Not One Dime for Aggression

All funding requests for the war must be rejected.

The Pentagon is requesting $200 billion in war funding for the ongoing illegal assault on Iran:

The Pentagon has formally moved to secure a staggering $200 billion supplemental budget to sustain ongoing military operations against Iran. According to a report by the Washington Post, the request has been submitted to the White House for backing before it heads to a fractured Congress, where it is expected to ignite a fierce legislative battle over the future of American involvement in the Middle East.

Congress should not approve any funding for this war. The $200 billion request is obscene, but any amount would be unacceptable. All funding requests for the war must be rejected. There should not be one more dime for aggression against Iran.

The Iran war is a betrayal of both U.S. interests and constitutional principles. This is a war initiated on the president’s whim. The people do not support it, Congress never authorized it, and our treaty commitments prohibit it. It should never have been allowed to start, but we can end our part in it by refusing to fund it.

Our government is fighting alongside a genocidal regime as it seeks to devastate yet another country. The U.S. should not be aiding the Israeli government in Netanyahu’s obsession with wrecking Iran. The U.S. has no reason to be at war with Iran, and our government’s role in starting this war is deeply shameful.

If this insane amount of funding is approved, it is all but guaranteed that the war will escalate and expand. The administration is already preparing for further escalation. It is likely just a matter of time before they introduce ground forces if Congress doesn’t shut down the funding. Voting to fund the war is signing off on sending more Americans to fight and die in a bad cause.

Hawks will complain that cutting off funding will tie the president’s hands, but that’s exactly why it needs to happen. Left to his own devices, the president will make more terrible decisions and cause even more destruction. The president’s hands need to be tied so that he can’t continue the illegal war he started over nothing. If there were some way to put the president in the constitutional equivalent of a straitjacket, that is what we ought to do.

There was no cause for war. Iran posed no threat, and the U.S. and Israel had no right to attack them. The war is needlessly causing tremendous harm to the Iranian people, it is needlessly putting Americans in harm’s way, and it is also doing extensive damage to the global economy. We all stand to lose from this pointless and despicable war. It must be halted now, and shutting off the funding is the only available way to do that.