This Is How Forever Wars Begin

First, with lies and bombs. Then, with a request for hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars. Will Congress cave to the White House yet again?

In the final year of President George W. Bush’s second term, his administration asked Congress for $190 billion to continue funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that had long since turned into quagmires. On Wednesday, the Pentagon asked the White House for $200 billion to fund the war on Iran, which is not even three weeks old.

That amount doesn’t go as far as it did two decades ago, of course, but it nonetheless says a lot about what the Trump administration is planning in Iran. The Pentagon thinks it needs roughly as much money as it cost to fight a year of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—indeed, adjusted for inflation, $200 billion is more or less what President Obama proposed for those wars in 2009.

Why does the Pentagon need that much money? Just last week, Trump said the war was “very complete” and that we had “won,” albeit with a sizable asterisk: We still had to “finish the job,” he said. So what does finishing the job in Iran entail? It’s a rhetorical question—because it’s clear that the administration doesn’t know. The more interesting question at this moment is whether the Republican-controlled Congress, which is about to be put on the spot over the war, will force the administration to provide a concrete answer.

Trump and his “secretary of war,” Pete Hegseth, have said plenty about the war, but their statements have been vague, geopolitically illiterate, unhinged, sociopathic, and increasingly desperate—sometimes all at once. But one can glean a handful of potential objectives: the demise of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard; the........

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