Thursday, November 05, 2026

'Freed up or congressionally constrained': Is Trump more or less likely to resume war on Iran?

A collapse in oil prices on Wednesday suggests chances of escalation are dwindling, but some analysts say a bitter Trump might lash out at Tehran

During a rally in Tehran's Enqelab Square, Iranians stand beneath an anti-US billboard depicting US President Donald Trump, on 4 November 2026 (Atta Kenare/AFP)

Sean Mathews

Published date: 4 November 2026 22:08 GMT | Last update: 11 hours 36 mins ago

The Democrats secured a sweeping midterm election victory on Tuesday, but one critical question remains unresolved: is US President Donald Trump now more or less likely to resume the war on Iran with the election cycle over?

Before the midterms, the US appeared to be on the verge of launching a new, wide-scale attack against Iran.

The families of US diplomats were evacuated from the region, and additional US military assets flooded into the Middle East. Arab leaders issued cryptic warnings about a devastating new conflict.

But the attack many diplomats and analysts expected around election day never materialised. In fact, Republicans are now blaming the Iran war, and even Israel, for their blistering defeat at the hands of the Democrats.

Trump said on Wednesday that "it's largely true" the Iran war and high fuel prices tied to the conflict led to his party’s historic defeat.

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"The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night," Vice President JD Vance said more bluntly on Wednesday, also blaming the Trump administration’s ties to Israel for his party’s thrashing.

Notably, the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, posted his support for Vance’s analysis on X. People familiar with the White House have described him as an ardent anti-interventionist who has opposed the US war on Iran.

'We are going to end this war'

A nine percent collapse in oil prices on Wednesday reflects a shift in expectations. Merissa Khurma, founder and CEO of Amena Strategies, told Middle East Eye that an election outcome could see Trump’s inner circle and Congress constrain the president from resuming the war.

“This all depends on how elected members in the House and Senate work together to ensure a change of course with Iran and what Trump is told by his advisors,” Khurma, who is also a non-resident fellow at the Baker Institute at Rice University, told MEE.

US midterm elections 2026: Abdul El-Sayed becomes first Muslim elected to Senate

Several reasons could dismiss this reasoning when it comes to Trump.

The president has boasted about his “veto power” over Congress.

While Trump told Politico on Tuesday during election coverage that he didn't want to just "sit around there for two years vetoing everything", the 80-year-old billionaire who is prohibited from running for a third term may also feel unconstrained by lawmakers.

Under the Constitution, only Congress has the authority to declare war, but the last US president who sought out congressional approval for the use of military force was George W Bush in 2001 and 2002.

Still, experts say the scale of the Democrats' victory could constrain Trump. With 54 seats in the US Senate and 237 in the House, the party has a comfortable cushion that will give it subpoena and investigative power.

“It is hard to predict what Trump will do, but it matters how Democrats work with Republicans willing to cooperate on stopping further escalation,” Khurma said.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer put the Iran war at the heart of the Democratic Party’s agenda on Wednesday.

“We are going to end the war,” Schumer said.

"We have some Republicans already who have joined us in ending the war, and the Founding Fathers had the power of the purse as one of the ways of deterring a president who does war without the consent of the American people,” he added.

Despite this rhetoric and downward move in oil prices, the deployment of military assets in the Middle East suggests escalation is likely.

'Trump is freed up'

The US has two aircraft carrier groups and an amphibious assault ship in the Arabian Sea. A third aircraft carrier group is arriving in the region.

Houthis launched cross border raids on Saudi military posts, sources say

Meanwhile, Iran’s leadership appeared to savour Trump’s political collapse.

“The Iranian nation handed Trump a strategic defeat on the battlefield and in the Hormuz - and a POLITICAL DEFEAT in Washington,” Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said in a post on X.

Even as Trump acknowledged the Iran war played a part in his party’s stunning defeat, he expressed no doubts about launching a war on Iran at the start of the year.

"I can tell you that as far as that war is concerned, I would have done nothing different,” he said.

