Trump launched a war in Iran in February. Four soldiers died in it. Tomorrow he will attend their dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base. Two Army soldiers killed in Iranian missile and drone strikes on a Jordanian base will be returned, along with a third service member believed to be the soldier missing from those same attacks, and a fourth killed in Iraq by an Iranian drone. Speaking from the Oval Office, the president called attending the ceremony an honor.
I run a shop in Redemption Springs, Georgia. A president who orders men to war carries an obligation that does not end when they come home in transfer cases. The moral weight of the decision to wage war equals the weight of the war itself. A president cannot call it an honor to receive the dead and wash his hands of the living.
The Constitution assigns the power to declare war to Congress. Article I, Section 8. The framers understood that a single executive should not send citizens to die without deliberation. These four men deserved that deliberation before they were deployed. They deserved a Congress that debated whether their service in Jordan and Iraq served the country’s interests. What they got instead was the president’s decision and the machinery of war already in motion. No authorization for the use of military force was passed. Congress debated nothing. Democrats have pressed the president to end the war after these very killings, and it has not stopped.
This will be the third dignified transfer Trump has attended since February. Every president since Eisenhower has sent Americans to war without a formal declaration — the last one this country issued was in 1942. I’ve watched the pattern repeat under every administration I’ve been alive for. The frequency of these ceremonies in five months tells its own story about this particular war’s trajectory.
Eisenhower, in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, warned that in the councils of government, the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power would persist. He called for an alert and knowledgeable citizenry. The war that killed these four men was launched without congressional authorization. It is sustained by a Congress that has not exercised its constitutional authority to deliberate, to vote, to take responsibility for the expenditure of American lives.
The four men at Dover are the cost. The flag on the transfer case does not honor the president who ordered the war. It honors the man inside it.