Trump's Bombing of Iran Shows the Failures of Congress & the Supreme Court

Trump Again Ignores the Intelligence Community

Trump’s reckless decision to bomb Iran and his equally reckless boasts that the U.S. bombings were a “spectacular military success” and “Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated” create a host of dangers for all of us:

First, Iran’s retaliation may take many forms, including strikes at American bases, mining the Strait of Hormuz (through which one sixth of the world’s oil moves via tankers per the New York Times reporting), terrorist strikes directly and through proxies. So we don’t know what Trump has unleashed.

Second, as many experts are pointing out, it is impossible at this point to know whether or not destruction of the nuclear facilities (if they were destroyed completely and it’s obviously too early to tell) would actually end Iran’s efforts to develop a nuclear weapon. For example, the materials may already have been moved and/or the efforts to achieve the bomb may be accelerated and driven completely into secret by Trump’s overt telegraphing that the U.S. will attack wherever they think the capacity is housed. That is one of the deep dangers of abandoning diplomatic channels altogether: less visibility as acts of war tend to bring fog not visibility. If the effect of Trump’s bombing is to drive the weapon development into secrecy then by the time we find out about that – it will be too late to do much about it.

Third, as I posted on Bluesky, Trump’s statement about “lethality” reflects his (and Hegseth’s) fetishizing the term “lethality” as if that is all there is to the U.S. military and its strategy.

As I pointed out in my video about the federalization of the National Guard – any armed person (even children) can be lethal. Fixating on the “lethality” of the U.S. military suggests Trump and his Secretary of Defense lack any understanding of the complexities of military strategy and its relation to diplomacy and intelligence gathering.

The ignorance about the intelligence community is particularly dangerous. In Ron Suskind’s 2006 book “The One Percent Doctrine” the birth of the post-911 intelligence apparatus is well-explained. For better or worse (and it’s particularly for the “worse” regarding civil liberties and privacy), that intelligence capacity is deep, complex and has thoroughly evolved from the state focused espionage of the USSR v. US cold war to reflect the apparatus necessary to analyze threats that no longer emanate from any one state much less superpower. Trump, however, seems ignorant of the complexities and abilities of the intelligence community, choosing to ignore their analysis (as voiced by his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard) that there is no evidence Iran is building a nuclear weapon just as he once publicly sided with Putin over the intelligence that Russia had tried to interfere in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Trump’s concept of the world seems rooted in an over-simplified movie image of World War II – a concept that is dangerously ill-suited to the post-Cold War and post-911 era in which the importance of the intelligence apparatus (often referred to as the “intelligence community”) cannot be over-stated.

Lastly, in the days to come, expect to hear a lot about the War Powers Act and whether Trump has acted un-constitutionally in making war without seeking Congressional approval. That is a critical inquiry to make even though at the moment there is little to no chance that Congress will act to rein Trump in. There likely will be challenges to the legality of Trump’s actions but it’s worth noting that the real failure (or “Constitutional violation”) has already happened. Namely, Congress’s abdication of its role is what has allowed the growth of the executive’s power and its abdication of its role to hold Trump accountable has brought to this normalization of a President who is entirely un-checked. And, the Supreme Court’s granting Trump near total immunity completes the Constitutional failure. We’ll see but I don’t see much hope that Trump acting as a Commander-in-Chief is likely to inspire either Congress or the Supreme Court to bring back the checks and balances.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/business/us-iran-oil.htmlhttps://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/trump-says-his-spy-chief-gabbard-wrong-irans-nuclear-program-2025-06-20/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Percent_Doctrine