David Sanger

The military suffered huge setbacks during the 12-day war with Israel.

The protesters are on the streets.

In which case, the president may be thinking about a preventative war, which is to say a war when you're strong and your adversary is weak.

That's different than a preemptive war when you see that your adversary is getting ready to strike you and you strike them first.

Preemptive wars are considered relatively legitimate.

But preventive war has generally been considered under the rules of just war to be illegal.

And it's interesting that in the State of the Union, he did not even briefly raise the question of whether Congress would give him an authorization to use military force, similar to what it provided to George Bush prior to the invasion of Iraq, much less a war declaration.

Now, if we were being threatened with imminent attack by another country,

on our facilities here in the United States, we would consider that an act of war.

And it seems reasonable to think that if we're threatening that against Iran, that too would be an act of war and thus worthy of congressional participation.

They would.

And they might make life easy for the president by striking first.

Right.

That would be the easiest thing.

I mean, imagine for a moment, either because of a deliberate act or because of some military officer someplace who's getting way ahead of himself or even just an accident.

They take a shot at an American warship in the Persian Gulf, right, where the Abraham Lincoln is and so forth.

That could trigger something.

And so part of the difficulty of putting such a big force there is the opportunity for someone to make a miscalculation.

is huge.

And the difficulty of putting that force together at a cost of hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, and keeping it there is that it's really hard to disassemble.