On Saturday June 21, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to announce to the nation that the United States had launched airstrikes on three nuclear sites in Iran, in what he called a “very successful attack.” He followed shortly afterward with a speech from the White House, flanked by Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
All of this was meant to give a sense of legitimacy and order to an action that was anything but legitimate or lawful. As U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, wrote in a statement shortly after the news broke, “The President’s disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorization is a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers. He has impulsively risked launching a war that may ensnare us for generations. It is absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment.”
The Progressive concurs and calls for an immediate end to the military actions in Iran. We also call for a thorough investigation into the Trump Administration’s unconstitutional actions in carrying out an act of war without Congressional approval.
The current attacks on Iran have deep roots. Middle Eastern Studies scholar Stephen Zunes wrote on our website last week, “The unprovoked attack by Israel against Iran and the tragic war that has resulted could have been avoided back in 2017 had President Donald Trump not broken off the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran Nuclear Deal—and if President Joe Biden hadn’t refused to return to it.”
But the causes of the current crisis go back even further. In an interview with The Progressive in 2019, historian and former U.S. Army colonel Andrew Bacevich argued that the predominant U.S. and Iranian perspectives surrounding the conflict differ substantially as to when and how it began.
“For the Iranians,” Bacevich said, “the start point is the [1953] CIA-engineered coup that overthrew [Iranian Prime Minister] Mohammad Mosaddegh . . . . For us, we want to begin the story with the Iranian revolution and the [1979-1980] hostage crisis, a great humiliation done to the United States, and one which we really have not gotten over.”
The race to paint Iran as concealing its intent to wield “weapons of mass destruction” has deep roots as well.
Just weeks ago, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress, “The [intelligence community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.” Yet the President disagreed. He had his own “intelligence.”
This has strong echoes of the lead up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, when government officials asserted, using false evidence, that Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. In January 2002, more than a year before the United States launched a war against Iraq based on false claims about weapons of mass destruction, then-President George W. Bush told a joint session of Congress: “The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”
This past Sunday, following Trump’s bombing attack on Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made eerily similar remarks, saying, “History will record that President Trump acted to deny the world’s most dangerous regime the world’s most dangerous weapons.”
A week before the Saturday night bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities by the United States, Rafael Grossi, the United Nations director general of the International Atomic Energy Association, had told the U.N. Security Council, “Despite the current military actions and heightened tensions, it is clear that the only sustainable path forward—for Iran, for Israel, the entire region, and the international community—is one grounded in dialogue and diplomacy to ensure peace, stability, and cooperation.”
Grossi told the agency’s board of governors on Monday that “Armed attacks on nuclear facilities should never take place and could result in radioactive releases with grave consequences within and beyond the boundaries of the [country] which has been attacked.”
The Progressive, throughout its 116-year history, has always stood against war and militarism and for peaceful solutions to conflict. As our former editor Erwin Knoll wrote of the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, “There’s no such thing as a just war. Never was. Never will be.”