Victor Davis Hanson: Is Iran War Legal? Yes
Victor Davis Hanson /
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.
I want to have a couple of videos on the current state of affairs in the bombing campaign against Iran. Let’s start with a lot of issues. We could call them Iranian questions or Iraniana.
How’s that? There’s been a question, is it legal? And the Left has brought that up on repeated occasions that [President Donald] Trump does not have authorization from Congress.
But the 1973 War Powers Act says that a president just must notify Congress of his intention. And [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio has done that. And then he has 60 to 90 days to act, depending on the particular type of authorization. He has 60 to 90 days to conduct a war without notifying Congress. And we’re now in one month. 30 days. So, he’s not even halfway there.
It brings up another issue. Barack Obama, the constitutional lawyer, has been very critical of it. But remember, we’ve forgotten the 2011 Libyan bombing. Remember that the [Moammar] Gadhafi regime had given up all of its nuclear proliferation sites. We had Americans on the ground, stealthily, so that we were dismantling them.
I was there in Libya in 2007, and I saw the country, and it was under massive transformation as Libyans were starting to be accrued to the idea that their children, the next generation of dictators, were going to liberalize the country. And Libya was terrified of the United States after its threats to denuclearize countries that had started bomb programs. So, it had given up its elements of it.
But the point I’m making is Obama then went in, in 2011, when there was a civil war, along with some NATO countries. It was the idea of Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, all keen critics of the current war, who demanded that we bomb.
And we bombed not for 30 days, not for 60 days, not for 90. We bombed for seven months. And we didn’t have 10,000 sorties. We had 26,000 sorties, and no one said a word. No one said a word, because the media was left. And they supported whatever Obama did.
Same thing with the most disastrous misadventure we’ve had in recent military history in Afghanistan. When we left, skedaddled out of Afghanistan, we left contractors, loyal Afghans behind.
We took unaudited Afghans with us, with, you know, a bustle completely unaudited, and many of them have turned up to be criminals or dependent on welfare.
And then, in addition, we lost 13 Marines. We’ve lost that many in 30 days of war, but Joe Biden lost that in one day. And then we left, I don’t know how many, record estimates, statistics say $30 to $50 billion of military architecture and weapons. A billion-dollar embassy. $300 million refitted Air Force base at Bagram. No one said a word.
There was hardly any criticism. So, take that with a grain of salt. The war is legal, and the hysteria about it is media-driven, as a part of the Left’s ability to weaken the presidency.
The aims of the war, this is very important. Donald Trump listed four or five aims. He did on March 1. He did on March 20. We know what they were. We wanted to end their nuclear program. We’re almost there. Stop their ability to make a bomb.
No. 2, we wanted to end their missile program, their ballistic missiles. And we’re making progress. And we wanted to stop the ability of them to recreate them. Their industry. Israel’s going after that.
And we can’t really stop the resupply, if the Russians are sending new missiles across the Caspian Sea, as some reports suggest, but we’re trying to do our best. So, the war is not lost at all. And the aims have been systematically achieved.
The third, remember, was stop the money going to Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas. And they are all desperate. That was very unpopular with the Iranian people to give precious billions of dollars, while they were near starvation, and arm Arab terrorists. They were not in favor of that.
A fourth was to stop the killing of Americans. Over the last 47 years, no terrorist entity or cadre has killed more Americans in barracks, embassies, during the Iraq and Afghan wars, with shaped charges, than Iran has. It tried to kill Donald Trump. It tried to kill John Bolton, had tried to kill Mike Pompeo, tried to kill [former U.S. Special Representative for Iran] Brian Hook, tried to kill the Saudi ambassador. So, we’re gonna try to stop that.
And then, of course, we don’t want it to be the regional disruptor that perennially threatens the Gulf states. They’re attacking Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, all of these countries that are the main exporters of oil and the competitors of Iran.
And remember, they’ve intimidated them for years. And maybe now we can stop that. That was another aim.
And finally, regime change was not explicitly listed. That would be the optimum result. You want the regime out. Because whatever damage you do, and it will be considerable, in three or four or five, 10 years, it will be resupplied by the Chinese and the Russians.
But that was not an explicit agenda item. Donald Trump said help is on the way. He mused about getting rid of these theocrats. We’ve decimated their military and theocratic chain of command. But we never explicitly said we’re going to Iran to get rid of the government.
The Israelis might wanna do that. They’re more proximate and more vulnerable. And that’s up to them if they want to continue after we do it. That can be a dividend of our aims. But it was not an exclusive, stated, explicit aim that we went in there to get rid of that regime.
And the reason why is that usually requires ground troops. We may have some ground troops. Who knows? But we have these, I can use that term again, misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, and both were aimed at regime changes. They did not work, at least not work the way they were planned.
Finally, and we’re gonna get to this in another video, a lot of people are saying the war is lost. Lost, lost, lost. Hysterical. It went south. Who’s to blame? All we can do is compare history. And as I said earlier, if you look at the first Gulf War, 42 days of bombing and some four days of ground troops. And as far as the air power, we lost 63 aircraft. Sixty-three.
We’ve only lost one major plane. We lost 63 helicopters and aircraft and 20 airmen dead. And in the Serbian campaign, it went on for 72 days. We had all our NATO allies behind us. And Serbia was a paper tiger compared to Iran.
So, in comparison to these types of operations, it’s been very successful.
What I want to get to later on is that all war, as Clausewitz said, is an extension of politics by other means. Or I think the German might suggest a continuation of politics by other means. It’s true. It is. So, there is a political and a military side, and we can’t mix the two.
Militarily, this is a clear victory, and it will have political dividends or ill effects depending in a cost-benefit analysis, what the American people adjudicate.
In other words, when they look at this war and they say it was not an existential war immediately, but it was necessary to stop this Iranian threat, of 47 years. Was it conducted in a way that the pluses outweighed the minuses? And then they will make a political calculation.
If the war is still going on and they feel that it wasn’t, then they will pressure Donald Trump through their representatives and the media to stop it, even though militarily it’s successful.
Military successful operations are not always politically successful. We’ve learned that in Vietnam, where we didn’t lose a single conventional battle. We didn’t lose a single conventional battle in Iraq or Afghanistan. And we lost the war politically. Politically.
We won amazing victories in 1952 and 1953 in Korea. And politically, it was a stalemate. So, let’s not confuse the two. You can have a militarily brilliant campaign, as we’re having, and you can lose this war politically.
We haven’t yet. But something to watch for.
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