By James E. Jennings*
ATLANTA, Georgia, USA | 15 April 2026 (IDN) — An Arab proverb says, “A fool threw a stone into a well—a hundred wise men could not get it out.”
By thumbing his nose at the Constitution, bypassing Congress, and zeroing out 349 million US citizens kept in the dark about launching a war against Iran’s 93 million people, Trump has committed war crimes and impeachable offenses.
He did it based on lies, without due authority, and under a scrambled casus belli that makes no sense, proving himself to be not just a fool but a villain.
His shifting lies about the reasons for the war are easy to see. For the White House to mask its attack plans with diplomacy like the Japanese did to US diplomats before Pearl Harbor is repugnant.
Trump acted without legal or constitutional authority to launch US attacks on Iran. Hitler danced with joy after invading Poland, Russia, and France based no checks but his own morality. He would be proud to have done such a massive crime as the attack on Iran.
Trump has repeatedly broken his numerous promises to keep the US out of “Forever Wars.” His and Netanyahu’ private war against Tehran’s leaders, using the American military as if it were his own army, violated both US law and the UN Charter.
But Trump is not a king as in medieval times. There is no way he was empowered to dispatch fleets across the globe and launch wars without consulting even the few wise men still left in Washington.
He cannot pretend that his single limitation on the use of force is his own limp and scarred morality instead of America’s official government in Congress or the requirements of conscience and law. Painful experience shows that the years of sacrifice and the costs to the US in money and blood in Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially in Vietnam, advise against such imperial dreams.
Destabilization
Launching a war of aggression in the Persian Gulf further destabilizes all the countries in the Middle East. Three million are displaced in Iran. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of a million internally displaced people in Lebanon and the CIA’s secret shipment of arms to the Kurds in north Iran are further provocations that promise lengthy turmoil ahead. And Trump’s grand plan for a Riviera in Gaza may become just another nail in the coffin of the people there.
Trump’s Administration is also breathtakingly corrupt, as catalogued in detail in an article in the prestigious Foreign Affairs journal’s March/April 2026 issue. He has lied repeatedly about his reasons for going to war, first claiming that Iran’s nuclear capability had been “obliterated” but now saying that he and Mr. Netanyahu are so sure about the urgency of Iran’s future non-compliance that they had to start a war immediately. Nobody is fooled by that.
The fact that Vice-President Vance, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and a host of others are inventing additional reasons for taking the nation to war without constitutional authority only adds to the fog of war. Trump’s distribution of a plethora of medals for heroism in past wars to cover starting another is a cheap trick to distract the public and energize his seriously lagging base.
Anyone who excuses the mass slaughter of schoolchildren at Minab, Iran on the first day of the war as a necessary cost of successfully decapitating a regime with whom we were peacefully negotiating at the time, has lost a portion of their soul. The outcome of this new war is uncertain, but one thing sure is that its reverberations will reach far into the future.
Trump’s claim that it will last only days is laughable to anyone who knows either the people of Iran or the history of the region. A thousand years from now, the people of Iran will still remember and commemorate the death of those innocent children.
Although the widespread “No Kings” protests guarantees that Trump will not be able to run roughshod over the citizens of our Republic forever as if it were his private playground, his damage to the country will be lasting.
How long justice might tarry is anybody’s guess, but his claim in the run-up to the illegal attack on Iran’s leaders that it had to be done immediately is a cruel joke. Trump is now Netanyahu’s poodle. Instead of being the strongest person on the planet as he would like to think, Trump is merely a puppet on a string, with Netanyahu as the puppeteer.
For a great power like the US to put itself in the service of a smaller one like Israel is shameful. Now with missiles buzzing like hornets around every country in the region and Russia and China getting involved—what could possibly go wrong?
*James E. Jennings, PhD, is President, Conscience International [IDN-InDepthNews]