Iran Warns of All-Out Offensive as Trump’s Unauthorized War Grinds Into Its Fifth Month
A senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader says Tehran will abandon proportional retaliation if U.S. bombing continues, days after Congress went on record calling the war illegal.
What Iran said
A top military adviser to Iran’s supreme leader warned Friday that Tehran will escalate to a phase of open-ended offensive operations if U.S. airstrikes continue for another two or three days. Major General Mohsen Rezaei, a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, told the Iranian state news agency IRIB that Iran would stop confining itself to matching each American strike with an equivalent response, and that no political border would remain safe.
The threat landed as U.S. Central Command completed the seventh consecutive night of American bombing, a round that began at 3 p.m. Eastern on Friday and ended six and a half hours later. CENTCOM said the strikes hit surveillance sites, logistics infrastructure, underground weapons storage and maritime capabilities using fighter aircraft, drones and warships, and that U.S. forces are fully enforcing the naval blockade of Iranian ports.
Iranian state media reported that at least six bridges were struck in southern Iran, including one still under construction, killing at least eight people and injuring 20 more. The pattern of targets, bridges, rail junctions and power lines linking coastal cities, points to a campaign aimed at wresting control of the Strait of Hormuz away from Tehran by wrecking the infrastructure ordinary Iranians depend on.
Americans are already paying for it
Iran answered with missiles and drones aimed at U.S. installations across the region. Multiple U.S. officials told CBS News that several American service members were wounded when Iranian fire hit at least two bases in Jordan this week. Neither Washington nor Amman has disclosed how many troops were hurt or how badly. Jordan’s armed forces said air defenses intercepted 10 incoming missiles early Saturday. In Kuwait, a power and desalination plant burned after being hit. In Qatar, a child was wounded by shrapnel from an interception.
The official toll of Trump’s war now stands at 14 U.S. service members killed, including a Navy pilot who died in a crash over the Arabian Sea this month, with more than 400 wounded since fighting began on February 28. The president spent Thursday night telling the country the United States is winning and that Americans will see the fruits of that labor very shortly.
Congress said no. Trump did it anyway.
The war Trump is escalating is one that both chambers of Congress have already voted to stop. The House passed a war powers resolution 215 to 208 in early June, and the Senate approved it 50 to 48 on June 23, with Republicans Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski joining Democrats. It was the first time in history that both chambers directed a president to withdraw forces under the War Powers Act.
Trump’s response was to treat the vote as a nuisance. After the June ceasefire collapsed, the White House sent lawmakers a letter dated July 10 declaring hostilities resumed, a maneuver the administration reads as restarting the 60-day clock that lets a president wage war without congressional sign-off. Sen. Adam Schiff, who filed a fresh war powers resolution with Sens. Tim Kaine, Andy Kim, Jeff Merkley and Chris Van Hollen, said the claim to another 60 days has no foundation in law, and noted that Americans were promised for months the war was over before getting more strikes, another blockade and turmoil that will push prices higher.
Republicans are the reason it continues
Congressional Republicans hold the majorities that could force this president to come ask permission, and with a handful of exceptions they have declined to use them. GOP leadership has not held public hearings with administration officials on a war that has killed American troops, wounded hundreds more and dragged into its fifth month with no defined objective. Having voted once that further war is illegal without authorization, the Republican majority has done nothing to make that finding stick.
Democrats have been left improvising leverage. This week Senate Democrats brought the annual defense policy bill to a halt, refusing to advance it unless Republicans accept legal limits on the war. Kaine told reporters he sees no point in additional war powers votes, since Congress has already said definitively that the war is illegal. The obstacle is not the tally. It is a governing party that will not enforce its own vote against a president of its own party.
Rezaei’s warning is a threat from an authoritarian government with a long record of violence against its own people and its neighbors, and it should be read that way. It is also a description of where an unauthorized war of choice tends to go when nobody with the constitutional power to stop it is willing to.
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