Daily Herald opinion: The stakes we face: The issue Congress avoids is not whether to go to war; it is whether to decide at all

As if purposely desiring to make his clueless impotence overt and undisputable, House Speaker Mike Johnson declared last week, “We are not at war” with Iran and “the mission is nearly accomplished.”

Thanks to George W. Bush’s famously premature 2003 declaration vis-a-vis Iraq, the “mission accomplished” phrase, of course, has become synonymous with blusterous failure, and that reputation wasn’t improved when President Donald Trump pledged Friday on social media that nothing short of Iran’s “unconditional surrender” will end the — well, whatever it is, Speaker Johnson — he has launched.

The president then immediately followed up with the promise that, “After that, and the ​selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of ​our wonderful and very ​brave allies and partners, will work ‌tirelessly ⁠to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction.”

So, added to the unilateral decision to take our nation to war, the president has added the specter of determining on his own our nation’s policy of what constitutes “GREAT & ACCEPTABLE” regime change of a sovereign foreign country.

Twice last week — once in the Senate and once in the House — congressional leaders demonstrated their willingness, if not eagerness, to relinquish their authority on a matter where the nation’s identity as a functioning democracy is at stake. Too many senators and representatives seem incapable of distinguishing between two very different issues in play — the justifications for military action against another country and the responsibility for responding to them.

There is no shortage of arguments in favor of removing Iran’s tyrannical, murderous, terrorism-exporting leadership. There is also no shortage of arguments in favor of studied diplomacy and resistance to the practice of forcefully interfering with the internal affairs of nations we don’t like. The Constitution is explicit in declaring Congress the arbiter of such conflicts.

Once the people’s representatives have declared war, the president has the authority as commander in chief of the armed forces to determine how it will be executed. By acceding to Johnson’s reasoning that we can’t interfere with acts of war that the president has already initiated, Congress has handed the president a degree of power that the Founders, rightly, abhorred.

In another era, the Trump administration’s almost gleeful demonstration of American military might — witness, among many examples, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s callous boast that U.S. aircraft are pounding Iranian cities with “death and destruction from the sky all day long” — would be dismissed as unseemly displays of arrogance inconsistent with the controlled strength of the American character. But such wanton shows of brutality are now willfully endured. With every military conflict since Vietnam, the Congress has allowed its war-making authority to successively erode, to the point at which it no longer insists even on declaring a position on presidential excess but submits to it entirely.

Whatever the status of Iran from the acts of war now being waged — even if contrary to reason and historical precedent, they affirm the president’s strategy — Congress’ weak capitulation is the greater, long-term loss here. If Trump can wage war without warrant or restriction, so can any future president. It is a dangerous enough precedent to declare that an obvious war is not a war and need not be subject to restraint from the people of our democracy. It is fundamentally calamitous to let any one person determine the reasons for starting one and then to conduct it in any way he or she pleases.

Those are the stakes we face from a Congress that hides from defining war or recognizing when its objectives have been or have not been achieved.