The Sweet, Pure Draft

That it all began in 1979 is the most Boomer assumption ever. But the slightly younger Michael Gove shows increasing and welcome signs of having become a neocon who had been mugged by reality. The word for that should be coined in The Spectator, where Tim Shipman informs us that the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, had helped the United States to “frame their request” to use British bases to bomb Iran. How is that Knighton’s job? How is it even compatible with his job? His only medals are Jubilee ones, the Coronation one, and the Long Service and Good Conduct Medal, while there are no wings among his braids. In 38 years, his only combat tour has been as an engineering support officer in Italy during the Kosovo War. To have risen to his present eminence, appointed in the end by Keir Starmer of all Prime Ministers, he is obviously a spook, and thus steeped in the Five Eyes culture of being fed scraps by the Americans while yelping our gratitude at having been fed at all. As for the BBC, more people might be prepared to pay for it if it did not think that having a supporter of this war and a supporter of a harder war amounted to balance. It should learn from Fox News, where Senator Rand Paul writes:

Once war begins and American soldiers are under fire, a rational discussion of the pros and cons of war becomes nearly impossible. That is exactly why our Founders wrote a Constitution that demands a debate before the initiation of war.

But there was no debate in Congress, let alone a vote. On Feb. 28, Americans awoke to discover that their country was once again embroiled in a war in the Middle East.

Americans were not asked if they would bear the burdens of war. Instead, the American people were told, through a presidential eight-minute video posted around 2:30 in the morning, that the country was, once again, at war.

And because there was no national discussion about going to war, we do not know whether ground troops will be used. We have no idea how long the war will last. We have no idea who will lead Iran after the death of the supreme leader. And we have no idea how many casualties the American people are supposed to tolerate. We cannot know the answer to these questions because no one bothered to make the case that war with Iran was worth the sacrifice.

The Senate is only now debating whether hostilities should end after they’ve already begun. Before I discuss the merits of this war, I want to say that my prayers, and those of my family, are with the troops in the region, those in combat and anyone who may be called to serve.

I do not take lightly that combat has begun, that many have been severely injured, and that lives have been lost.

A debate and a vote in Congress provide the nation with the only opportunity to discuss whether the country understands and accepts the inevitable sacrifices of war, especially the loss of life.

It is because of those realities of war that the Constitution grants the power to declare war to the United States Congress — not one individual sitting in the Oval Office. Giving Congress the power to declare war was meant to prevent one person from committing the nation to war. When the nation goes to war, it should be a collective decision, with a clear rationale for war articulated. More importantly, a debate and a vote in Congress provide the nation with the only opportunity to discuss whether the country understands and accepts the inevitable sacrifices of war, especially the loss of life.

The people have been robbed of a public debate. Let me inform the public that this evasion is intentional.

The congressional leadership — resigned to their own irrelevance — will gladly hand the president the power to initiate war in exchange for plausible deniability. Congressional leaders want to make the case to voters that they are not to be held accountable at the ballot box because they played no role in the decision to go to war. That is not statesmanship. That is shameful.

This country is now at war, which has already cost the lives of six American service members, and many more are severely wounded. Those soldiers and their families deserved a public debate and a vote in Congress before the initiation of hostilities.

But had Congress debated war with Iran, we would have been wise to recall the words of John Quincy Adams, who, as secretary of state, advocated a foreign policy of restraint: "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled," Adams argued, "there will America’s heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy."

There is wisdom in Adams’ words, but his was not an original argument. It was George Washington himself who warned in his Farewell Address that America should stay out of the world’s endless conflicts.

Congress has tragically forgotten this advice. The history of the 21st century has been one of endless wars in which America perpetually searches for the next monster to destroy. From Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Syria to Venezuela, advocates for war tell us a country is a threat and that toppling a foreign government is a noble quest to protect security at home while spreading freedom globally.

While they have recycled their arguments — when they bother to make them — the results are always instability, chaos, suffering and resentment.

