence will emerge that will exonerate the US military, but there is something of the boy who cried “wolf” at play here.  What reasonably intelligent person would believe anything this administration says after its serial prevarications about ICE operations?  

Indeed, the two things that will linger in Curmie’s mind for a very long time indeed are the loss of any remaining remnant of American honor or integrity in international relations… and the nagging feeling that de facto Commander-in-Chief of the US military is Bibi Netanyahu.