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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
“The United States and Iran exchanged fire for a second consecutive night on Thursday [July 9],” the New York Times reports, “extending a pattern of hostilities that has all but collapsed their fragile truce and left the Middle East suspended between war and peace.”
Let’s be honest here: There was no real “truce,” “fragile” or otherwise.
Sure, there was a bit of a lull for further negotiations after US president Donald Trump signed the instrument of US surrender (“Memorandum of Understanding”), but we’ve seen continuous minor flare-ups ever since and it was clear before the ink dried on the MOU that the US had no intention of surrendering the spoils of victory — in particular, control of the Strait of Hormuz — to the winners.
As for even a supposed “ceasefire,” Trump now says that’s “over.”
According to US law, it’s the war that’s over — and the law clearly says so twice.
The initial US attack on Iran was wholly illegal. Per the US Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war, and it had (and has) not done so.
But Congress waffled instead of acting … until June 23, when it passed a concurrent war powers resolution which again — above and beyond the requirements of the Constitution — formally and legally ended the war, clearly and unambiguously requiring Trump to withdraw all forces from the conflict.
Yet there those forces remain, continuing, illegally, to engage in hostilities with the Iranian regime over territory that is not and never has been a US possession of any kind.
If Congress owned anything resembling collective spine, every signpost along this road to fiasco would have read “this way to Trump’s impeachment and removal.” Waging an illegal war is, by any plausible definition, a “high crime” requiring that.
Yet there he remains, sitting in the Oval Office, flying on one version or another of Air Force One, hob-nobbing with (and insulting) fellow “world leaders,” etc.
He claims the Iranian regime is ringing his phone off the hook, begging for a “deal.”
In reality, I suspect any Iranian phone message summarizes as “بازنده میگه چی؟”
In English: “Loser says what?”
Every American continues to pay at the gas pump and the grocery store for this idiotic, illegal war. Some Americans have paid, and more may pay, with their lives before it’s over.
And when it’s over, the US will be worse off than before.
End this nonsense now.
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