Some experts say that a bitter US president with no electoral constraints may decide to resume attacking Iran.

“If anything, Trump is now freed up for another round of strikes,” Alan Eyre, a former senior State Department expert on Iran, now at the Middle East Institute, told MEE.

“The new Congress won’t be seated until January, and even then it is questionable how much real ability they will have to constrain the president, so I don’t think it changes much,” he said.

After the US midterms: What next?

Joseph Kishore, David North

WSWS, 5 Nov 2026

The overwhelming defeat of the Republican Party in the midterm elections registers a growing rebellion against the framework of right-wing politics that has dominated the United States and its two-party system for decades.

The vote was the sharpest repudiation of a sitting president’s party in the more than half century since the 1974 elections that followed the impeachment and resignation of Richard Nixon. On Tuesday the Democrats won the national House vote by about 13 points and gained at least seven Senate seats, six of them in states Trump carried three times.

The shift ran through every region and every section of the population. It was sharpest among those whom Trump claimed as his base: rural counties, young men and workers without college degrees. Trump made the election a referendum on himself and lost resoundingly.

Within the confines of a political system that permits no alternative to the two parties of big business, the vote reflects opposition to the war on Iran, inflation, extreme levels of social inequality and attacks on democratic rights. It is the continuation, in the context of an election, of the No Kings demonstrations involving millions of people last year and the mass protests against ICE murders in Minneapolis and other cities that erupted at the beginning of 2026.

The vote is part of the international movement of the mass demonstrations of youth and workers that have spread over the past two months across France, Italy, Greece, Belgium, Spain and Germany. Moreover, the debacle suffered by Trump follows by only two weeks the defeat of the fascist Bolsonaro in Brazil.

There is a genuine elation among workers and young people over the humiliation of Trump. But not only does he remain in office—and committed to the pursuit of his fascistic agenda—there is an unbridgeable chasm between the sentiments animating masses of people and the Democratic Party.

For all the election night hoopla, the transfer of a congressional majority for the Democrats will not fundamentally change the policies of the ruling class. The wars will expand, social inequality will increase and the assault on democratic rights will continue. While the working class is moving to the left, the financial-corporate oligarchy will continue its program of imperialist militarism and class war.

Throughout Trump’s two terms, the Democrats, far from opposing Trump, functioned as his enablers. Their stance has never changed: bipartisanship, “common ground,” a readiness to “work with” the president. They repeated it as Trump sent troops into American cities, built detention camps for immigrants and launched a war on Iran.

The Democrats will rely on the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to provide this program with a left cover. On Tuesday the number of DSA members in the House rose from two to eight, as six newly elected members from New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado and California joined Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib.

The DSA contingent will function as a fig leaf for the Democrats. Its members ran as Democrats and will sit in a caucus led by Hakeem Jeffries, for whom Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib have voted as the party’s candidate for Speaker in every Congress since 2023.

The record of the DSA’s best-known officeholder shows where this leads. As millions of people demonstrated against Trump, Zohran Mamdani, the DSA mayor of New York, met with Trump at the White House twice and welcomed him to Gracie Mansion in a demonstrative display of political collaboration.

This conduct was not a matter merely of cowardice. The Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the ruling class, and what it fears above all is opposition to Trump from below. The one issue on which it waged a relentless campaign against Trump was the war against Russia in Ukraine.

Within hours of the polls closing, the Democrats were back on script. “The American people have chosen the economy over extremism. The American people have chosen hope over hatred,” declared Jeffries, who will become Speaker of the House in January. “[W]e are ready, willing and able to find bipartisan common ground with the other side of the aisle.”

Millions did not vote for “hope over hatred.” They voted against war, social misery and dictatorship. After two years spent searching for common ground with a would-be dictator, however, Jeffries announced that the search would continue.

Barack Obama sang from the same hymnal, calling for “a politics that brings people together rather than divides them.” It was Obama who, the day after Trump’s first election in 2016, assured the country that the contest had been merely “an intramural scrimmage” between two sides of the same team.

