This Saturday, President Donald Trump launched a massive military campaign on Iran and also went on record to speak on it. “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties,” Trump said in his address to the nation, but “that often happens in war.” Americans have been caught up on his last couple of words, as it seems to be a clear indicator of a full-on war being waged with Iran.
The statement is being taken as an admission of war. While some worry how far Trump can truly go, as the U.S. Constitution does not grant the president the ability to fully wage war, others are more worried about what the campaign means for the general public. Trump is publicly bracing the country for a costly military operation, a sign we are entering an open-ended war with Iran, regardless of the potential human cost.
Trump’s main goal with this campaign was the elimination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, as he has framed Khamenei’s death as a necessity to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear-armed terrorist state. So far, three U.S. service members have been killed and five wounded in the fighting. Trump is framing the situation as a generational necessity and Israel’s killing of Khamenei as the most important achievement of the war so far, saying that Khamenei “had the blood of hundreds and even thousands of Americans on his hands” and was responsible for killing innocent people around the world.
This brings the lens surrounding the war back towards Trump’s original statement, where he frames the lives lost as a sacrifice and paints it as a “trade-off” for what they are achieving in Iran. Now that Khamenei is dead, however, the attacks have not ceased. Instead, Trump has called on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Iranian military, and the Iranian police to lay down their arms and receive full immunity “or face certain death. It will be certain. Death won’t be pretty.”
The way this conflict has escalated has raised questions about whether the president even has the ability to carry a conflict this far without congressional approval; however, no motions have been made to stop Trump thus far. Many have begun to worry if this could trickle down and result in a draft, especially after Trump’s original comment about the potential deaths; however, at this point, it is not clear how drastically this will escalate domestically.
