President Donald Trump had time to lecture Congress for more than an hour and a half during a rambling State of the Union address, but he has not found the need to provide a consistent rationale to the people’s representatives for why he started a war of choice with Iran that was likely to and has already inflamed the entire Middle East region. 

Basking in his triumphalist snatching of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from that country, Trump sent a vast armada of U.S. military forces to the Persian Gulf region directed at Iran because of [fill in the blank]. Over time, Trump’s musing about the reasons for using the U.S. military to attack Iran has changed.

Initially, the president claimed he was supporting the protests against the repressive Iranian regime. Yet since then, the protests, suppressed by that government, had subsided. He then alluded that the forces were going to the Gulf to pressure Iran to end its nuclear program—a program that he had earlier boasted, after previous surgical U.S. air strikes, already had been “obliterated,” thus eliminating the primary threat to the U.S. from Iran. Yet Steve Witkoff, Trump’s lead conflict negotiator,........

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