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Editorials of The Times: Want war with Iran? Ask Congress first

The United States has blamed Iran for recent attacks on shipping and pipelines in the Persian Gulf; Iran says it was not responsible. The United States has responded to the tensions by building up forces in the region.

Editorials of The Times: Want war with Iran? Ask Congress first

The downing of an unmanned U.S. surveillance aircraft Thursday by an Iranian surface-to-air missile is another worrying click of the ratchet between the Trump administration, which unilaterally abandoned the 2015 nuclear accord for a campaign of “maximum pressure,” and an Iranian government suffering from tighter economic sanctions.

The United States has blamed Iran for recent attacks on shipping and pipelines in the Persian Gulf; Iran says it was not responsible. The United States has responded to the tensions by building up forces in the region.

Iran claimed responsibility Thursday for the downing of what the Pentagon said was a RQ-4 Global Hawk drone. Iran said the drone had violated its airspace. The U.S. Central Command said the spy craft was operating in international airspace.

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“I find it hard to believe it was intentional,” President Donald Trump said about the shoot-down Thursday afternoon, adding that “this country will not stand for it, that I can tell you.”

The inconsistent messages from the White House underscore the fact that both the United States and Iran are capable of making grave strategic miscalculations.

On Monday, Iran announced it would soon stop honoring a central component of a 2015 nuclear deal, the limit on how much low-enriched uranium the country is allowed to stockpile. The same day, the Pentagon announced the deployment of an additional 1,000 troops, Patriot missile batteries and pilotless aircraft to the region. That new deployment came in addition to the 1,500 troops, an aircraft carrier group and B-52 bombers sent to the region in May.

The most recent deployment was in response to attacks last week against two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, attacks the U.S. military blamed on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Iran denied involvement, while government officials in Europe expressed some skepticism at the evidence of Iranian culpability. The Pentagon also said that Iranian forces shot a missile at a U.S. drone flying over the Gulf of Oman near the time of the ship attacks.

With opposing military forces in such proximity, with accusations and munitions flying and with the White House facing a trust deficit, the danger of open conflict increases by the day. Which is why, if Trump and the Warhawk Caucus — led by national security adviser John Bolton; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. — want a wider military conflict with Iran, they first need to persuade Congress and receive its approval.

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Mission creep has unfortunately become standard operating procedure for the Pentagon in the post-9/11 world, and it is long past time that the legislative branch reclaimed its central role in overseeing war waged in the name of the American people.

There are encouraging signs that Capitol Hill is reasserting its authority. Against the wishes of the president, the Senate voted Thursday to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia for its proxy war with Iran being waged in Yemen.

The House of Representatives also this week voted to repeal the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force as part of a $1 trillion spending bill. The 18-year-old authorization does not permit the opening of a new conflict with Iran in 2019, despite efforts by the administration to convince a skeptical Congress that Iran is somehow allied with al-Qaida.

Linking al-Qaida to a despotic Middle East regime was exactly the pretext that the George W. Bush administration used to invade Iraq, with catastrophic results. It would insult the intelligence of every American for the Trump administration to attempt the same gambit.

Trump drew his own line against acting without congressional approval in a tweet back in 2013, after regime forces in Syria launched a series of chemical weapons attacks: “The President must get Congressional approval before attacking Syria — big mistake if he does not!”

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We supported President Barack Obama’s decision to seek congressional authorization in 2013 for any unilateral action against the Syrian government and criticized his earlier announcement of a red line that would trigger U.S. intervention, because that statement boxed him in by putting U.S. credibility at stake.

It’s now President Donald Trump who faces a crisis in credibility — over the wisdom of abandoning nuclear diplomacy in favor of confrontation; over the legality of using the 2001 terrorist attacks as a legal justification for another conflict in the Middle East; over the morality of enabling a conflict in Yemen, which the United Nations calls the world’s worst man-made humanitarian disaster. Most concerning, despite his stated aversion to entering another war, he shows little sign of having learned a central lesson of the past two decades of U.S. military action: It is easy to start conflicts and impossible to predict how they might end.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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