The Iraq War was launched under similar false pretenses, and the consequences of that fateful decision still reverberate throughout the Middle East to this day. The overthrow of Iraq’s secular government and the collapse of its civil society spurred some of the worst sectarian violence in modern history and directly led to the rise of ISIS.

More than a decade since the U.S. military intervention that toppled Muammar Qadhafi, and a year after the fall of Assad, these divided, unstable countries struggle to escape the cycle of violence and chaos.

And although Nicolás Maduro may have been removed from power by American military forces, the socialist and oppressive Chavista regime has not been removed from the Venezuelan government.

Most tragically, after two decades of war, the Taliban flag flies over Kabul.

America’s adventures have not produced the promised utopias — or even Jeffersonian democracies. 

History is replete with examples of wars that quickly escalate beyond their initiators’ intent. While some may think we maintain escalation dominance, the spiral of violence can rapidly get out of control.

America is at war. But Americans don’t want this war. They didn’t vote for it. In fact, they voted for just the opposite.

Beyond the documents and words of our Founders, that is why their intention to grant the power only to Congress is so important today.

If the president came to Congress to ask for authorization for war, the people’s representatives could do what they were elected to do: represent them.

Debate provides information and answers we do not now have.

The constitutional separation of war powers is not just some notion that belongs in our history books. It’s a vital part of a democratic republic. This Congress should be ashamed of how it has allowed this unilateral march to war.

No others in our history have been this cavalier with our military men and women and tax dollars as they are at this moment.

I urge my colleagues to join me in opposing both this war and the unilateral actions taken without congressional authorization, as the Constitution commands.

Justin Logan writes:

Baby Boomers should be remembered in domestic terms for enervating the U.S. economy with Total Boomer Luxury Communism. That generation vacuumed up current and future revenues to fund their luxe retirements, while young people struggle to find good jobs and homes while staring down a desolate future of debt and constraints.

President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is very much a Boomer foreign policy, and in a similar sense. The second Trump administration has lit small fires across the world and let them burn, while accruing the costs of putting them out well into the future.

It could be seen early with Venezuela. In September 2025, Trump began bombing Venezuelan small boats, first on the basis that they were to blame for the fentanyl crisis; this policy morphed into a larger campaign having to do with cocaine and the Maduro regime itself. Perhaps remembering his own rhetoric about regime-change wars, Trump had Gen. Dan Caine draw up a tactically excellent plan to snatch Nicolas Maduro and his wife and bring them back to the United States on drug charges.

This approach satisfied no one, but even so, the costs were low. The Miami crowd was upset Trump stopped short of installing Maria Corina Machado, going so far as to claim she “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country” to govern, despite her stand-in candidate having won in a landslide in 2024 after she was banned from running. For their part, the America Firsters were upset because the mission seemed like a Boomerish lark—an ’80s movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger taking on some moustachioed Latin dictator—that had little to do with how we live at home.

But Trump wriggled out of this by punting. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced there would be three phases to follow: stabilization, recovery, and transition. This of course raised the question why Maduro’s former vice president and successor Delcy Rodriguez would help the United States move from phase two to phase three. She seems far more likely to pocket the gains from stabilization and recovery and put roadblocks in the way of transition.

But the costs of this policy resurfaced faster than Trump hoped. In a twist that should have surprised no one, Machado announced days ago that she would be returning to Venezuela in the coming weeks. The likely response of Rodriguez and former Maduro henchmen Diosdado Cabello and Vladimir Padrino should also surprise no one—they are going to seek to imprison her or worse. Then Rubio and Trump will be left with a decision: Do they let the regime in Caracas do with her what they will, or do they try to fight her into power? The costs of their January policy seemed so far away, but somehow they resurfaced within months.

Similarly with Iran. The president’s most profound foreign policy instinct is casualty-aversion. This is a noble and sensible sentiment. It also recommends a restrained foreign policy. Given that big foreign policy goals often incur a large butcher’s bill, those unwilling to incur big costs should avoid big foreign policies.

