Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Senate Fails to Pass War Powers Resolution
Yesterday, the United States Senate debated a resolution invoking the War Powers Act to curb the ill-considered war againsdt Iran. The House will vote today, but since the Senate failed to pass its version, the House vote is just a formality. It will go forward to allow members to go on the record about this war. Based on how the Senate voted, the attack on Iran and all that follows is the responsibility of the Republican Party. At the moment, they seem to be OK with that, but as the body bags come home, that will change.
The vote in the US Senate was 53 against and 47 for the resolution. It was a straight party-line vote with two exceptions. Republican Rand Paul voted with the Democrats on the grounds that the president exceeded his constitutional authority. Only Congress can declare war, and the Congress never voted on anything resembling such a declaration.
As for Senator Fetterman, he seems to be stuck in 2003 and has accepted the weapons-of-mass destruction argument. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:
"Every member in the U.S. Senate agrees we cannot allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. I'm baffled why so many are unwilling to support the only action to achieve that," Fetterman said on X Monday. "Empty sloganeering vs. commitment to global security -- which is it?"
The trouble is that it is 2026 not 2003, and Iran is not Iraq. Mr. Fetterman will face a primary and may well lose if this war goes pear-shaped.
Despite those two votes crossing the floor and balancing each other out, this war is now a Republican War. Everything that happens belongs to them, for good or ill, from here on. The playbook goes back to 2003 and 2004, when George W. Bush got a mid-term win because of the war with Iraq. The White House thinks it can pull a rabbit out of the hat with a victory over the mullahs.
At the moment, this is a war in the air, fought with planes, drones and missiles. Both sides have limited ordnance, despite what the American government has said. The question is who runs out first. Do the mullahs run out of missiles first or do American allies run out of anti-missile weaponry first. Yet, one does not win a war without putting an 18-year-old in the field with an automatic rifle. Ground forces are going to be necessary.
The White House knows, one hopes, that sending US troops into Iran would be a ridiculous mistake. In Iraq, the military succeeded tactically and the entire project strategically was a disaster. After 23 years of fighting, Iraq is a satellite of Iran. That is hardly a good return on a multi-trillion dollar investment. As for the Israelis, they lack the numbers to do much on the ground unless they are fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
That leaves the Kurds, who have proved over the years that they are very good at fighting. They have also had experience of the Trump administration that leads one to believe that the Kurds are not going to trust the Americans. In 2019, Mr. Trump withdrew US forces from Syria where the Kurds were helping against ISIS, leaving them to the mercies of the Turks, with whom the Kurds have fought for decades.
The Council on Foreign Relations wrote at the time:
There are several reasons why US President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw American forces from northern Syria, and leave the region's Kurds vulnerable to neighboring Turkey's military incursion, was a terrible one. The Kurdish forces in control of the region had been the principal US partner in the struggle against the Islamic State (ISIS). Trump's abandonment of them reinforced already existing doubts in the region and around the world that the United States remains a reliable ally.
The Kurds appear to be willing to fight against Iran, but how much can the US rely on a people it betrayed?
The decline under the Trump administration continues to accelerate.
© Copyright 2026 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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