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Jared Golden of Lewiston represents Maine’s 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. This piece was originally published on April 3 in “ Dear Mainer,” Golden’s Substack. It is reposted here in its entirety, with permission.
It has been three weeks since I wrote to you about the ongoing conflict with Iran. Given the seriousness of this situation, I feel an obligation to keep in contact with you about what is happening and give you a view into my own thinking as events continue to unfold.
(Here is my earlier letter, in which I addressed questions of the separations of powers, Congress’ responsibilities now that hostilities have begun, and my own commitments to supporting our troops by seeking out the information needed to make the best judgement I can as a member of Congress in this high-stakes environment.)
Now let me provide some updates about how this conflict is developing.
At the tactical level, it appears that our armed forces are making progress toward meeting the military objectives given to them by the president. However, given his public statements, the president’s political objectives in Iran remain unclear — setting up weighty, unanswered questions about his goals and what conditions must be met, in his mind, to end the conflict. This is unsustainable.
For its part, Iran — knowing that it cannot defeat our military in a fight — has put pressure on the United States by expanding the battlefield with attacks against Gulf nations and other American allies. The defensive efforts of our military and our allies have been fairly effective to this point, but Iran maintains an ability to carry the fight beyond its borders.
A bigger problem for us and for the world has been Iran’s moves to close a critical shipping lane in the Strait of Hormuz, resulting in a significant increase in global energy costs and demonstrating its ability to extract an economic toll from the American people. It would be a mistake to believe that Iran is not capable of more.
It has been reported that the Pentagon plans to ask Congress for additional funding to pay for ongoing operations. I will treat such a request with the utmost seriousness. While I lean in favor of making sure that our troops get the resources they need to carry out their mission as safely as possible, I also have many questions for President Donald Trump and his administration, and so far they aren’t doing a good job answering those questions.
The president should be able to explain to the American people why this fight is necessary (and just as importantly, why now), what his goals are, how those goals will be accomplished and at what cost. The contradictions and lack of clarity in his primetime speech Wednesday did little to answer those questions.
President Trump has been inconsistent in his statements about his objectives. Even in private, the administration has done a terrible job providing concrete answers to basic questions from the U.S. House and Senate. That’s unacceptable. Congress — and the American people — need clear and reliable information about why we are in this conflict and some idea about what our president thinks success will look like.
What is a productive outcome for the United States?
When I was deployed in Afghanistan, the Taliban used to say “the Americans own the watches, but time is on our side.”
It was an effective summary of how, for them, fighting on their own land, victory was merely a question of whether they could maintain the will to stay in the fight. For us, defining a successful endgame was far more complex and the more we debated it, the more complex it got. Imagine for example, if we had defined victory as degrading the Al Qaeda network and getting Osama Bin Laden. Had we kept it that simple, we could have declared the mission accomplished and pulled out in 2011. Instead, we allowed the mission to balloon to include unrealistic political goals in Afghanistan, and remained there at a tremendous cost to America until 2021.
Now that we’re in an active fight with Iran, our objectives should be limited and simple, and we should drive hard to meet those objectives and get out, avoiding at all costs a long-term fight and, most of all, avoiding the necessity of putting American boots on the ground.
Here’s what a productive, and realistic, outcome for the United States could look like:
The severe degradation of Iran as an immediate military threat to the United States and our allies. As a result of its rapid military buildup and support for proxy militia forces throughout the Middle East, Iran had become a dominant and belligerent power and threat to the security of the entire region. The U.S. military should severely degrade the threat from Iran’s navy, air force, ballistic missile and drone programs, nuclear weapons program and the defense industrial base it would need to rebuild anytime soon.
The strengthening of American alliances with Gulf States. Similar to the United States, Israel has been in this situation with Iran for decades and was prepared for retaliation when it bombed Iran last year. But in the weeks since this conflict began, Iran has attacked America’s allies in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. Iran is pushing those countries closer to the United States, and we can establish credibility as a good partner in a tough situation — not only because taking care of your allies in a fight is the right thing to do, but also to further isolate Iran in the future.
The first outcome should be achievable over a relatively short window of hostilities, and a strategy designed to achieve the second will have more time to be developed and operationalized once the first objective is met.
By keeping our goals limited in scope, we can prevent the likelihood that the United States will become bogged down in a lengthy war or even worse a repeat of the failed “nation-building” efforts we took on in Afghanistan and Iraq. That said, a narrow scope does not mean we should neglect diplomacy, which is essential to leveraging military gains into a lasting, peaceful outcome.
It’s time for leaders to step up
The use of military force is deadly serious. American lives have already been lost in this conflict, and its outcome will have serious effects not only in the Persian Gulf but around the world.
At home, the high stakes should clarify the mind of elected officials and transcend politics.
Unfortunately, what we’ve seen instead is a quick retreat to partisan lanes. The service members at the front lines of this conflict deserve better from their leaders in Washington. That starts with the president, whose inconsistent statements and lack of transparency are undermining their efforts. He must provide clarity about the operation to the American people and more answers to Congress.
Many Republicans have avoided answering important questions about the conflict’s necessity or the separation of powers, and for the most part have been willing to defer to the president, so far. Meanwhile, my fellow Democrats have largely coalesced around a strategy of continuing to press for an immediate end to military operations, effectively passing the buck because they know this strategy lacks support in Congress to become law.
Instead of throwing our hands in the air — either in deference to the president or in opposition to him — both parties should work on an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that may retrospectively authorize aspects of the conflict but also place meaningful limits upon the president before the conflict escalates into a full-blown war.
Most of my colleagues would prefer this conflict to never have started, and I don’t blame them. But we should be leading conversations about how to secure the best possible outcome for America, now that it has.