Not so with Trump. In Iran, the president has married grandiose ends to limited means. Perhaps knowing that the nuclear and ballistic missile arguments were duds, Trump threw a bit more spaghetti at the wall. Though he was at pains not to use the dreaded term “regime change,” Trump announced that “all I want is freedom for the [Iranian] people.” But freedom for the Iranian people is not going to arrive on the back of a Tomahawk.

That appears in The American Conservative, and my old editor on that magazine’s PostRight blog, Freddy Gray writes:

When President George W. Bush invaded Mesopotamia in 2003, everybody laughed at Comical Ali, the bespectacled Iraqi information minister who kept insisting that the American ‘rats’ were doomed as Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed around him.

The world moved on. Iran is not Iraq, as President Donald Trump’s supporters are so fond of saying, and Bush-era ‘forever wars’ are no more. Plus, these days the comedy communications come from the American Commander-in-Chief.

At the weekend, as missiles rained across the Middle East, Trump’s cabinet officials mostly avoided attention-grabbing interviews. The boss, however, embarked on his own heroic PR campaign. Taking questions from just about any reporter who happened to call, he launched a devastating series of pre-emptive strikes against any media narrative that threatened to make sense.

After the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei, intelligence sources intimated that the US had been cultivating a senior insider to take over the dictatorship, à la Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela. But Comical Donnie promptly informed ABC that the attack on Tehran’s leadership compound had been ‘so successful it knocked out most of candidates… It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.’

Operation Epic Fury could go on for four to five weeks, he said. The mission was ‘ahead of schedule’, yet might go on ‘far longer’. Timelines are for losers. ‘Wars can be fought “forever”,’ Trump promised on social media in the early hours of Tuesday. ‘I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,’ he told the New York Post.

Team Trump usually delights in the President’s ability to set the media’s hair on fire. By Monday, however, after three US fighter jets were shot down in a friendly fire incident over Kuwait, it wasn’t just pompous liberals or conservative ‘panicans’ suffering narrative whiplash. Deep in the belly of Trumpworld, loud grumblings could be heard.

‘Off the record, there is no plan,’ said one former Trump official, during a Pentagon briefing presented by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. ‘They’re all completely freaking out,’ added another source who is close to the administration. ‘This could easily lead to nuclear war. Soon.’

America First insiders who oppose the Iran strikes know who they blame most: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. ‘Bibi forced [Trump] to do it,’ says the same source. ‘He didn’t want to at all.’

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the MAGA darling turned critic of Trump, declared: ‘We are no longer a nation divided by left and right, we are now a nation divided by those who want to fight wars for Israel and those who just want peace and to be able to afford their bills and health insurance.’

Trump’s war allies are quick to dismiss ‘MTG’ and others as anti-Semitic cranks. On Fox News on Monday evening, Netanyahu laughed off the suggestion that he had ‘dragged’ the US President into a conflict: ‘That’s ridiculous. Donald Trump is the strongest leader in the world.’ The next day Trump said: ‘If anything I might have forced Israel’s hand.’

Yet Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in his first significant statement since the bombing began, did seem to confirm that America launched Epic Fury because Israel was going to attack Iran regardless. ‘If Iran was attacked – and we believe they would be attacked,’ he said, ‘they would immediately come after us, and we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded.’

Asked if that meant America had been forced to act because of impending Israeli action, Rubio equivocated: ‘Obviously, we were aware of Israeli intentions… but this had to happen no matter what… two things can be true.’

Which is more true, though? And whose war is it anyway? For the growing number of Israel-sceptics in America, and for those within the Make America Great Again movement who suspect that the President is putting the interests of a foreign country above his own, Rubio’s first answer is exactly the evidence they craved.

Others wonder what must be going through the mind of Vice-President J.D. Vance, an Iraq veteran and critic of neoconservative warmongering, who played a big part in the failed bid to resolve the Iranian question through diplomacy.

