The Iran War

The war began on 28 February 2026, when the United States joined Israel's attack on Iran, and Congress has never authorized it. The House has voted 3 times to end it. By the Washington Examiner's count the Senate has taken up a war powers measure 14 times, and on 24 September it failed 49 to 50. The aim has been stated by the administration's own officials: Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Washington is strangling Iran's economy to force a change in policy or a new regime, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the goal can be regime collapse.

On the first day, Tomahawk cruise missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, in southern Iran. Minab's public prosecutor, an Iranian official, puts the final toll at 156 dead, 120 of them students and 26 teachers. A preliminary Pentagon investigation reported by the New York Times in March found the United States responsible, most likely through bad Defense Intelligence Agency coordinates. On 17 September the United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran concluded there are reasonable grounds to believe the strike was a war crime: an indiscriminate attack, made on outdated intelligence, on a building that had been a school since 2015. The same mission found Iranian authorities responsible for crimes against humanity against protesters. The administration has never formally accepted responsibility, and the offices that would assess such strikes have been cut: the Pentagon's Civilian Protection Center from 40 staff to 9, and Central Command's civilian harm team from 10 people to 1. Across the war, Iran's government puts its dead at 3,528, and the United Nations humanitarian office counts more than 3,400 civilians killed.

The Strait of Hormuz is how the war reaches everyone else. On 22 September shipping data cited by Reuters showed traffic through it down to 2 vessels, and under the American naval blockade, Drop Site News reports, Iran's oil exports fell from 1.85 million barrels a day in the spring to about 255,000 in August. The United States hit 8 Iranian tankers in the days after 5 September, by Secretary of State Marco Rubio's count, and Ansarallah took Mocha and Perim island at the Bab al-Mandab. Diesel crossed $6 a gallon on 11 September for the first time on record. The Congressional Budget Office put the war's cost to the Defense Department at more than $38 billion through 1 August, a floor that excludes casualties and veterans care, built from public data after the department declined to respond.

The administration has published no document setting out what it would accept as a settlement. The president said on 9 September that the war would end immediately after the midterms, and on 26 September he rejected Iran's offer to reopen the strait within 7 days if the blockade and oil sanctions were lifted. The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed officials, reported that he expects to resume bombing after the midterms, and Drop Site News reported officials telling the Journal that a third carrier strike group and 9,000 to 10,000 more troops are due in the region by the end of November. That is anonymously sourced, not announced policy.