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According to President Trump, the United States attacked Iran because the Iranian regime posed “imminent threats” to the U.S. and its allies, including through its use of terrorist proxies and continued pursuit of nuclear weapons.

“Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas and our allies throughout the world,” he said in a recorded statement Saturday.

According to leading Democrats in Congress, Trump’s justification is questionable, especially given his claims of having “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities in separate U.S. bombings last year.

“Everything I have heard from the administration before and after these strikes on Iran confirms this is a war of choice with no strategic endgame,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and part of a small group of congressional leaders — the Gang of Eight — who were briefed on the operation by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

That divide is bound to remain an issue politically heading into this year’s midterm elections, and could be a liability for Republicans — especially considering that some in the “America First” wing of the MAGA base were raising their own objections, citing Trump’s 2024 campaign pledges to extricate the U.S. from foreign wars, not start new ones.

The debate echoed a similar if less immediate one around President George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, also based on claims that “weapons of mass destruction” posed an immediate threat. Those claims were later disproved by multiple findings that Iraq had no such arsenal, fueling recriminations from both political parties for years.

The latest divide also intensified unease over Congress ceding its wartime powers to the White House, which for years has assumed sweeping authority to attack foreign adversaries without direct congressional input in the name of addressing terrorism or preventing immediate harm to the nation or its troops.

Even prior to the weekend bombings, Democrats including Sen. Adam Schiff of California were pushing Congress to pass a resolution barring the Trump administration from attacking Iran without explicit congressional authorization.

“President Trump must come to Congress before using military force unless absolutely necessary to defend the United States from an imminent attack,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a member of the armed services and foreign relations committees, said in a statement Thursday.

In justifying the daylight strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei just two days later, Trump accused the Iranian government of having “waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder” for nearly half a century — including through attacks on U.S. military assets and commercial shipping vessels abroad — and of having “armed, trained and funded terrorist militias” in multiple countries, including Hezbollah and Hamas.

Trump said that after the U.S. bombed Iran last summer, it had warned Tehran “never to resume” its pursuit of nuclear weapons. “Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland,” he said.

Other Republican leaders largely backed the president.

“The United States did not start this conflict, but we will finish it. If you kill or threaten Americans anywhere in the world — as Iran has — then we will hunt you down, and we will kill you,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“Every president has talked about the threat posed by the Iranian regime. President Trump is the one with the courage to take bold, decisive action,” said Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi.

While Iran’s coordination with and sponsorship of groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas are well known, Trump’s claims about its ongoing development of nuclear weapons systems are less established — and the administration has provided little evidence to back them up.

Democrats seized on that lack of fresh intelligence in their responses to the attacks, contrasting Trump’s latest claims about imminent threats with his assertion after the separate summer bombings that the U.S. had all but eliminated Iran’s nuclear aspirations.

“Let’s be clear: The Iranian regime is horrible. But I have seen no imminent threat to the United States that would justify putting American troops in harm’s way,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the Gang of Eight. “What is the motivation here? Is it Iran’s nuclear program? Their missiles? Regime change?”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement that the Trump administration “has not provided Congress and the American people with critical details about the scope and immediacy of the threat,” and must do so.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said the Trump administration needs congressional authority to wage such attacks barring “exigent circumstances,” and didn’t have it.

“The Trump administration must explain itself to the American people and Congress immediately, provide an ironclad justification for this act of war, clearly define the national security objective and articulate a plan to avoid another costly, prolonged military quagmire in the Middle East,” he said.

After the U.S. military announced Sunday that three U.S. service personnel were killed and five others seriously wounded in the attacks, the demands for a clearer justification and new constraints on Trump only increased.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) said Sunday he is optimistic that Democrats will be unified in trying to pass the war powers resolution, and also that some Republicans will join them, given that the strikes have been unpopular among a portion of the MAGA base.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who partnered with Khanna to force the release of the Epstein files, has said he will work with him again to push a congressional vote on war with Iran, which he said was “not ‘America First.’”

Benjamin Radd, a political scientist and senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, said that whether or not Iran represented an “imminent” threat to the U.S. depends not just on its nuclear capabilities, but on its broader desire and ability to inflict pain on the U.S. and its allies — as was made clear to both the U.S. and Israel after the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which Iran praised.

“If you are Israel or the United States, that’s imminent,” he said.

What happens next, Radd said, will largely depend on whether remaining Iranian leaders stick to Khamenei’s hard-line policies, or decide to negotiate anew with the U.S. He expects they might do the latter, because “it’s a fundamentalist regime, it’s not a suicidal regime,” and it’s now clear that the U.S. and Israel have the capabilities to take out Iranian leaders, Iran has little ability to defend itself, and China and Russia are not rushing to its aid.

How the strikes are viewed moving forward may also depend on what those leaders decide to do next, said Kevan Harris, an associate professor of sociology who teaches courses on Iran and Middle East politics at the UCLA International Institute.

If the conflict remains relatively contained, it could become a political win for Trump, with questions about the justification falling away. But if it spirals out of control, such questions are only likely to grow, as occurred in Iraq when things started to deteriorate there, he said.