After an unusually quiet weekend, Vance popped up on Fox News on Monday, an hour before Bibi, to reiterate that America could never, ever allow Iran to build a nuclear weapon. ‘There is just no way that Donald Trump is going to allow this country to get into a multi-year conflict with no clear end in sight and no clear objective,’ he said. The Vice-President’s office declined to comment on an anonymous claim in the New York Times that, on 18 February, he’d advised the administration ‘to go big and go fast’ on any strike against Iran. Another source suggested that Vance had been ‘sidelined’. He said: ‘POTUS thinks he’s goofy.’

More hawkish insiders say Vance is sanguine about strikes, that American hostility towards the Iranian regime runs deeper than the ‘paleocon’ – i.e., anti-neocon – view allows, and that Trump understands the people far better than the wacky voices you hear on right-wing podcasts. That’s what the man himself believes, too. ‘I think MAGA is Trump,’ he told yet another journalist by phone on Monday. ‘And MAGA loves what I’m doing – every aspect of it… This is a detour that we have to take in order to keep our country safe.’

The word ‘detour’ is telling. It may be true that the patriotic impulse to crush freedom’s enemies runs deeper than any qualms about repeating the mistakes of Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya. But the available polling suggests that the public opposed striking Iran, and parts of Trump’s 2024 coalition are already breaking away. Key figures of the Make America Healthy Again movement – though not its leader, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr – have begun a ‘Health not War’ campaign demanding that Trump seeks congressional authorisation on the Iran operation.

What Trump and Vance know but won’t say is that if the conflict cannot be resolved quickly, and if its consequences on the global economy can be felt as November’s midterm elections approach, the Republican party will suffer and Trump 2.0 could fall apart. And all the talk about Israel will become ever more toxic.

Matthew Parris writes:

A friend met Mary Wilson on the Isles of Scilly, where she and her husband, Harold, had a home. She confided in him that Harold, now in the grip of senile dementia, was slipping away from her; and she felt the lonelier because in the eyes of the world his achievements as prime minister were slipping away as well.

My friend rehearsed with her the list: the Open University, etc. Then he added this: there is a kind of achievement in high office which by its very nature is unlikely to burn brightly in the world’s imagination after a leader has gone, but is no less luminous for being forgotten. I mean (he said) declining to do something foolish. On behalf of our country (he said), your husband politely declined Washington’s invitation to join the Vietnam war. That may have looked unmemorable: something we didn’t do. But had we done it the consequences for our country and our armed forces would have been huge./ Could it be in the nature of our present Prime Minister to make his mark on history, too, in the same way: by something he stopped us doing?

There is certainly a chance that America’s and Israel’s attack on Iran will in retrospect prove to have been right. But I think there is a greater chance it will not, and a fair chance it will prove a tremendous mistake. We British cannot stop it and should not even try to hinder it. But support it? Join it? No.

In my eighth decade, and my fifth in journalism, I feel a certain weariness, trudging rather than leaping into the fray. My newspaper, which supported the Iraq war, never discouraged me from setting out the case against, which I did with passion. I remember a fierce debate with The Spectator’s own Douglas Murray: his argument for intervention beating mine against, hands down, in front of a New York audience. I remember visiting Basra and describing for The Times the mess we had got ourselves into there.

I remember two visits to Afghanistan and many columns trying to explain the futility of intervention in that mad place. When the Syrian civil war came along I remember inveighing against British involvement on the grounds that we knew the monster we opposed but had no idea what monsters might replace him. And I remember making the same argument when we and the Americans went after Gaddafi in Libya.

And now here we go again. Am I simply wasting my breath reminding readers, once again, that you should not go into a war without a clear and feasible plan for getting out of it? That unless you know your way around the nest of competing forces within a country, and what may be unleashed if the great paperweight of a controlling monster is lifted, it can be counterproductive to wade in? Is it hopelessly ‘ideological’ to argue that revolutions are more likely to stick if they come from below rather than being imposed from above? Am I too pessimistic in fearing those eternal interlopers in domestic and international politics, random and unforeseen events? Reports of an accidental missile strike on a girls’ school right at the start are, if confirmed, a worrying augury.

