President Trump broke a key campaign vow today by ordering an attack on Iran.
American war planes hit targets across the nation, including the capital Tehran, because negotiations to stop Iran from developing atomic weapons were unsuccessful and, Trump said in short speech, to protect American “national security.”
Iran retaliated, striking the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, and poured missiles into Israel. Iran also hit targets across the Middle East.
Top Republicans rightly called the U.S. air raid unconstitutional.
The Attack
“In the initial wave, the U.S. carried out dozens of strikes with attack planes launched from bases around the Middle East and from one or more aircraft carriers, a U.S. official said, The New York Times reported:
The warplanes are part of the largest U.S. military buildup since the Iraq War in 2003, and the deployment includes two aircraft carriers, a number of naval destroyers and more than 50 fighter planes.
The focus of the American strikes for the moment is military targets in Iran, a U.S. official said. Besides its nuclear facilities, Iran is believed to have more than 2,000 missiles, primarily short- and medium-range ballistic missiles that threaten Israel and American forces across the region. Those missiles are scattered at launch sites across Iran and were among the first targets, U.S. military officials said.
Announcing “major combat operations” in an eight-minute speech, Trump called the Iranian regime “a vicious group of very hard, terrible people” whose “activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world.”
Trump said that the regime has chanted “Death to America” for almost 50 years and “waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops and the innocent people in many, many countries.”
He also noted the attack on the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979; the taking of American hostages, who were held for 444 days; and the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983.
“From Lebanon to Yemen and Syria to Iraq, the regime has armed, trained and funded terrorist militias that have soaked the earth with blood and guts,” Trump said:
And it was Iran’s proxy, Hamas, that launched the monstrous Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, slaughtering more than 1,000 innocent people, including 46 Americans, while taking 12 of our citizens hostage. It was brutal, something like the world has never seen before.
Iran is the world’s number one state sponsor of terror, and just recently killed tens of thousands of its own citizens on the street as they protested. It has always been the policy of the United States, in particular my administration, that this terrorist regime can never have a nuclear weapon. I’ll say it again, they can never have a nuclear weapon. That is why in Operation Midnight Hammer last June, we obliterated the regime’s nuclear program at Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan. After that attack, we warned them never to resume their malicious pursuit of nuclear weapons, and we sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. Again they wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. They didn’t know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil. But Iran refused, just as it has for decades and decades.
Trump said the regime has “rejected every opportunity” to end their “nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.”
“This regime will soon learn that no one should challenge the strength and might of the United States Armed Forces,” Trump said:
I built and rebuilt our military in my first administration and there is no military on earth even close to its power, strength or sophistication. My administration is taking every possible step to minimize the risk to U.S. personnel in the region. Even so, and I do not make this statement lightly, the Iranian regime seeks to kill. The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war. But we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future.
“Take Over Your Government”
Trump also urged Iran’s army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, to lay down their weapons or “face certain death,” and urged Iranians to overthrow their government.
“Your hour of freedom is at hand,” he said. And “when we are finished, take over your government,” he said:
It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.
In his state of the union speech, Trump promised to attack Iran because of its supposed intransigence on nuclear weapons.
The IRG comprises about 200,000 members, the Times reported:
Iran has a fleet of hundreds of fast boats that specialize in swarm attacks in the Persian Gulf. It has a massive arsenal of 3,000 to 6,000 naval mines that can enable it to temporarily close off the Strait of Hormuz.
Aside from striking Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and sending missiles at Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates, Iran closed the Straight of Hormuz, a vital seaway for the world’s oil supplies. One estimate said the price for a barrel could rocket to $250.
“We have closed the Strait of Hormuz until further notice,” the Iran Military Monitor wrote on X:
“Let the Orange Pig open it if he can!”
Promises, Promises
Long before his first term as president and during his campaign for this term, Trump denounced plans to attack Iran.
“Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate,” he said in November 2011 of President Barack Hussein Obama:
He’s weak and he’s ineffective. So the only way he figures that he’s going to get re-elected, and as sure as you’re sitting there, is to start a war with Iran.
“@BarackObama will attack Iran in order to get re-elected,” he wrote on Twitter on January 17, 2012. On September 16, 2013, Trump wrote that Obama would attack Iran to “save face.”
Trump supporters backed Trump in 2024 because he was supposedly anti-war. “A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for Dick Cheney and a vote for war, war and more war,” future director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard wrote on October 28, 2024:
A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to end wars, not start them. We are at a historic crossroads. Our God-given rights are under attack. Now is the time for us to stand together, for love of country, and for Donald Trump to get us back on the path to peace, freedom, and prosperity.
“To anyone still gullible enough to fall for scummy media hoaxes: Trump said warmongering neocons love sending your kids to die for wars they would never fight themselves,” White House aide Stephen Miller wrote on November 1, 2024:
Liz Cheney is Kamala’s top advisor. Liz wants to invade the whole Middle East. Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.
MTG, Massie, the Constitution
“This is NOT freeing the Iranian people!!!” former GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X over video of a girl’s school that was hit. Fifty-one kids were killed and 60 wounded.
“This is murdering their children!!!” she wrote:
WTF are you insane people doing???
AMERICA DOES NOT SUPPORT THIS!!!
In a 694-word jeremiad, Taylor Greene recalled the campaign promises. “We said ‘No More Foreign Wars, No More Regime Change!’ We said it on rally stage after rally stage, speech after speech,” she wrote:
Trump, Vance, basically the entire admin campaigned on it and promised to put America FIRST and Make America Great Again.
My generation has been let down, abused, and used by our government our entire adult lives and our children’s generation is literally being abandoned.
Thousands and thousands of Americans from my generation have been killed and injured in never ending pointless foreign wars and we said no more. But we are freeing the Iranian people.
Please.
There are 93 million people in Iran, let them liberate themselves. But Iran is on the verge of having nuclear weapons.
Yeah sure.
We have been spoon fed that line for decades and Trump told us all that his bombing this past summer completely wiped it all out.
It’s always a lie and it’s always America Last. …
America is going to be force fed and gas lighted all the ‘noble’ reasons the American ‘Peace’ President and Pro-Peace administration had to go to war once again this year, after being in power for only a year.
Head-spinning, but maga.
Like Taylor Greene, GOP Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky denounced the attack.
“I am opposed to this War,” he wrote on X:
This is not “America First.”
When Congress reconvenes, I will work with @RepRoKhanna to force a Congressional vote on war with Iran,” Massie wrote on X.
The Constitution requires a vote, and your Representative needs to be on record as opposing or supporting this war.
Massie called the attack “Acts of war unauthorized by Congress.”
GOP Senator Rand Paul reminded Trump that only Congress has the authority to declare war. He quoted President John Quincy Adams’ famous words about American foreign and military police, along with Founding Father James Madison’s words to Thomas Jefferson: “The Executive Branch is the branch most prone to war, therefore, the Constitution, with studied care, delegated the war power to the legislature.”
Wrote Rand, “my oath of office is to the Constitution, so with studied care, I must oppose another Presidential war.”
