Can anyone reading this editorial right now explain, clearly and succinctly, why the U.S. is currently engaged in an open-ended military operation against the Islamic Republic of Iran?

If you said yes, congratulations — you’re doing better than the Trump administration. President Donald Trump and his advisers have offered nothing but shifting and often self-contradictory explanations since the American-Israeli attacks against Iran started over the weekend.

Trump’s habit of doing whatever impulsive thing strikes his fancy, without permission from or even a coherent explanation to Congress, the American people or anyone else, is reckless enough when the topic is, say, randomly imposing tariffs on our trading partners. When the subject of Trump’s reckless impulsivity is the powder keg known as the Middle East, it is nothing short of terrifying.

A war powers resolution vote of the kind some in Congress are trying to force is the very least that must happen.

Conflicts in that region have a way of going sideways even when they begin with clear objectives and the building of domestic and international support. Recall that even George W. Bush’s catastrophic war in Iraq began with at least the pretense of a clearly stated goal (to eliminate what turned out to be nonexistent weapons of mass destruction).

To paraphrase a recent comment by some internet wag: This time, we don’t feel like we’ve even been properly lied to. Trump has gotten us into another potential forever war — the kind he has campaigned against for years, by the way — with seemingly as little forethought or public discussion as his impetuous tear-down of the White House’s East Wing.

None of this is to suggest mourning for the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s 86-year-old leader killed in airstrikes Saturday. The world is undoubtedly a better place with one less theocratic dictator who oppresses and routinely murders his own people.

But for all Trump’s sabre-rattling in recent weeks about Iran’s killing of thousands of Iranian protesters, the U.S. did nothing until that slaughter was effectively over.

In Trump’s eight-minute weekend video announcement of airstrikes that had already started, he encouraged Iranians to “take over your government.”

Regime change, then? No, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday: It is “not a so-called regime-change war.”

Trump’s video and later comments also cited the urgency of ending Iran’s development of nuclear weapons — the same program the U.S. "completely and totally obliterated" with its bombing campaign last June, as the administration crowed back then.

The administration later claimed the purpose of the current attack wasn’t to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions but to prevent it from developing conventional missiles that could reach the United States. This despite the assessment of our own military experts that such a threat is a decade away, if at all.

Again, from Hegseth: “Iran had a conventional gun to our head as they tried to lie their way to a nuclear bomb.”

Good luck untangling that one.

Perhaps the most novel explanation for the current hostilities came from one of the few grownups in this administration, Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“Why now?” he rhetorically asked in a news conference. One reason, he said, was that the U.S. knew Israel was preparing to attack Iran, so we needed to join in to “preemptively” ward off any counterattacks on U.S. assets.

So now the Israeli government is deciding for us when we go to war?

Trump later flipped that explanation on its head, saying of Israel, “I might’ve forced their hand” in the joint operation.

Did you get all that?

Is everything more clear now?

We would note that Trump's attack on Iran blithely ignores the Constitution's requirement that only Congress can declare war — though that’s an issue that far pre-dates this president. Congress hasn’t formally declared war on anyone since World War II. In the many U.S. military conflicts since then, presidents of both parties have taken advantage of an AWOL Congress that has meekly refused to assert its constitutional authority on this most fraught of subjects.

Still, most of those conflicts have at least entailed a president consulting with Congress and with the American people. Trump, being Trump, has bothered with neither.

Efforts to force a vote on a war powers resolution in Congress might at least pressure Trump and his allies to articulate a single coherent purpose for a conflict that has at this writing already cost six American service members their lives and will undoubtedly cost more going forward. They and their loved ones, along with the rest of us, are at least owed that much.

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