Be in no doubt that Ayatollah Khamenei was a despot whose wickedness and brutality placed him in the very highest league of tyranny; that under him Iran, with its nuclear ambitions and terrorist proxies, posed a mortal threat to Israel and a simmering challenge to peace in the region. All true.

It’s not as if our participation would make any difference to the outcome, so why try to own the outcome?

But what if intervention fails? If the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) ends up still on top, this would be a win for tyranny that will crush hope and stunt home-grown opposition for many years. And what if intervention succeeds, but leads only to chaos and perhaps civil war within Iran? It is this last possibility, which Washington strategists will surely have factored in as very real, that leads me to my final ‘what if?’.

What if Israel’s war aims are not the same as America’s? They may this week seem indistinguishable but as the situation develops a divergence may begin to show. America would presumably wish to see a strong, stable, peaceful Iran: the regional economic powerhouse that the country could be, and a dominant political power. Donald Trump says he wants Iranians to make their country great again.

Israel, however, will be content with mere chaos. Israeli strategists may even prefer it. Benjamin Netanyahu’s interests are well-served by simply smashing the place up. If this intervention leaves a critically weakened Iran in a state of semi-permanent turmoil, economic collapse, hostility from its neighbours and nascent civil war, that suits Tel Aviv fine. For the West, however, it does not.

Such thoughts leave me most uncertain that America is doing the right thing; but more certain that, whether or not this is the case, we British should stand back. It’s not as if our active participation would make any difference to the outcome, so why try to own the outcome?

Wilson and the British government were no supporters of Ho Chi Minh when we declined to join the US war effort. We hoped America would succeed but were (perhaps) unpersuaded that the Pentagon was wise and (certainly) unpersuaded that our own interests would be served by rallying to the interventionist cause.

So what should Keir Starmer do? Nothing. No grandstanding for or against the Americans. Keep repeating (if he likes) that Khamenei deserved his fate and the IRGC are an evil force. Pass up every opportunity to wish this American adventure well. Use discreet back-channels to let Washington know that it would save a great deal of unpleasantness for both sides if the Pentagon could manage the attack without using any British bases or (preferably) their base on our own (still) sovereign territory of Diego Garcia. This is what he seems to be doing.

Bold? No. Glorious? Hardly. But if there’s such a thing as Starmerism, this could be its moment.

And Justin Marozzi writes:

One word stood out in the florid and overwrought announcement of the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader by a tearful state-television newsreader on 1 March: ‘Leader and Imam of the Muslims, His Eminence Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, on the path of upholding the exaltation of the sacred sanctuary of the Islamic Republic of Iran, drank the sweet, pure draft of martyrdom and joined the Supreme Heavenly Kingdom.’

The dreaded ‘m’ word – martyrdom – immediately takes anyone familiar with Muslim history back to a legendary 7th-century battlefield in central Iraq. In 680, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Husayn ibn Ali – regarded as the third Shia imam – faced a much larger army commanded by the Umayyad caliph Yazid I at the Battle of Karbala. He was routed, and he and his men slaughtered and decapitated. The battle entrenched the division between Sunni and Shia Islam and established the elevating narrative of martyrdom in the face of tyranny which courses through Muslim history, particularly Shia Iranian, like a river of blood.

Ancient history? Of course. Yet the past resonates powerfully in the Middle East as a living force shaping events in a way which outsiders, especially westerners, can find difficult to comprehend. Far from being a vaguely interesting millenarian curiosity, the Iranian tradition of martyrdom is absolutely key to understanding the latest conflict.

‘It’s the most significant aspect of the confrontation between Iran and the US and Israel,’ says Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. ‘Khamenei is going to go down in history as an iconic Shia leader who really followed the path of Imam Husayn.’ Never mind that this is the same man who only last month ordered the machine-gunning of many thousands of street protestors, some Iranians are already likening Khamenei to the saintly and widely revered Husayn.

