Thoughts on the Iran war
The Constitution explicitly gives warmaking authority to Congress, not the Executive Branch.
When President Trump started bombing Iran, my immediate reaction was opposition. After all, while I did not vote for Trump, one of the things I found most attractive about his policy agenda is his reflexive opposition to new wars.
With that said, there is obviously a strong case to be made for taking out Iran's nuclear program. Iran is a regime of Muslim terrorists - the exact same people who viciously murdered over 1 million people in the Armenian Genocide, viciously raping Armenian women and girls. Iran funded and supported the horrific October 7 massacre of Jews, where thousands were mercilessly slaughtered and both women and girls were violently raped, sexually mutilated and gang raped. (There is a strong current of pedophilia in radical Islam.) We cannot allow a pedophile terrorist regime to have access to a nuclear bomb to either blackmail the world or incinerate millions.
However, whatever the intelligence may have said about the imminence of the threat from the terrorist regime President Trump had in February 2026, he had eight months to make the case to Congress and the American people about the need to strike Iran's nuclear program between the June 2025 strikes and the February 2026 resumption of strikes. Whatever one might say about the realities of modern warfare, the Constitution explicitly gives warmaking authority to Congress, not the Executive Branch. The rule of law mandates that Congress retain its proper authority.
Obviously President Trump is right that European powers should step up and force the terrorist regime in Iran to stop blocking shipments of oil in the Persian Gulf. Iran is directly attacking the economy of the free world, and this is not the first time they have done this. Iran pulled the same stunt in the 1980's when they weaponized the Strait of Hormuz to hold the global economy hostage. President Reagan reacted strongly against this terrorist act, and Iran presents an even greater threat today because of things like drones. This has been a constant threat for 40 years and our European allies have more of an economic and national security interest in protecting the free flow of oil than we do.
Interestingly enough, self-proclaimed "MAGA Republicans" more strongly support the Iran strikes than traditional Republicans. Some of this is the force of personal support of President Trump, but the strikes on Iran do fit within an "America First" foreign policy, protecting America's economic and national security interests over the objections of even our NATO allies.
When Pope Leo claimed that God does not answer the prayers of those who wage war, he contradicted Holy Scripture. The Bible is filled with examples of God's people waging war, and God did answer the prayers of King David and his descendants, as well as the children of Israel as they took the promised land. We do not worship a different God today that we did before Jesus Christ was born. Christian just war theology has always allowed for war in the case of self-defense, and preventing a pedophile terrorist regime from having access to nuclear weapons certainly qualifies as self-defense.
Still, President Trump should have spent the intervening eight months working with Congress to get an authorization to use force, and one need not divulge explicit war plans to members of Congress who could "leak" sensitive military data to the Iranian regime. It is not like Iran did not know that more airstrikes could be coming, even with a debate in Congress. While the Iran strikes are justifiable on policy grounds, Congress should have been given the opportunity to vote. Members of Congress from both parties need to re-assert their own authority. Republicans should realize that eventually we will likely have a Democrat as President again, and we do not want to give that President expanded powers not enumerated in the Constitution.