The No-Explanation War

In February, 2002, over a year before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld stood in front of news cameras at the Pentagon and laid out his now infamous word contraption about “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns.” He was responding to a reporter’s question about the lack of evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Today, as Donald Trump’s war in Iran reaches its sixth day, the idea that a senior Administration official would feel the need to justify military action feels both anachronistic and almost cute.

In this week’s edition of my column, Fault Lines, I wrote about how the Trump Administration’s policy of shoot first and don’t answer questions later might be a conscious effort to circumvent or perhaps even erase the country’s collective memories of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s long been conventional wisdom that the public would never approve of yet another interminable conflict in the Middle East. What the Trump Administration seems to be asking is, “What if we just skipped over the entire approval process?”

Earlier this week, my colleague Susan B. Glasser asked a similar question in her weekly column: “Can the U.S. win a war of its choosing when it cannot explain why it chose to fight or what, exactly, victory would mean?” And for those who, like me, woke up this past Saturday morning and asked, “Can the President even declare war on his own?” the historian Jill Lepore provides a thorough and informative answer. Congress certainly doesn’t seem interested in making decisions on military action. Ruth Marcus argues today that, with this latest attack, it has fully ceded its legislative authority, leaving seemingly no checks on the executive whatsoever. She warns: “The Framers would have found this chilling.”

Read Jay Caspian Kang’s column »