Trump is the weakest he's ever been. That makes him so dangerous on Iran | Moira Donegan

"In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, members of the George W Bush administration presented the case for war exhaustively, repeatedly, and in public. The then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice wrote an editorial in the New York Times claiming that Iraq was lying about its so-called weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, Colin Powell went to a meeting of the United Nations security council in New York, where he held up a tiny vial of substance meant to represent anthrax, claiming that Iraq had the weapon and was willing to use it."

"They were all lying, it turned out, but the lie served a purpose: it was a concession to the idea that the American people would have a say in whether or not their country went to war. This time around, there has been no such concession. The Trump administration launched a war on Iran with no organized attempt to persuade the American public of the justice of their course of action, no effort to get the constitutionally required approval from Congress, and no attempt to put forward an even minimally coherent post-hoc rationalization for their decision."

"Operation Epic Fury, the inane name given to the war by Pete Hegseth's Department of Defense, has now been explained as a response to Iranian aggression; as a check on Iran's nuclear program; as self-defense; as not self-defense; and as something the United States had to do because Israel was planning to start a war anyway. Other allies of the regime have claimed that really, the new escalation to military force was a mere acknowledgement of the reality that Iran had been at war with the United States."

The Bush administration extensively campaigned to justify the 2003 Iraq invasion through public messaging, with officials like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell presenting claims about weapons of mass destruction to Congress and the United Nations. Though these claims proved false, the administration at least acknowledged the principle that the American public should have input on war decisions. The Trump administration's military action against Iran, called Operation Epic Fury, represents a departure from this approach. No organized public persuasion campaign preceded the action, no congressional approval was sought despite constitutional requirements, and no coherent post-hoc justification was provided. Instead, various contradictory explanations emerged, ranging from Iranian aggression to nuclear concerns to Israeli military planning.

Read at www.theguardian.com