Jeffrey Blehar of National Review Online assesses the president’s latest questionable claim.
Heads up folks, did you know that the Iran war is apparently over? Yes, on May 1 Trump sent a letter to Congress officially declaring the war “terminated.” On what grounds? Why the cease-fire, old chap, that’s what ended the war! More to the point, the war is now being declared “terminated” because time ran out for Donald Trump under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which requires the president to terminate any military action within 60 days of beginning it, absent congressional approval.
Perhaps Trump thought it wouldn’t take more than two months to remake the Middle East in his own image via aerial bombing campaign. So now the administration is arguing that the clock either paused on April 7 (when the cease-fire was nominally put into effect) or has stopped altogether, and it can simply be reset to zero if bombings resume. Lawmakers — Republicans as well as Democrats — are obviously displeased about this, but then again, it’s not as if lawmakers can force the Pentagon to withdraw the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln carrier group from the Arabian Sea right now, either. So the war is (1) already over; (2) liable to resume at any moment.
Let’s set aside the twist — there might be a winning argument to be made at SCOTUS that the War Powers Act is an unconstitutional restriction of executive warmaking powers under Article II of the Constitution — because Trump isn’t making that argument right now either. He is instead claiming to be acting in accordance with the statute, by recourse to insultingly obvious semantic tricks.
Donald Trump has threatened to resume attacks on Iran’s military and infrastructure almost daily (just in the past five days alone, no less), emphasizing that if the Iranians “misbehave,” we will attack. Maybe we don’t, and the war ends with this strange denouement. But if we do resume attacks, with our military already locked in the same place they’ve been deployed for months now, it will then become retroactively obvious that the war never ended in the first place.
