Why now is the time to be loudly anti-war

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The US House of Representatives voted late last week on whether or not to pass a war powers resolution that would require President Trump to seek congressional approval for further foreign intervention after taking it upon himself to, along with Israel, bomb Iran. Passing the resolution would have provided a sorely needed check on his power at a time when his lawlessness has reached a fever pitch, and would have hopefully helped avoid killing more Iranians and US servicemembers. The vote failed, allowing him to further entrench us in war and augmenting the idea that it’s inevitable.

In light of the events of the past week or so, I’d like to share a pretty simple belief: We don’t have to be at war. We’re taught growing up about the myriad battles of the past that, in a perfect world, should serve as painful lessons to avoid—not inspiration for the future. Yet time and again, this country chooses violence, and what persists is an attitude that if past generations made it through war, then we will, too. I’m here to tell you that we don’t have to. War is a choice.

War bookends everyone’s life in one way or another. As a 38-year-old, I’ve scarcely known adult life without it. My second week of high school was 9/11. Immediately, President George W. Bush entrenched us in war in Afghanistan, and soon after, Iraq, leading to unfathomable death and destruction. According to a Brown University study, more than 940,000 people “were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023.”

We don’t need to do this again. Today’s teens don’t need to grow up in a world marred by war, where their classmates and siblings are forced to fight un-winnable fights with the fear that if things carry on, they’ll be forced to serve, too. Donald Trump does not care about regime change in Iran. Donald Trump does not care about the stability of the Middle East. Donald Trump couldn’t tell you one single fact about Iran that doesn’t line his pockets. Donald Trump cares about Donald Trump, and he’s opened up his own country and many others to yet another generational war. You do not have to fall for it.

But there’s good news: Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson says we’re not at war. 

"We are four days into a very specific, clear mission, an operation," Johnson told reporters last week. This “operation,” as it were, supposedly has two objectives: to destroy Iran's ballistic missiles and to "take their Navy down." The second part there sure sounds brand-new and made-up, but came on the heels of the US torpedoing an Iranian naval ship off Sri Lanka, killing 87 people. 

Aside from literal acts of war, there are many signs pointing to the fact that we’re at war. Politico reported Wednesday that “U.S. Central Command, meanwhile, is asking the Pentagon to send more military intelligence officers to its headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days but likely through September.” Members of Congress said they’re hearing a price tag of two billion dollars per day to carry on in Iran. The rain in Tehran is black after the bombing of oil depots. And the violence had spread beyond Iran’s borders: Israel, our partners in this offensive, has reportedly killed nearly 300 people in Lebanon in the past week. If this isn’t a war, then why is it shaped like one?

It’s not just Republicans who are open to supporting continued US violence abroad. A handful of Congressional Democrats have signaled a willingness to hear Trump out. “I need to know the goals and the plan. … I don’t rule anything out,” US Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan told Politico. “I mean, we’re in it.” 

Democratic Senators Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Gary Peters of Michigan, and Tim Kaine of Virginia have also said they’re open to sending the Pentagon more money. 

During the war powers resolution vote on Thursday, four Democrats sided with the Republicans to block it, in a vote that failed by two. Rep. Greg Landsman of Ohio, one of the four Democrats, told C-SPAN on Thursday: “I think it’s important to say, look, this is not good policy. What’s better policy is to allow the military and our allies to finish this particular operation, which is targeted, just the missiles and the launchers and the ships. That’s it. And then be done.”

The problem is that by relinquishing control from the very start, we’ll never get to say when it’s over. What kind of message does this send to constituents—or prospective future leaders—that once you’re in a war you must fund and fight it, no matter how you got there in the first place? Or that Trump can do whatever he wants and we’ll always clean up the mess? Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth has decried the “stupid of rules of engagement” in overseas fighting, but that doesn’t mean Congress should throw out any of their pre-existing rules to accommodate anarchy.

Hegseth doesn’t want media reporting on the deaths already caused by this war because he thinks it makes the president look bad. Perhaps he should have thought about that before he killed people. Numbers make things real. Numbers aren’t opinions. They just are. Being dead is not a matter of conjecture. But that’s what this administration wants; for doubt to creep in. For Americans to say “Well, the Ayatollah was really bad, and there are people celebrating his death, so maybe the illegal ends justify the means?” 

A bad man killing a bad man does not make the first man good. 

And now we’ve learned he’ll be replaced by his son Mojtaba Khamenei, who worked hand-in-hand with his late father, and is now fueled by vengeance against the country that just killed his parents, his wife and one of his sons.  

We can distance ourselves by calling it “Trump’s War,” but the fact remains that, as the president of this country, his actions cast a filthy pall on all of us whether we support war or not. We can say it’s his “war of choice” or even refuse to use the word war at all, but do you think the little girls killed in the Iranian school bombing on Saturday cared about phrasing? When American missiles are raining down on your country, all you know is where the bombs came from. We all become complicit. 

Much like it’s taken some journalists years to admit that Donald Trump is indeed a fascist, so will others wait until we’re weeks, months or years into a war with Iran—or whichever countries he decides to target next—to say this needs to end. What would happen if, instead of waiting to see how this all plays out, we just say no, here and now. No waiting for the administration to get their story straight, no entertaining a million different justifications for why it’s actually worth all this death and destruction and money (Jesus Christ, the money!) What if those of us with a conscience and a modicum of influence just said no to war, regardless of oil prices, and before there are boots on the ground?

If you draw a moral line mere days into this war, you won’t have to do years of soul-searching to figure out what was obvious from the start. You won’t have to conduct a years-long mea culpa campaign explaining how, as a “policy wonk,” you were so sure war was the right choice at the time, but you were indeed wrong. As nice as it is to see someone like Bill Kristol pivot late in life to policies more progressive than most of Congress and vocally opposing war in Iran, he can’t takesies backsies cheerleading a war that destroyed untold lives. Hindsight is not required for 20/20 vision; we need only pay attention to history.

Many of the people in government and media who lulled the public into a compliant stupor in the early aughts remain in power today. While I was too young at the time to say I knew better, that’s no longer the case. And if you’re someone who’s old enough to remember how we ended up in Iraq, or even Vietnam, you have a duty to take what you’ve learned and apply it to the present; to recognize that you don’t have to be a military expert or a political science PhD to just say no to war. 

There is no way this war is going to end well for the United States. It’s already cost hundreds of lives in Iran, and the lives of seven American service members. The day after the initial bombing, anti-American protesters in Karachi, Pakistan breached the perimeter of the US Consulate there in an attempt to storm the building while American staffers were inside. Security personnel—which included, as Reuters has confirmed, US Marines—opened fire, killing 10 of the protesters. Non-essential consulate staff and their families have been instructed to evacuate because of the “risk of terrorist violence.” 

But perhaps as an American, the most compelling reason not to go to war abroad is that we’re already fighting one here at home. The Trump administration has unleashed the full force of the federal government on immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, poor people, non-Christians, and any combination thereof, making them afraid to go to work, to school, to celebrations, to houses of worship or to merely go put their trash bin on the curb. We’ve already been enlisted in a war we never asked for, having to put our bodies on the line to protect our neighbors—sometimes with deadly results. 

Americans don’t need to be deployed to Iran or elsewhere to experience the horrors of war because one has been domestically grown for us. Abolishing ICE (and DHS at large); preventing the opening of concentration camps; protecting our families, friends and neighbors; providing mutual aid for our communities; those should be the wartime efforts at hand.