Yes, the Iran War Is a ‘War of Choice,’ and a Bad One

“The war on Iran is not a war of choice,” huffs New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin, who since President Donald Trump launched massive airstrikes on the Islamic Republic last week has had it up here with the “Democrats and their media handmaidens” describing the conflict as anything other than strictly defensive (leave aside for the moment the high-profile conservative critics of the war).

Goodwin’s umbrage is widespread among those supporting the war as not only justified but initiated just in the nick of time. Eschewing any defensible definition of imminent, the Harvard-educated Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) avers “the president was right to act” because “Iran has been an imminent threat to the United States for 47 years.” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R–Wyo.) echoes those thoughts, announcing, “The United States has been in a forever war with Iran since the late 1970s” and thanking Trump for “taking decisive action to defend America from the Iranian terroristic regime.”

These are ridiculous, nonsensical formulations—especially the notion that Iran was mere hours or days away from turning the American homeland into a nuked-over parking lot. Even President Donald Trump declared last June that “Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated—and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News.” Similarly, a Defense Intelligence Agency report from last year concluded Iran wouldn’t have missiles capable of reaching America until 2035. Recall also that U.S. officials were in active negotiations with Iran and that administration officials “told congressional staff in private briefings…that U.S. intelligence did not suggest Iran was preparing to launch a preemptive strike against the U.S.”

So prior to last Saturday, Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons, was years away from possessing missiles that could reach the United States, and wasn’t about to launch a sneak attack. Such basic facts completely undercut the whole idea that the president needed to act immediately and, not uncoincidentally, without any sort of congressional authorization.

That’s why “war of choice” rhetoric rankles. Washington Post columnist George Will, an arch critic of most policies enacted by Trump, drops the rhetorical equivalent of an atom bomb, writing:

Some say that U.S. involvement in Iran constitutes a “war of choice.” That too casually bandied phrase rarely fits untidy reality. America’s Civil War was a choice: Lincoln chose not to heed those — they were not few — who agreed with the prominent publisher Horace Greeley. He said of the seceding Southern states, “Let the erring sisters go in peace.”

The implication is that to oppose an unauthorized and unconstitutional war—one whose objectives and justifications keep changing and whose timeline keeps stretching out—is to be on the wrong side of the Civil War? That’s an outlandish suggestion, and one designed to smother dissent rather than clarify reality.

The phrase war of choice is most associated with former Council on Foreign Relations President Richard N. Haas, who published a 2009 memoir and study titled War of Necessity, War of Choice, which looked at the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. (Haas served in various roles in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush). In his influential formulation, Haas called the earlier conflict a “war of necessity” because it involved one country invading another sovereign nation, crossing an internationally recognized border. For the world to do nothing as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq swallowed up Kuwait, he argued, was both morally and strategically vacant. There is much to challenge about the wisdom of the first Gulf War (or, at the very least, American participation in it), but the casus belli was clear.

Yet Haas heavily criticized the 2003 invasion of Iraq, telling Frontline shortly after it took place:

I think the first thing to say about this war is that it was an elective war. It was a war of choice. We didn’t have to go to war against Iraq; certainly not when we did, certainly not how we did it….Obviously, you could have delayed it a day, a week, a month, a year. There was no necessity then. It wasn’t as though the Iraqis were poised to suddenly do something or break out. So the decision to go to war—which obviously was the president’s decision—like everything else about this war, was an elective decision.

A war of choice, in other words, is one whose timing, intensity, and duration are wildly elective and subject to change. It is certainly not a timely response to a specific act of aggression, such as the American response to the 9/11 attacks or the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Indeed, when Trump first announced the Iran strikes, he recited a litany of actions by Iran or its proxies dating back to 1979, when the current regime took power, including the taking of American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, the 1983 bombing of marines in Lebanon, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole (“they knew [about] and were probably involved with the attack”), and Hamas’ slaughter of Israelis on October 7, 2023. But as to the specific decision to go to war right here and right now, Trump simply said, “It’s been mass terror, and we’re not going to put up with it any longer.”

As my colleague Matt Welch put it on The Fifth Column podcast, we’ve gone from the “Donroe Doctrine” (foreign powers shouldn’t mess with countries in North or South America) to the Dee Snider Doctrine, named after the lead singer of Twisted Sister, whose 1984 signature song announced, “We’re not gonna take it anymore.” Out with strategic planning and building support, in with headstrong improvisation and hoping for the best.

On that last point, it’s deeply alarming that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is already refusing to rule out sending troops into Iran, and Trump is declaring, “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.” Such glibness recalls George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who notoriously told troops in Iraq that “you go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

Yet in a war of choice, timing is obviously under the control of the initiating military and it doesn’t just extend to the number of troops, planes, and bombs you possess at a given moment—it also means thinking through all sorts of scenarios, working to secure regional allies and support commitments, and building a clear set of objectives. Indeed, as bad and utterly misguided as the 2003 invasion of Iraq was, the lack of planning after major hostilities concluded was arguably worse. The same result hangs over the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya, which unseated the Gadhafi regime and ultimately gave rise to chaos that still rules the place.

In a February 28, 2026, piece on his Substack, Home & Away, Haas responded to the U.S. bombing of Iran by arguing:

First and foremost, this is a war of choice. The United States had other policy options available. Diplomacy appeared to have promise to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Increased economic pressure had the potential, over time, to precipitate regime change….Iran posed no imminent threat to vital U.S. interests. Iran was not on the verge of becoming a nuclear weapons state or using what weapons it did have against the United States. At most the threat was a gathering, manageable one.

This distinction is important, as a world in which countries believe they have the right to undertake preventive strikes against those they judge to be threats would be a world of frequent conflict. That is why such actions have no standing under international law.

Of course, simply because he popularized the term hardly means that Haas gets to define its application in every situation. But his logic is irrefutable, and there is every reason to insist on the “war of choice” phrasing because it forces Iran hawks to explain themselves and their plans in plain English rather than the obfuscatory gunk that has plagued American foreign policy for at least the entire 21st century.

Former Bush administration speechwriter and defender of torture as mere “enhanced interrogation” Marc Thiessen exemplifies this position when he writes in The Washington Post, “Trump is not starting a forever war in Iran; he’s ending one.” Like many of the president’s defenders, he lists the horrific acts of the Iranian regime even as he hails Trump’s unique genius in figuring out a way to effect regime change without a messy and ongoing physical presence. “There is no need for a U.S. invasion force. The Iranian people are the boots on the ground, and the fate of the country is in their hands,” he writes, even as the administration is starting to soften the ground for U.S. troops. No “yips” about it.

If this is indeed a war of necessity rather than a war of choice, then anything goes, all the way to the twilight’s last gleaming. That’s the sort of thinking that made Iraq a disaster and kept us in Afghanistan for just short of 20 years, amidst constantly changing and dubious rationales, until the American forces turned the country back to the rulers they had deposed in 2001.

If the first lesson of a war of choice is that it didn’t have to start the exact moment it did, the second lesson is that it can end abruptly too, especially if Congress or the people demand that it do so.