The offer of “bipartisan common ground” to a party that has spent two years working to establish a presidential dictatorship is a pledge to Wall Street, and Wall Street took note. On Wednesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1,570 points, or 3 percent, its best day since April 2025 and its second best since Trump was re-elected.

That was the verdict of the financial oligarchy on the election. The bankers are neither naive nor sentimental. They know that the Democrats are not going to implement a policy of social reform, let alone socialism. If they believed the election posed any threat to their interests, they would not be celebrating.

After Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democrats imposed deficit reduction and abolished welfare. After Barack Obama’s election in 2008, they rescued the banks, halved the wages of newly hired autoworkers and offered cuts to Social Security in pursuit of a “grand bargain” with the Republicans. Joe Biden, who followed Trump’s first term, waged war against Russia, armed the genocide in Gaza and prepared the way for Trump’s return.
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The other line that predominates in the media is that the election marks a return to normalcy. “The system has held,” the New York Times editorial board proclaimed, under the headline “Trump Has Met His Match.”

Do not be deceived: Trump is a symptom, not the cause. He is the political representative of a financial oligarchy that retains its grip on power.

Two forces will dominate policy and the response of the state in the coming period. The first is the economic crisis, which is showing many signs of entering a new stage. With the national debt above $40 trillion and the war driving up prices and borrowing costs, the ruling class will demand that the working class pay. The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, laid out the agenda on Wednesday, proclaiming that “one issue cries out for finding common ground: the looming fiscal cliff,” that is, major cuts to social programs.

The second is American imperialism, which will not be turned into a gentle lamb by a change in the composition of Congress. There is much talk of the election marking an end to the war against Iran, but no faction of the ruling class is prepared to tolerate a major setback in the Middle East. The war on Iran, moreover, is one front of a global war, including the war against Russia in Ukraine, the main priority of the Democrats.

Popular sentiment is far to the left of the Democratic Party. Millions of people want an end to war, the defense of democratic rights and a radical improvement in their conditions of life. Every faction of the ruling class and, one must add, the trade union apparatus is terrified of the radicalization expressed in the vote and of what it anticipates.

For decades, the profound class divisions of American society have been suppressed, by the two parties of big business, by the union bureaucracy and by an official political culture that denied the very existence of class. They are now beginning to erupt, and they will develop with explosive force.

The opposition that found expression at the polls will not remain on electoral grounds. The United States is entering a period of escalating class struggle, in which the issues that drove the vote will be fought out in the factories, the workplaces and the schools.

The basic issue is the gap between the scale of the crisis and the development of the leadership the working class requires. The objective conditions for a mass movement against war, inequality and dictatorship are maturing rapidly. The political consciousness needed to carry that movement forward is only beginning to take shape.

To advance their interests, the working class must develop as an independent political force, united with workers across national borders and armed with a socialist and revolutionary program. The central political task of our epoch, upon which the victory of socialism and the future of humanity depends, is the resolution of the crisis of revolutionary leadership in the working class.

Wednesday, November 04, 2026

Israeli prison guards ‘shot prominent Palestinian detainees nine times’

Hassan Salameh was beaten and shot inside his cell, possibly with rubber-coated bullets, after Ben-Gvir stormed the prison, his fiancee and a prisoner rights group say

A Palestinian boy holds a framed image of Hassan Salameh during a protest against the Israeli death penalty law for Palestinians in Gaza City 31 March (Reuters/Dawoud Abu Alkas)

MEE staff

Published date: 3 November 2026 15:45 GMT

Israeli prison guards shot and wounded prominent Palestinian detainee Hassan Salameh nine times last month, his fiancee and a prisoners’ rights group have said.

The assault on Salameh, 55, came after National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir stormed his cell and filmed himself threatening to kill him.

The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS), which monitors the conditions of Palestinian detainees, said it received information about the assault following a visit to Salameh by a lawyer on Monday.

