During Sen. Lindsey Graham’s latest appearance on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” host Kristen Welker began the interview in a notable way: “Let me start with the big question: Is the United States at war with Iran?”
The South Carolina Republican replied, “I think the Ayatollah would say yeah,” referring to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the U.S. and Israeli military offensive in Iran.
At roughly the same time, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, another White House ally, appeared on Fox News and told viewers, “We are not at war with Iran.”
The competing answers were jarring, but so too was the underlying question. There should never be any ambiguity about whether the United States is at war or not. But as of Sunday morning, Welker’s question for Graham was not only reasonable, but it generated contradictory responses from the White House’s own surrogates.
Hours later, Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida appeared on MS NOW and insisted that the U.S. is not at war, despite the fact that President Donald Trump referred to “war” on Saturday morning, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested more than once on Monday morning that the U.S. is engaged in a war.
When the question is, “Are we at war?” and the answer is, “It depends on whom you ask,” there’s a problem.
But it’s not the only problem. Wars can be many things, but the one thing they should never be is mysterious. And yet, more than 48 hours into our latest combat operations in the Middle East, neither Trump nor anyone on his team has explained in a coherent way why the president launched this offensive, or what its objectives are, or what the plan is to achieve those goals, or whether the war is legal, or how much it’s expected to cost or how long it’s expected to last.
“Usually, it’s the job of a president to formulate and articulate his goals — and offer answers to these questions — before the bombs begin to fall,” Puck’s Julia Ioffe wrote. “But those expectations are a relic of the Before Times, and this president’s trademark is brazen disregard for Washington’s standard operating practice. If anything, he revels in what this town might call ‘strategic ambiguity.’ After all, if you don’t define your goals before you start, no one will know if you’ve failed to achieve them.”
In fairness, it’d be an overstatement to suggest that the president and his allies have said literally nothing to justify the military offensive, but the comments they have made have offered more heat than light. There were some suggestions, for example, that Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S., but that wasn’t true. There was similar talk that Tehran was a week away from industrial-grade uranium enrichment, but that wasn’t true, either.
The New York Times published a fact-check report, reviewing many of the key rationales and justifications for the policy. It found a lengthy series of falsehoods and exaggerations, each of which generated a fresh round of questions about why in the world this is happening.
After Trump spoke directly to the Times about his vision, the newspaper added that the president “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
And so, Americans have been forced to speculate in the absence of clarity. Is this about oil? Creating a distraction? Making the folks behind the FIFA peace prize look ridiculous?
A variety of observers have presented a variety of explanations, but let’s not miss the forest for the trees: Wars are not supposed to be riddles. The fact that the White House has initiated an international guessing game is itself a scandal for the ages.
On the eve of the war, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri told NOTUS, in reference to Trump and his Iranian intentions, “He’s been very clear.” Before the offensive began, this position was absurd. Now, it’s vastly worse.
