I hate calling them “former” students, because some of them stay in touch. I was lying in bed in Ajaccio, Corsica at 5:30 this morning and saw a text from one of these “former” students asking about my thoughts on the bombing of Iran.
Those of you who know me recognize that retirement has not been that easy for me. I loved my job, and with very few exceptions, never woke up in the morning groaning that I had to go to work. So when I get an opportunity to engage with young, curious minds I’m not going to say no.
I crawled out of bed, found a cup of tea, and sat down to answer a pretty complicated question. Here, in full, is how I presented my thoughts on the bombing of Iran during the week of 6/22/2025 to my “former” students.
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Let me start out by saying I will never tire of the notion that even one of you reaches out to me when issues come up. It is surely the thing I miss the most about teaching…that is, the opportunity to engage with curious minds on a regular basis.
I’m travelling in Corsica now…in fact we’re on our way shortly to Napoleon’s boyhood home which is now a museum…I’ll be able to answer Jess’s question she submitted to the YouTube channel about how Napoleon is viewed here.
On to Iran. In designing a response I came to a fork in the road. I had a decision to make on how I would try to answer. But I’m not Robert Frost or his friend, so I will take both forks one at a time.
Fork 1: The trump factor. The easiest way to answer the question is to criticize the decision because trump made it. There’s plenty of justification for this approach. Everyone could rightly reject anything he does because his track record of lying about everything is pretty clear. Even in this case, he has lied repeatedly about just about everything. He’s ignored his own intelligence reports that confirm that Iran was not actively pursuing a weapons program. He lied about his intention to never get involved in a Middle East armed conflict. He himself sabotaged the Iran deal that had been in place and by all accounts was working.
It’s not hard to attribute trump’s attack as a response to falling poll numbers. Nothing gets good old American nationalist blood flowing like a war.
George W Bush had some of the lowest polling numbers in history before 9/11, and then some of the highest just a few weeks later. I AM NOT SAYING BUSH DID 9/11!!!! I’m saying the track record on the American people supporting the President during time of conflict is easy to document. (Compare this to the Brits who actually dumped Winston Churchill in the middle of WWII!)
So his Big Beautiful Bill is wildly unpopular. (Even Fox News polls suggest the public hates it.) The Senate may not pass it. His own poll numbers are down. The tariff plan pretty much collapsed in its entirety, and the rest may soon go with it.
In short, it’s easy to dismiss this attack as trump just diverting attention from his problems at home, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for doing so.
(If you really want to dig into the US military response after 9/11 as an example of pre-war misdirection, this documentary is by far the best. I used to show it in class when I taught government. It’s called “Why We Fight”. Not sure where you can find it, but you young ‘uns don’t ever seem to have trouble finding things. It’s NOT the 1950s version…it’s the one made after 9/11.}
Fork 2; The legal argument. This is the tricky one and by far the more interesting. In my lifetime I have seen presidential power to wage war without declaring it greatly expand. Though it happened before my lifetime, Truman fights in Korea and 50,000 Americans die without Congressional declaration of war. Truman called it a “police action” and avoided asking Congress to send us back to war just a few years after the Germans and the Japanese were defeated.
Since then just about every President has used armed force without explicit Congressional approval. The legal arguments and the development of these precedents are very well laid out here. I use the National Constitution site frequently, because it is the best non-biased analysis of any constitutional issue. It’s bookmarked at the top of my computer.
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-i/clauses/753
There are a couple of relevant tabs…all really useful in understanding that what trump did in Iran was maybe legal and maybe illegal. Congress does NOT have the courage to stand up to him, so essentially he can do what he wants.
As for me, I believe military force should be the very last resort. Way more people die than the country projecting that force ever forecasts. The litany of “we’ll be out of there in a couple of weeks with limited casualties and no innocents being killed” is the saddest, most treacherous lie we are told. It’s not hard to see in the last 25 years how that’s played out.
Young American men and women will die if this escalates…maybe even some of your friends. I have several former students who have been deployed in recent weeks, and they are worried. Innocents will die…maybe in large numbers, just as they are dying in large numbers in Gaza and in Israel today. Modern warfare, for all its alleged precision, still cannot prevent massive civilian casualties.
So both forks lead me to the same conclusion…this attack was unwarranted, probably illegal, and certainly risky to the lives of many who will have no say in the outcome. Diplomacy is always better, and we abandoned that when trump came to power.
There will be a price for his recklessness, we just don’t know who will pay it yet.
The Grumblings 
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