Information provided to the group and Salameh’s fiancee, Ghufran Zamel, indicated that he had been severely beaten and shot nine times.

The type of ammunition used and the precise circumstances of the shooting remain unclear.

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Israeli prison guards have recently stepped up the use of rubber-coated bullets against prisoners, firing at them from close range inside their cells.

The practice has caused severe injuries and potentially irreversible harm, according to rights groups.

PPS said Israeli restrictions on prison visits had prevented the lawyer from obtaining further details.

“This has raised serious concerns about the prisoner’s fate and underscores the urgent need to disclose the circumstances of the incident and guarantee his physical safety,” the group said.

Zamel told local media that Salameh was beaten before Ben Gvir’s visit and after he left. An Israeli force stormed the cell, subjecting him to a severe beating, including blows to the face, before firing nine bullets at him.

Three days after the assault, Salameh was taken to have his injuries photographed. He was then returned to his cell without medical treatment and given only painkillers, despite the injuries he had sustained, Zamel said.

According to Zamel, Monday’s visit by the lawyer confirmed that Salameh was still suffering from the effects of the assault and remained in poor health. He appeared visibly exhausted.

PPS said the attack came amid what it described as a campaign targeting prominent Palestinian prisoners, which goes “beyond repression and punishment” and places their lives at risk.

“Prisoner leaders are facing various forms of physical and psychological torture, systematic crackdowns and public threats to kill them made by Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir,” the group said.

“The continuation of these policies, alongside restrictions on visits and the absence of independent oversight, paves the way for further violations and deprives prisoners of even the most basic protection.”

Escalating abuse

Born in the Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza in 1971, Salameh became involved in Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation after the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987.

He later became a leading figure in the armed wing of Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades. In 1996, Israel convicted him of orchestrating several bombings that killed and wounded scores of Israelis.

Salameh said the attacks were carried out in response to Israel’s assassination of Hamas bombmaker Yahya Ayyash earlier that year.

Israeli guards ‘crushed’ Palestinian prisoner’s testicle with rubber bullet

He was sentenced to 48 life terms and has spent a total of 14 years in solitary confinement since his imprisonment 30 years ago.

In September, Ben Gvir posted a video showing himself in Salameh’s cell, surrounded by security guards, as he told him that he wanted to “execute” him.

The minister also vowed to ensure prisoners such as Salameh were “put to death” if he became defence minister.

Palestinian prisoners, particularly prominent figures such as Salameh, have long faced abuse by Israeli prison authorities.

However, reports of abuse have escalated since the Gaza war and genocide began in October 2023. Several rights groups have accused Israeli prison authorities of widespread torture, physical assaults, sexual violence, starvation, medical neglect and humiliation of prisoners since then.

Last month, Physicians for Human Rights Israel and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel said they had collected 21 testimonies documenting what they described as a “dangerous practice” of prison guards firing rubber-coated bullets at prisoners from close range.

In one incident, an Israeli prison guard seriously wounded a Palestinian prisoner by firing rubber-coated bullets at his testicle. His right testicle was “completely crushed” and had to be surgically removed.

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US senator reveals ‘staggering’ sum AIPAC spent to defeat Abdul El-Sayed: They have the money; we have the people

November 4, 2026, at 8:37 am

Senator Bernie Sanders and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed address students at the University of Michigan and members of the local community during a town hall rally in support of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign for the U.S. Senate in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States, on October 26, 2026. [Katie McTiernan – Anadolu Agency]

Independent US Senator Bernie Sanders said on Tuesday that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the leading pro-Israel lobbying group in the United States, had spent $39 million to oppose Egyptian-American Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race.

Sanders made the remarks in a post on the US social media platform X, as voters headed to the polls in the congressional midterm elections. El-Sayed is running against Republican candidate Mike Rogers.

“AIPAC spent $30 million against Abdul El-Sayed in the primary, then poured another $9 million into supporting Mike Rogers,” Sanders said.

