‘They Are Making It Up As They Go Along’

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy says what he has heard behind closed doors proves a “senile” President Trump has no plan for Iran.

Since the United States and Israel began a series of strikes on Iran one week ago, President Trump has offered a series of shifting rationales for the war. But despite the haziness emanating from the White House, both chambers of Congress have voted down resolutions that would have placed restrictions on Trump’s ability to further his military campaign. Meanwhile, the president has raised the specter of a more prolonged conflict as he openly mulls getting involved in Iran’s search for a new leader following the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, has emerged as a strong critic of the Trump administration’s involvement in Iran and has warned that the White House risks pulling the United States into a drawn-out, expensive conflict reminiscent of the Iraq War. I spoke to Murphy about what he learned from a recent Senate briefing on Iran, what Congress can do to rein in the president’s strikes overseas, and why he’s proposing legislation to ban prediction markets from betting on war.

Earlier this week, you and your fellow senators received a classified briefing from Trump-administration officials about the ongoing war in Iran. What were your takeaways?This is a war defined by early incoherence. In that briefing, we got no greater clarity on what our objectives are. They talk a lot about hitting different weapons systems, including the nuclear program. But you can’t destroy the nuclear program from the air.

They claimed in the briefing they weren’t interested in regime change, but the president repeatedly states that he wants to pick the next leader of Iran. It’s increasingly clear that there are major divergences between our goals and Israel’s, but we got very little information about that. And finally, it appears they are readying for a very long conflict because if they aren’t prepared to topple Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, then they are going to be in constant pursuit of the Guard’s efforts to maintain and rebuild missile, drone, and nuclear capacity.

They essentially are previewing that they’re going to attempt to control Iran from the air, running thousands of missions overhead and constantly chasing military targets throughout the country. That’s a yearslong, multitrillion-dollar war. What are your biggest concerns if the U.S. ends up in a prolonged conflict with Iran?Well, the immediate impact is on the American economy. What we learned with the February jobs report is that this economy is a disaster and Trump has intentionally made it a disaster by his tariffs in particular.

The surge in oil prices will be permanent if this conflict with Iran lasts for months or a year or more. But it also appears that Israel is attempting to completely and permanently destabilize Iran and that we are entertaining the notion, at the very least, of funding a civil war by bringing the Kurds into Iran. A permanently destabilized failed state in Iran is not good for the United States. That probably means permanent targeting of our assets in the region, especially now that Russia is giving Iran information about our most sensitive locations, and it could lead to a new Shia insurgency like the one that pursued our troops relentlessly in Iraq for much of the middle of the Iraq War.

Do you think we’re likely to see boots on the ground in Iran?I think it’s impossible to know because of the incoherence and incompetence of this administration. They are making it up as they go along. It seemed as if Donald Trump just realized for the first time, 48 hours ago, that the result of his military strikes may be a harder-line leadership in charge of the country than even the ayatollah.

Everything is improvisational over at the White House right now. I think America is shocked that a president who ran on getting the U.S. out of wars is starting wars left and right. The Donald Trump people thought they knew a few years ago would never put ground troops into Iran. But this is a doddering, senile old man who’s losing his grip on reality and is being pushed around by people who probably profit off war.

So you can’t take off the table the idea that he may send millions of American troops into Iran. Since you’re a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, I’m curious for your perspective on what this war may mean for the Middle East as a whole.The one lesson to learn from the past 30 years of U.S. policy in the Middle East is that a bungled U.S. military intervention can scramble politics in the region for a generation.

I think it’s hard to overstate how much damage we did to the entire region, how many lives we destroyed through the Iraq invasion. It was ill thought out and unplanned, and it ended with the region being reshaped. That could be the consequence of these strikes in Iran, especially in the event that Iran tumbles into civil war. Traditionally, we are used to Sunni insurgency, not Shia insurgency. But if all the Shia Middle East, including Shia elements spreading into places like Pakistan, become radicalized against the United States, we could have a different kind of terrorist threat against the U.S.

and our allies in the region. The Senate voted down a War Powers Resolution that would have put restrictions on President Trump’s actions in Iran; the House followed suit a few days later. What other options does Congress have on this issue?First, it’s important to note that a War Powers Resolution is not an authorization of military force. I supported the War Powers Resolution, but I think it’s a lot easier for Republicans to vote against a War Powers Resolution than for them to vote in favor of an authorization for an open-ended war in Iran.

I think we have to use whatever leverage we have available to us, including shutting down other business before the Senate in order to prompt the administration and Republicans who support the war to bring a vote and a debate on an authorization of military force. Now, we may not be successful in that endeavor because I think they know a proactive authorization of military force probably couldn’t pass.

The other leverage we have is funding. At some point, they will need additional funding, either in the appropriations bill that will be up for debate in the fall or in a supplemental. Democrats should not provide a dime for this war, and we shouldn’t trade support for funding for the Iran war for something else. I’ve heard some suggestions that we should vote to fund the Iran war in exchange for funding for something we want.

I think that could be a grave mistake. Do you think there would be energy behind a push not to fund this conflict if it came to a vote?Of course. The public hates this war, and the war will continue to be unpopular as oil prices rise, as gas prices rise, as commodity prices rise, and as more Americans get killed. So I’m virtually certain that if there is a vote on the floor of the Senate and the House to fund the Iran war, it’s going to be really hard for anybody to vote for it, but certainly for Democrats because there’s going to be a public outcry to vote against it.

It’s true the American public is not principally plugged in to foreign affairs on a day-to-day basis; that is, until it’s all they care about. There are these moments — like when the Iraq war was going south, like the moment Obama was asking for congressional consent to bomb Syria, like during the messy withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan — that the entire country is seized by an American military engagement overseas.

So if a funding bill comes before Congress, I just think the people of this country on both the right and the left are going to be of one very loud, clear mind. It has been reported that several anonymous bets were made in prediction markets such as Polymarket prior to the first strikes on Iran, suggesting people were knowingly betting on the conflict before it began. You’re proposing legislation to address these kinds of bets.

What would that legislation look like, and why is it important to rein in these markets in this way? I think you have to be pretty knowingly deaf and blind not to understand what happened. People close to Donald Trump who knew the war was starting on Saturday made big bets on Friday. We know because that particular bet — that war would happen within 24 hours — was not a frequent bet on Polymarket until a day before the war began.

That’s clearly people with inside knowledge. We have to ban these markets entirely, first because nobody should be making money off life-and-death issues like military strikes that end up bombing schools overseas, but also because there were clearly people in or near the Situation Room who were going to make a whole bunch of money if we engaged in military strikes against Iran. So there likely were people giving the president advice based not on U.S.

national security interests but upon their secret financial interest. That’s a dystopia nobody in this country should accept. My legislation will broadly ban these prediction markets as they relate to government action like war. It’ll ban prediction markets anytime there’s a situation when one person essentially controls the entire outcome, like the president of the United States in a question of war.

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Summary

This report covers the latest developments in pakistan. The information presented highlights key changes and updates that are relevant to those following this topic.

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