By Jim Cason and David Brooks on March 3, 2026
foto: AFP
Contradictory messages, shifting objectives, and now warnings that the US war against Iran could drag on for weeks are generating growing opposition within his own country—even among his own ranks—and questions about why President Donald Trump launched this military action, even after his own military leaders concluded that there was no imminent threat to the US.
The Pentagon announced on Monday the deployment of additional troops to the region, while lawmakers in both houses of the US Congress—which did not authorize the attacks, which violate the law—were preparing resolutions to disapprove of the war. Meanwhile, nearly six in 10 Americans disapprove of Trump’s decision to take military action, according to a CNN poll that confirms several other surveys.
The U.S. government is making a very limited effort to justify this war, even to its own bases. The president and senior Pentagon officials offered no concrete evidence on Monday that the United States faced any immediate threat from Iran that would justify acting in concert with Israel to eliminate the leadership of that Islamic republic.
As he often does, the US president only added to the confusion of the official narrative about this war, arguing on the one hand that he was open to negotiating an end to the conflict if the new Iranian leadership committed to not developing nuclear weapons, while shortly thereafter calling on the Iranian people to overthrow that same leadership. On Monday, the commander-in-chief indicated that the war could continue for another four or five weeks.
The Trump administration fails to mention that the Iranian government had already negotiated a non-nuclear weapons agreement with the Obama administration, and that it was Washington, not Tehran, that withdrew from the agreement under Trump’s presidency. Furthermore, last Friday—one day before the massive US-Israeli attack—the foreign minister of Oman, the host country for the most recent negotiations between the United States and Iran, announced that Tehran had accepted an agreement subjecting it to an international monitoring mechanism to verify that it was not developing a nuclear arsenal.
“There was an offer on the table that was much stronger than what the Obama administration had negotiated with Iran… Trump had the option to declare victory. Instead, he declared war,” said expert Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, yesterday.
Democratic Senator Tim Kaine called for a vote in the Senate on Monday to end the war. “Has President Trump learned nothing from decades of U.S. meddling in Iran and endless wars in the Middle East?” Kaine asked in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal, calling on “every senator to register (their opinion) on this dangerous, unnecessary, and idiotic action.”
For his part, progressive Senator Bernie Sanders said that this “Trump-Netanyahu war is unconstitutional and violates international law. It endangers the lives of U.S. troops and people throughout the region. We have lived through the lies of Vietnam and Iraq. Enough with endless wars,” and called for the application of the law that establishes that only Congress can declare war.
Even among Republican lawmakers, there is opposition and, above all, growing concern about the lack of clear objectives in what appears to be a military operation with potentially indefinite goals and timelines. “I am opposed to this war. This is not ‘America first,’” said ultra-conservative Republican Representative Thomas Massie. “Trump, Vance, Tulsi, and all of us campaigned against foreign wars and regime change,” recalled former congresswoman and now right-wing commentator Marjorie Taylor Greene, noting that this war “does not lower inflation or make the cost of living affordable.”
On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted to reporters that “this is not Iraq, this is not endless,” but failed to articulate the specific and concrete objectives of his war. Hegseth, who has a tattoo of a Catholic crusader’s cross, called the war “our punishment against their ayatollah and their cult of death.”
On Sunday, Trump took credit for the missiles that killed the Iranian leader. “I killed him before he could kill me,” he said in an interview with ABC News.
However, in this country—including the government—there seems to be little understanding that Ali Khamenei was not only the leader of Iran, but also a leader of millions of Shiites throughout the region, and therefore his assassination has implications beyond one country.
Trump reiterates that he is open to negotiations with Iran’s new government, but Parsi, of the Quincy Institute, believes it is unlikely that Iran will agree to sit down at the table for some time. “It is very clear that the Iranians do not seem willing to accept a ceasefire, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to achieve that quickly. Part of the reason is their belief that if this war does not end in a way that is also costly for the United States, it will only be a temporary interlude,” Parsi told public radio.
If so, some believe that Trump has just fallen into his own trap and now does not know where the exit is.
Israel’s goal, Parsi says, is to destroy the state of Iran and perhaps create chaos in the region that could spread to Turkey and several other Middle Eastern countries. That would leave Israel as the supreme power in the region. For now, everything indicates that the United States shares that vision, but as the war casualties increase and oil prices rise, the Iranians may believe that they will be in a better position to negotiate with Washington.
The Iranians may be right. Iran has the third-largest oil reserves in the world, after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, and a quarter of all oil exported worldwide passes through the Strait of Hormuz, off the coast of Iran. Almost immediately after this war broke out, the world price of oil rose, which will likely lead to increases in the cost of gasoline and other fuels in the United States, just after Trump celebrated in his State of the Union address that he had reduced those rates.
“Of course, it’s an attempt to overthrow the Iranian government,” explained Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Columbia University and contributing columnist for La Jornada. “But it’s part of something bigger. The United States is currently fighting for global hegemony… This is part of a world war that the United States is already waging. That war is coming to Venezuela, it will come to Cuba, or it is already in Cuba. That war is already in the Middle East. Europe is already a vassal region of the United States. So, this is the United States trying, within what is already a multipolar world, to maintain its global hegemony.”
Source: La Jornada translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English