“Here’s the good news: In response to AIPAC, ordinary Americans donated $12 million to Abdul,” he added.

READ: AIPAC signals fresh spending against El-Sayed after humiliating $32m Michigan defeat

“They have the money; we have the people. Let’s win,” Sanders concluded.

Sanders’ remarks come amid a closely fierce race for Michigan’s Senate seat. El-Sayed won the Democratic Party nomination in August, defeating Representative Haley Stevens, who had received substantial financial backing from pro-Israel groups.

According to The Washington Post, AIPAC’s independent political action committee spent more than $30 million during the Democratic primary to support Stevens and oppose El-Sayed, before providing about $9 million to a political group backing Rogers in the general election.

El-Sayed, an Egyptian-American doctor, has taken positions critical of Israeli policies, particularly Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip. He has called for an end to US military aid to Israel and enjoys the support of Sanders and several progressive political figures.

Election flop leaves Donald Trump a wounded animal

Gabriel Rubin

November 4, 2026

WASHINGTON, Nov 3 (Reuters Breakingviews) – A paean to vanity construction projects was an apt closing message for President Donald Trump ahead of midterm elections. In 2024, he swept back into power by promising lower prices and no new wars. Two years later, his Republican Party has lost ‌unified control of Congress as inflation reaccelerates and imperious foreign policy runs aground in Iran. There was little left to tout beyond the White House’s new helipad. Still, the commander-in-chief’s apparent lack of concern makes some sense. Despite Tuesday’s legislative rebuke, he still overwhelmingly controls the trade and military decisions that caused such brutal blowback.

Losing both chambers of Congress, as early returns pointed to on Tuesday night, should end the most chaotic portion of Trump’s second term. Once seated, Democrats ⁠with investigatory powers should rein in the president’s worst excesses. Particularly rich seams likely include questionable government contracting, opens new tab, Trump family self-dealing in various cryptocurrency ventures, and influence-peddling, opens new tab abroad.

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They may be emboldened by a race that seemed to be shaped directly by White House policy. For instance, polls showed voters swinging hard for Democrats in the closing months of the race, as gasoline prices surged by 40% and diesel prices nearly doubled following Trump’s decision to attack Iran.

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/BRV-BRV/BRV-BRV/zdpxezrmzvx/media-embed.html

Republican candidates in states on the border with Canada lost, despite attempts to distance themselves from Trump’s onerous tariffs. Republican incumbent Susan Collins of Maine even won a largely symbolic rollback of some levies in late October, but it was too little and too late. Her opponent, Troy Jackson, mocked her during debates for getting duties on ‌road salt ⁠removed: “we can’t eat road salt.”

Agricultural and manufacturing states, burned by the loss of key export markets in China for beef and soybeans, delivered particularly brutal verdicts. Kansas, South Carolina, and Texas elected Democratic senators for the first time in decades. Besides reorienting the battlegrounds of American politics, their six-year terms will provide a lasting advantage in future election cycles, making ambitious legislation more plausible if the opposition party retakes the White House ⁠in 2028.

And then there’s the embrace of artificial intelligence by the President and his party. In Texas, arguably the epicenter of the boom in chatbot-powering data centers, Democrats won the governor’s race for the first time in decades. Elon Musk’s nearly $500 million in election spending for Republicans in ⁠Texas was not just wasted, but repudiated.

Ultimately, though, Trump has promised to become “Mr. Veto” against a Democratic Congress, thwarting efforts by lawmakers to address these points. Even attempts to remove members of the administration, like Defense Secretary and Iran war architect Pete Hegseth, ⁠require overwhelming votes that might still be out of reach. There will be fights over the budget, and plenty of brinksmanship. For now, the rebuke is stinging, but incomplete.

Follow Gabriel Rubin on Bluesky, opens new tab and LinkedIn, opens new tab.

Context News

On November 3, the United States held elections for the House of Representatives and 35 seats in the 100-member senate.

