This Is a Lawless War

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, March 20, 2026

 

You can always tell a Washington hack has run out of arguments when he starts with the bean-counting.

 

Consider how certain apologists for Donald Trump have complained over the years that x or y prosecutor or special counsel spent $z investigating the president, e.g., “Democrats spent $40,000,000 of YOUR tax dollars trying to impeach Trump. But not one cent was spent to benefit citizens!” Sometimes these claims about costs are not true, and sometimes, as in the foregoing example, their assertions of wastefulness beg the question: Spending $40 million to root out corruption in the executive branch would very much “benefit citizens,” in my view.

 

Such protestations are all almost always beside the point: The U.S. government spends something on the order of $13 million a minute in the course of its ordinary operations—an extra million or two or even a hundred hardly even registers and may, in fact, be money well spent if it funds a fruitful investigation of official wrongdoing. Democrats who typically spend money like Flavor Flav on a six-year rock bender suddenly get all Scrooge-y when the government spends a few million bucks on diesel to deport some illegal immigrants or to fund some other disapproved policy, just as Republicans—who are at this point at least a generation past any non-risible claim to fiscal rectitude—get big mad when $0.01 goes out of the Treasury to slow down the spread of HIV in Africa. In neither case do the suddenly flinty partisans give a fig about the sums in question—they want to stop the policy. Not all parasites are the same, but when the ticks start lecturing you about the fleas, they are talking their own book.

 

The case against the Iran war is not the $200 billion that Secretary of Don’t You Dare Call It a War Pete Hegseth is asking for to fund U.S. operations in Iran. Now, I’ll bet you almost any sum of steadily depreciating U.S. dollars you like that the number ends up being a hell of a lot more than $200 billion, but even at greater expense, money is not much of an argument. You’ll know that the U.S. government is serious about saving money when it starts to reform the programs that actually spend the money: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc., which, along with interest on the money we’ve already borrowed to fund these same entitlements, account for the majority of federal outlays.

 

Nor should we be persuaded by sentimentality about the loss of the lives of U.S. troops. With all due respect to the patriotism and courage of U.S. forces—patriotism and courage that are conspicuously absent from their draft-dodging commander in chief—the entire military enterprise is based on the assumption that lives will be lost. In a typical year, the leading cause of death for members of the U.S. armed services is suicide, followed (and sometimes surpassed) by accidents, many of them off-duty accidents. You’d have to go back more than a decade to find a year in which more U.S. troops died in hostile engagements than from ordinary homicide, and even then the margin was not very large. All decent people value every individual life of the men and women who serve in the armed forces, but it is not as though we are throwing our soldiers into a meat grinder in the Russian style. Statistically speaking, it is more dangerous to be a logger.

 

There are many other bad arguments, along with merely unpersuasive arguments, against the Iran war: high gas prices, economic risk, the recent downturn in my IRA. In spite of our ludicrous national myth about World War II bringing the nation out of the Great Depression, wars are almost always economic losers and very often are economic catastrophes—exactly what one would expect when spending a great deal of money to destroy wealth and disrupt commerce. Nations that wish to use military means to accomplish anything—even basic self-defense—ought to assume that there will be a substantial economic cost to doing so and be prepared to pay it. Economic costs are not an argument against this war but against war per se. But economic costs are not the only kind of costs, and there is no such thing as a free lunch or sovereignty on the cheap.

 

The case against this war is that it is illegal—whatever Secretary Jägerbomb has to say about it, this is a war, and it is being conducted with no congressional authorization in a haphazard, chaotic, ad hoc way by a president who is profoundly corrupt, nearly 80 years old, and unable to write an ordinary English sentence, surrounded by a constellation of grifters, addicts, and incompetents unrivaled by anything in Washington since the days of Franklin Pierce. When I hear certain of my friends say that “it would have been better” if President Trump had gone to Congress, it sounds to me like someone saying “it would have been better” if John Dillinger hadn’t robbed all those banks—as though this were somehow optional, a nicety, a lowercase “i” that has been unaccountably left undotted. Donald Trump’s foreign policy is a crime spree: the massacres in the Caribbean, the deposing of Nicolás Maduro, this illegal war in Iran, to say nothing of his unconstitutional trade war against the world at large, his threats to wage war against NATO allies to annex desired territory, the war against Cuba he apparently is considering, etc. If an American president can do all this without a peep from Congress, then we owe King George III an apology—his ambitions were never so grand.

 

We can have a government of laws under the Constitution or we can have what it appears we are intent on sliding into: an elected dictatorship.