berg80
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- Oct 28, 2017
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- #341
The Law of Going to War with Iran, Redux
On March 2, the Trump administration issued a statutorily required war powers report giving the first official account of the domestic and international legal basis for its actions, stating:Later, the same report makes clear that President Trump ordered these actions “pursuant to [his] constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive to conduct United States foreign relations.” Yet this account leaves nearly as many legal questions as it answers.
This past June, I wrote a piece in Lawfare that anticipated and critiqued the legal arguments that the Trump administration ultimately put forward to justify its decision to join Israel’s earlier military campaign and strike Iran’s nuclear sites. Many of those arguments are now being deployed once again, but in a different context to justify a far more ambitious military campaign. This article updates my prior analysis to this new reality, both to shed more light on how the Trump administration appears to be justifying its recent actions and to situate those arguments against broader historical practice.
All told, Trump’s decision to use such broad military force against Iran pushes against the legal limits on his authority in almost characteristic fashion. His apparent international legal arguments lean heavily on permissive U.S. interpretations of when states may resort to the use of force, while his domestic legal arguments seem likely to focus narrowly on the limited risks to U.S. servicemembers without constraining how the president may use military force beneath that high threshold. While neither set of arguments are entirely without precedent, prior presidential administrations have generally approached their limits with a degree of caution; Trump and his advisors are instead leveraging them to the hilt. As in so many other areas, the end result is a clear vision of a president with few hard legal constraints, so long as he does not feel obligated to exercise his legal authority in good faith. Only here, the most severe consequences of these actions are not being felt by Americans, but by individuals in Iran and across the broader Middle East now caught in their wake.
The Law of Going to War with Iran, Redux
The Trump administration’s attack on Iran pushes even the executive branch’s generous understandings of the President’s legal authority to their limits.
www.lawfaremedia.org
Since trumples give Capt. Bone Spurs a pass on everything from rape to felony conviction to more constitutional violations than one can count should their opinion on this issue even matter?