Editing by Jonathan Guilford; Production by Aditya Srivastav

Monday, November 02, 2026

Four-Year-Old Among Eight Palestinians Killed by Israeli Attacks Across Gaza

by Dave DeCamp | November 1, 2026 at 2:19 pm ET | Gaza, Israel

Israeli strikes pounded Gaza on Sunday, killing at least eight Palestinians, including a four-year-old boy, as the IDF continues its constant violations of the US-backed ceasefire deal.

The boy, identified as Zain Owais, was killed alongside his father, Mohammed, by an Israeli strike that hit a group of Palestinians west of Gaza City. At least one other person was killed in the strike.

Mourners react as a man carries the body of Palestinian boy Zain Owais, who was killed along with his father Mohammed in an Israeli strike, according to medics, during their funeral in Gaza City, November 1, 2026. REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas

Another Israeli attack hit the al-Mawasi tent camp west of the southern city of Khan Younis and killed five police officers, according to Gaza’s Interior Ministry. Gaza’s police force has been a frequent target of Israeli strikes as Israel seeks to disrupt Hamas’s control over the small area of Gaza where the civilian population lives.

According to Al Jazeera, the Interior Ministry said the police officers killed on Sunday were “performing their routine duties,” and it condemned the “horrific massacre.” The ministry said that since the so-called ceasefire deal was signed, the IDF has killed 75 police officers and called on the international community “to take urgent action and exert pressure” on Israel to end the attacks.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Sunday that since the ceasefire deal was signed in October 2025, the IDF has killed at least 1,583 Palestinians, including 348 children and 150 women. Another 5,696 have been injured, including 1,731 children and 966 women.

In that same period, seven IDF soldiers have been killed in Gaza, including one who was killed by other Israeli soldiers in a friendly-fire incident in February of this year, and two who were killed in September in the accidental explosion of an Israeli military drone. According to the Israeli military, the other four died as a result of “combat” in southern Gaza in October 2025, when Hamas militants were trapped on the Israeli-occupied side of the Strip.

Hamas has also not launched any rocket attacks on Israel and has agreed to a US-backed proposal that would see the group give up its weapons, but Israel rejected the potential deal. Despite President Trump calling for Israel to stop bombing Gaza because Hamas agreed to disarm, the US continues backing Israel’s daily attacks.

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Trump plans to resume bombing of Iran as early as day after midterm elections

Andre Damon @Andre__Damonm WSWEDS, 2 Nov 2026

President Donald Trump arrives to speak during a campaign rally at the Five Flags Event Center, Sunday, Nov. 1, 2026, in Dubuque, Iowa. [AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall]

The Trump administration had told Gulf Arab governments to prepare for a new round of strikes on Iran as soon as November 4, the day after Tuesday’s midterm elections, MS NOW, the cable network formerly known as MSNBC, reported Friday, citing three senior Gulf Arab officials. The network wrote that US President Donald Trump was planning to resume the bombing of Iran once the elections were over.

Tuesday’s election is expected to reflect overwhelming popular opposition to the war in Iran and to its economic consequences, including the surge in prices. In a Pew Research Center poll released October 8, 65 percent of Americans said they disapproved of how Trump had handled the war.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the United States had told several Gulf Arab governments to expect a military campaign against Iran after the election. The Journal wrote that Trump was leaning toward a large post-election attack whose targets could include Iran’s nuclear sites and its infrastructure.

