Op-Ed: The Iran War has no clear strategy or rationale
By: Chris Backemeyer
One hundred eighty-one days. Come tomorrow, that’s how long Americans will have been fighting a war with Iran that the White House still can’t explain.
Time and again, we’re told the United States doesn’t have enough money. Not enough to protect Medicaid. Not enough to maintain food assistance for the most vulnerable among us. Yet Washington has found tens of billions of dollars to keep this war going, with no end in sight.
The war began on February 28. Since then, it has run through a ceasefire, the collapse of that ceasefire, and a resumption of strikes, at a cost of roughly $1 billion a day. Total spending is now well north of $100 billion. A single day of this war could cover a full year of health care for nearly 110,000 Medicaid enrollees.
And yet six months in, this war still lacks something that should be the bare minimum before sending American forces into conflict: a clear and compelling reason.
You don’t need to convince me that Iran is a bad actor. I worked on Iran policy for more than a decade at the State Department and the White House, including serving as a lead negotiator of the Iran Nuclear Deal.
I spent three years negotiating the 2015 agreement and defending its merits. The deal put verification programs and safeguards in place to ensure Iran could not enrich enough uranium to build a warhead. During the first Trump administration, I spent six months trying to convince officials not to rip up the agreement because a contained Iran was better than the alternative. That’s where we are now.
I’ve sat in the Situation Room and debated how to confront threats from Iran. Nothing is more sobering than weighing military action that carries a human price. And this isn’t hypothetical. American service members have died, including Army Sergeant First Class Noah Tietjens of Bellevue. The Pentagon’s own count now puts U.S. military deaths at 18, with more than 750 wounded —and rising.
If there were an imminent threat to Americans, protecting our country would be worth whatever it takes. But the administration still hasn’t demonstrated that such a threat existed or, if it did, explain how an air campaign addressed that threat. After six months of this war, Iran continues to be led by an autocrat bent on destroying America and it retains 10 warheads worth of near-weapons grade uranium.
Diplomatic efforts have been led by two businessmen, including the president’s son-in-law, neither of whom possesses the technical or diplomatic expertise needed to broker the kind of solution this crisis demands. Even the ceasefire this spring collapsed, and fighting resumed with no clearer endpoint than when it began.
Congress has tried, more than once, to rein this in. The House passed a war powers resolution twice, and in June the Senate did too — the first time both chambers had approved such a resolution directing a president to pull U.S. forces from a war. Nebraska’s entire congressional delegation voted against it, and Trump ignored it. A month later, after the ceasefire fell apart, the House passed another resolution and the Senate narrowly voted it down.
Congress can’t even agree with itself on how to stop a war it never authorized, and the administration keeps fighting regardless.
The costs also show up in the wallets of Nebraska families. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil flows, has been disrupted for months, and oil prices have climbed as a result.
For Nebraskans already struggling with higher costs, even small increases at the pump add up. Farmers, already hit by destructive tariffs, depend on fuel to plant and harvest crops. Add to that increased fertilizer prices, which further drives up food prices and hurts revenues for farmers. Truckers rely on diesel to keep goods moving.
A war thousands of miles away has become an ongoing financial burden at home.
History shows these conflicts rarely stay limited. What begins as a short campaign can become a years-long war costing trillions, and this one is already tracking that way. Those debts will eventually be used to justify cuts to rural hospitals and relief for working families. Somehow, that “fiscal responsibility” never seems to apply when it comes to funding another war overseas.
Sending Americans into harm’s way and committing billions month after month requires debate, scrutiny, and accountability.
One hundred eighty-one days in, with no clear rationale and no clear strategy, Americans deserve an answer: Why are we still spending roughly $1 billion a day bombing Iran while so many challenges here at home go unanswered?
Chris Backemeyer is the Democratic nominee for Congress in Nebraska’s 1st Congressional District.