While the comparison might shock – Pope Leo XIV has rather less blood on his hands than the Butcher of Tehran for starters – assassinating the Ayatollah during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan is like killing the Pope during Lent, Gerges says. ‘This will come to haunt the US and Israel for years. It will resonate in the Muslim imagination for centuries. It’s pouring gasoline on a raging fire.’

Charles Gammell, a former Foreign Office official and Iran expert, emphasises that the culture of resistance is ‘absolutely central to the DNA’ of the Islamic Republic. Venerating Khamenei now provides the regime – however spuriously – with ‘both religious and nationalist legitimacy to crack down on its people’.

The Husayn-Karbala-martyrdom narrative has sustained the Islamic Republic since its birth. In 1979, as the despised Shah prepared to flee into exile, Ayatollah Khomeini invoked the example of Husayn. He called on Iranians to rise up against a despotic regime led by ‘the Yazid of our time’. Throughout the Iran-Iraq war – of which Henry Kissinger memorably said, ‘A pity they both can’t lose’ – Iran’s fallen soldiers were hailed as ‘modern-day Husayns’ and the war itself a ‘new Battle of Karbala’. When, after eight years of fighting, Khomeini at last agreed to sign a ceasefire in 1988, he declared it worse than drinking from a poisoned chalice. ‘Happy are those who have departed through martyrdom. Unhappy am I that I still survive.’ Perversely, in his assassination Khamenei has now achieved the glory of martyrdom that eluded Khomeini.

But to what extent the theme of martyrdom can meaningfully sustain Iran in its hour of need is a moot point. ‘I think it’s overstated,’ says Ali Ansari, professor of Middle East history at St Andrews. While some Iranians may be happy to bite the bullet, the collapse of the republic into an economic basket case and inferno of repression means that fewer are queuing up for an accelerated pathway to paradise. The regime will only try to hang in there, exhaust the Americans and escalate in order to force a de-escalation because it doesn’t have any other options. ‘They have painted themselves into a corner so it’s fight or be killed,’ Ansari argues. ‘To paraphrase General Patton, they are keener on you being a martyr than themselves.’

So beyond Karbala, what next? Apart from the usual uncertainty about making predictions, ever shifting American objectives make the situation especially difficult to read. Donald Trump’s admission that the US had identified possible candidates to take over from Khamenei but that they had then been killed in the initial attack is not a ringing endorsement of finely tuned planning.

With hostilities already spreading ominously, the Gulf monarchies under fire from Iran and international energy prices surging, the pressure is on to force a conclusion. ‘If President Trump does not rapidly declare victory and return to talks with Iran, we should expect ratcheted escalation on both sides for the foreseeable future and probably an inconclusive outcome,’ says Nicholas Hopton, a former British ambassador to Iran.

There are also real fears that the war could spiral even further. Last year, in the wake of Israel’s strikes against Qatar, a senior adviser to Turkey’s President Erdogan warned: ‘To the dog of Zionist Israel… soon the world will find peace with your erasure from the map.’ Last month, former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett claimed that ‘Turkey is the new Iran’. Belligerence is contagious.

The mood across the region, which has long provided fertile soil for conspiracy theories, is direr than ever. ‘Maybe the objective is chaos, to leave Iran without leadership, totally capitulated, as with what happened in Iraq,’ an Iraqi friend messages me. ‘Israel survives on a country like Iran being in chaos for the next ten years.’

Trita Parsi, of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, has a particularly stark response to those wondering how long the conflict will continue. ‘The question “How will this end?” should have been asked before this war was triggered. It wasn’t.’

Many Iranians, and much of the world, are fervently hoping that these are the dying days of the Islamic Republic. The tragedy is that, whatever happens, many more Iranians will drink the sweet, pure draft of martyrdom in the days ahead.