The Trump administration has offered very little in the way of justification for attacking Iran. Instead, it was bomb first, offer a feeble explanation later. This is breathtakingly illegal, and the administration just doesn’t care. President Donald Trump attacked Iran because he wanted to, full stop.
Now, there’s a scramble by the administration and GOP sycophants to cobble together some Rube Goldberg contraption combining international law, domestic law, and executive authority that would somehow make this totally cool and legal, but there’s no way to make it work.
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
"Imagine a year from now" -- the new administration line, being pushed here by Marco Rubio, is that Iran was developing conventional weapons "as a shield" for nukes. That story is much weaker than claiming Iran was an imminent threat.
Let’s start with international law and the explanation that this was a “preventive” strike, so everything is hunky dory. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Attacking Iran definitely counts as the use of force against their territorial integrity, and taking out their leader definitely counts as attacking Iran’s political independence.
There is, however, an exception to this in Article 51, which allows for self-defense if an armed attack occurs. Welp, we don’t have that here either. Iran hasn’t attacked the United States. Preemptive strikes are allowed in very narrow circumstances, when a threat is imminent, overwhelming, and there is no other alternative.
Only after we started bombing Iran did the administration try to make the case that an attack by Iran was right around the corner. How? Per Trump, Iran was only a few weeks away from acquiring nuclear weapons. That’s quite a change from November 2025, when Trump boasted that we had “obliterated Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity” in the June 2025 strikes. We’re supposed to believe that somehow Iran restarted its nuclear program from zero and managed to get within spitting distance of having a nuclear weapon in about eight months.
Even setting aside the idea that Iran could make this happen in such a compressed timeline, there’s another factor that makes it impossible to buy the idea that Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons: the June strikes buried Iran’s supply of enriched uranium. There’s no evidence that Iran has managed to dig that out, and even if they did, they’d have to enrich the uranium further before beginning to make a bomb. Experts have explained that even after digging it out, Iran would still be looking at several months to a year before being able to manufacture a weapon.
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
CNN put together a montage of the regime's incoherent talking points about Trump's war on Iran
The administration also floated the idea that Iran was developing long-range missiles that could reach the United States. Sure, except our own intelligence agencies say that Iran likely couldn’t manage that
