With U.S. military forces bombing Iran, WNIJ’s Peter Medlin spoke with Northern Illinois University political science professor Ches Thurber, who studies international conflict and security, to give the war context…
Peter Medlin (PM): In your view, has the administration presented a coherent case about why now?
Ches Thurber (CT): No, it hasn't. It's presented a number of different reasons, and some of those reasons are compelling. President Trump has talked about the nuclear program. He's talked about ballistic missiles. He's talked about support for terrorism in the Middle East. He's talked about the repression of dissidents, of thousands of Iranian civilians that were killed earlier this year, but he hasn't really tied those together in a way that makes clear why this war was necessary, what he hopes to achieve through this war, and why it had to happen right now.
(PM): Ches, this isn't the first time a U.S. president has authorized bombing another country without congressional approval & declaring war. The Obama administration did in Libya and, in this case, both the president and the Secretary of Defense have referred to this as a war. So, is it unconstitutional to wage it without congressional approval?
(CT): Yeah, we have the constitution and we have the War Powers Act, both of which seem to say it is the responsibility of Congress in order to declare war. Now you've seen presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, kind of push this boundary over time. I think Obama and Libya is a great example of this. The War Powers Act does give the president some latitude to defend the country before getting congressional approval, but this is certainly, I think, one of the most intense and most consequential uses of military force by an American president without having congressional authorization.
(PM): Israeli and American strikes killed Iran's supreme leader. In January, U.S. military forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. What do you think it means for international relations that the U.S. has entered into a new era of regime change like this?
(CT): It's striking that a president who made such a pillar of his foreign policy proposals when running for office that he would not take the United States to war, for protracted wars, for regime change in the Middle East in the way that many of his predecessors had, is now finding himself engaging in these military operations on such a frequent basis. Now there is some precedent to this. U.S. presidents tend, in their second terms, to get frustrated by what's going on in the domestic sphere and turn to foreign affairs and foreign policy, where they can kind of do what they want with less political resistance at home. I think we are seeing this happen in the case of President Trump.
(PM): The U.S. has a long history of regime change dating back all the way to the late 1800s. In fact, the U.S. did this in Iran in the 1950s, helping overthrow their prime minister. More recently, we think of Iraq, right? The reports of Iranian celebrating in the streets this weekend made me think back about the celebrations in Iraq during the U.S. invasion in 2003. Is it fair to compare what's happening right now in Iran with regime change operations like the Iraq War?
(CT): I think there are certain similarities, particularly when it comes to having political leaders that are really brutal, really unpopular, and so there might be substantial popular support in those countries for for, for a new type of regime, a new leadership. But that doesn't mean that the actual process of trying to take that old leader out and replace it with a new regime is going to be easy. Certainly, the United States learned that the hard way in Iraq, and so we've seen Trump say in the past that he wasn't going to do this type of military intervention. He did like to use bombings to kill important leaders of terrorist groups or other countries, but he didn't want to do this kind of regime change that would require kind of a longer-term U.S. military commitment. Yet when he made the statement on Saturday morning, that's exactly what he talked about. It seems like a major part of what he wanted to do was to change the political system in Iran. That seems like it would require a very difficult process, and perhaps a more prolonged U.S. military involvement.
(PM): At this point, several American troops have been killed. The scope of the war seems to be widening. What are you going to be paying attention to over the next couple days?
(CT): The course this war is going to take is going to depend on decisions President Trump has not yet made about what he wants to achieve and when he thinks he can declare victory. I think already we're starting to see some walking back of what those goals are. He's not talking about regime change as much as he talked about it on Saturday. In fact, we even saw Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth say that regime change was, was not the goal of this operation. So, I'm going to continue to look for those types of changes in statements that might suggest a narrowing or limiting of the stated goals of this mission that would give the president the opportunity to end American military involvement at an earlier point in time.