Israel and the U.S. are currently betting that the conflict will remain manageable, which could turn out to be true, Harris said, but “the problem with war is you never really know what might happen.”

On Sunday, Iran launched retaliatory attacks on Israel and the wider Gulf region. Trump said the campaign against Iran continued “unabated,” though he may be willing to negotiate with the nation’s new leaders. It was unclear when Congress might take up the war powers measure.

Where are the statesmen when the state is under siege by the current head of state?

I’ve been mulling that question, hardly for the first time, but on three occasions just in the last few days.

On Monday, the federal holiday celebrating George Washington’s birth, former President George W. Bush posted an essay on the first U.S. president as part of a civic project commemorating the nation’s 250th year. Simply by hailing Washington for traits that Donald Trump utterly lacks — humility, integrity, dignity, self-restraint, willingness to forfeit power — the piece was widely read as a sneak attack on the current president. Bush never named Trump. He thus maintained his years-long, stupefying silence about the man who’s trashed him, his family, his party, his legacy PEPFAR program and, most of all, his country.

As Jonathan V. Last wrote for the right-of-center, anti-Trump Bulwark, if Bush’s words were a veiled attack on Trump, “the veil is so powerful that even light can’t escape it.”

Bush’s essay came two days after former President Obama finally responded to Trump’s week-old racist post that caricatured the first Black president and his wife as apes, thereby mainlining into the body politic one of the most toxic tropes against Black Americans. Asked about it in a podcast interview, Obama was, as usual, too cool. He called Trump’s behavior “deeply troubling” and said “there doesn’t seem to be any shame about this among people who used to feel like you had to have some sort of decorum and a sense of propriety and respect for the office.”

But, like Bush, he never named Trump. And it’s not even clear that Obama was referring to him. Certainly Trump never was one of those who, as Obama put it, “used to feel … some sort of decorum and a sense of propriety and respect for the office.”

Then there was the third trigger for my musings about America’s M.I.A. statesmen.

On Friday — ahead of the holiday honoring Washington, who as the first president and military commander established the indispensable tradition of a nonpartisan military — Trump yet again violated Washington’s precedent. At Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, he essentially pushed uniformed young troops to violate the military codes enshrining Washington’s legacy of nonpartisanship. Trump treated them like props at a MAGA rally, lauding Republican candidates and officeholders on hand, mocking past presidents and urging the troops to vote Republican in November.

“You have to vote for us,” the commander in chief ordered them.

This is unprecedented, except by Trump himself. In October, he prodded sailors at Norfolk, Va., to boo “Barack Hussein Obama.” In September, he told commanders summoned from around the world that the fight is here at home, a “war from within” American cities. In June, also at Ft. Bragg, Trump damned Democrats and sold MAGA merch, over Army objections.

There’s a darn good reason for the wall that Washington built between the military and civilian government. As the Army Field Manual instructs troops: “Nonpartisanship assures the public that our Army will always serve the Constitution and our people loyally and responsively.” Not just Republicans, and not just Trump.

But as multiple officers told the website Military.com, “holding troops to account when goaded by the president, who is ultimately the boss, would be impossible.” Commanders themselves are mute because, after all, Trump is the commander in chief. They’ve watched as one Pentagon purge has followed another, starting with Trump firing the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top military officer. He chose instead an officer who, he often claims, once donned a MAGA cap and said, “I love you, sir. … I’ll kill for you, sir.”

It’s understandable that active-duty officers don’t make a stand. But what about America’s roughly 7,500 retired generals and admirals? As veteran ML Cavanaugh wrote in the Los Angeles Times after Trump’s Ft. Bragg performance last year, “The military profession’s nonpartisan ethic is at a breaking point.” Sure, individuals have spoken out. But as the military knows better than anyone, there’s strength in numbers.

It’s past time for a large, united front of veteran commanders to challenge Trump. Why wait for him to make good on his talk of invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy troops at the polls in this midterm election year, based on trumped-up conspiracies about Democrats’ fraud?

You know who could give the veteran and active commanders some political cover? The former commanders in chief.

Even more conspicuous than the brass by their silence and virtual invisibility in the face of Trump’s assaults — on the rule of law, civil rights, elections, foreign alliances and America’s global reputation — are the nation’s four living former presidents: Democrats Joe Biden, Obama and Bill Clinton, and Republican Bush.

It’s past time for the not-so-fab four to come together to publicly demand that Trump honor the oath of office that each man took, and to school the electorate on the many ways in which he’s dishonoring it — including by continuing to justify his refusal to peacefully transfer power in 2021. But each man is so observant of the norm that former presidents should not publicly criticize the incumbent one — again, a precedent from George Washington — that they self-muzzle.

This is Americans’ quandary in these Trump times: Presidents and high-ranking veterans who could speak truth to power are so constrained by their devotion to norms and traditions that they won’t confront a president who’s daily shattering the norms, traditions and laws that form the foundation of this democratic nation.

“This is the master alarm flashing for our democracy,” Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat and veteran, said last week of Trump’s targeting of him and other critics.

That takes us back to my original question: Where are the statesmen to answer that alarm?

Answer: They’re following ordinary rules despite these extraordinary times. And they must stop.

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