MS NOW reported that the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, with its escorts and about 9,000 Marines and sailors, would arrive in late November as the third carrier in the region, and that more Patriot antimissile batteries had gone to Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Trump told KCMO, a Kansas City radio station, on Friday that the war “is going to be over very soon” and that “We’re knocking the hell out of them,” MS NOW reported. On Saturday night Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate, where a Halloween party was under way: “We’ve knocked out their nuclear. We still have to take care of, I would say one or two sites, but we can do that in 10 minutes.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was hosting the Group of 20 foreign ministers in Atlanta, said Saturday at a press conference there: “If we needed to do something militarily, we would have the ability to do it and we have everything we need to be successful.” MS NOW quoted a former official of the administration who was familiar with its deliberations as saying of Trump: “He’s been convinced that with this final attack we can get a deal with the Iranians, or we can finally destroy their nuclear program.”Available from Mehring BooksThe struggle against imperialism and for workers’ power in IranA pamphlet by Keith Jones

On Saturday, according to Iranian media as summarized by the Institute for the Study of War, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei ordered a response “without geographical limitations” and directed that the list of targets be extended to all US and Israeli assets. Iranian officials have named US bases, Gulf energy installations, pipelines and airports. In the spring fighting, Iran struck energy and industrial sites in the United Arab Emirates and airports in Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.

Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat on the Foreign Relations and Appropriations committees, has sat in a classified briefing on the plan. Speaking Wednesday at the Middle East Institute in Washington, he said the briefing included “a fairly detailed conversation about what the war plan would be if we restarted military operations,” and that the plan “will lead, in my view, to a prolongment and an escalation of this war.” He pointed to “open reporting as to what we may be planning and the civilian infrastructure that we may be targeting.”

The next day Murphy wrote on X: “Some of us have been briefed on the war plan. And while I cannot disclose any details, I can say this: the plan is insane. It will not achieve objectives and will set off a new cycle of escalation.” Murphy suffered a stroke Saturday and was hospitalized.

Murphy’s statement is particularly significant because he has seen the plan. A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has said that the operation will produce the opposite of what is claimed for it: a longer and wider war, whatever the administration intends. His objections concern its effectiveness and its legality, not the aims of the war.

Yet no Democrat, Murphy included, demanded that the briefing be made public or that Congress reconvene before the attack.

Murphy remained the only lawmaker to have spoken publicly about the briefings. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer wrote on X Wednesday that Trump “led us into this war with no plan, no authority, and no exit strategy” and that Democrats had “given Republicans 14 chances to hold Trump accountable and end this reckless war.” Schumer’s posts that week did not mention the plan to resume it.

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On Friday night, as the MS NOW report circulated, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat, headlined a get-out-the-vote rally in Dumfries, Virginia, for Representative Eugene Vindman, a Virginia Democrat who served in the Army. While making cursory statements criticizing the war in Iran, neither speaker mentioned the strikes planned for after the election or warned about their implications, let alone called for opposition.

The Democrats on CNN, CBS and NBC on Sunday did not mention the plan either. Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, on CNN’s State of the Union, did not mention the planned strikes, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, on CBS’s Face the Nation, and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, on NBC’s Meet the Press, did not mention the war at all.

On January 22, 2026, five weeks before the attack on Iran began, the Democratic Party supplied 149 House votes for the $839 billion military budget, which passed 341-88. Six weeks earlier, on December 10, 2025, the House had passed the National Defense Authorization Act 312-112, with 115 Democrats in favor, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and on December 17 the Senate passed it 77-20, with Schumer, Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois and 25 other Senate Democrats in favor.

On March 4 the Senate voted 53-47 against taking up a War Powers resolution to stop the war, and on March 5 the House voted 219-212 against a similar measure.

Gasoline prices had risen by more than 40 percent since the war began, and the national average was above $4 a gallon, according to AAA figures on an NBC News price tracker updated Saturday. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported October 16 that gasoline prices had risen 34.2 percent in the year to September, fuel oil 74.2 percent and airline fares 22.4 percent, and that consumer prices as a whole had risen 3.7 percent.

The Pentagon told Congress that the cost of the war had reached $47.1 billion by October 16, the New York Times reported Wednesday, and that more than 60 percent of it had gone to bombs, missiles and other ammunition. The Pentagon’s casualty report published October 15 listed 21 US troops dead and 865 injured in the Iran war and related operations in the region.

Nasir Khan blog

Thursday, November 05, 2026

'Freed up or congressionally constrained': Is Trump more or less likely to resume war on Iran?