Lawfare Archive: The National Security Law Podcast Guys Talk Soleimani

Summary

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The Lawfare Podcast – Archive: The National Security Law Podcast Guys Talk Soleimani

Date: March 8, 2026 (original discussion from January 11, 2020)
Host: Benjamin Wittes (for Lawfare), Featuring Bobby Chesney & Steve Vladek (National Security Law Podcast, UT Austin)

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Episode Overview

This episode of The Lawfare Podcast, cross-posted from the National Security Law Podcast, features University of Texas law professors Bobby Chesney and Steve Vladek as they take a deep dive into the legality and strategic policy implications of the U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. With reference to recent escalations between the U.S., Iran, and their proxies, Chesney and Vladek dissect the domestic and international legal authorities underlying the strike, the practical and moral boundaries of presidential war powers, and the potential longer-term impact on U.S.–Iran relations and the balance of influence in the Middle East.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Context and Background

• Escalatory Timeline: The U.S. and Iran have a long history of "below the radar" lethal force exchanges. In late 2019, attacks orchestrated by Iranian proxies in Iraq led to increasing U.S. casualties and ultimately the decision to target Soleimani.

  “This is but the latest in a really, really long...series of exchanges of sometimes violent, sometimes nonviolent interactions.” (Chesney, 12:08)

• Strategic Interests:
  • Iran’s Goals: Increase influence over Iraq, destabilize the region to its benefit, and provoke U.S. military withdrawal. (14:10–15:29)
  • U.S. Goals: Suppress ISIS, preserve hard-won stability, safeguard energy interests, and contain Iran’s power. (16:44–17:51)
• Proxy Warfare: Soleimani’s involvement in supplying and directing Iraqi Shia militias, increasing rocket attacks on U.S. and Iraqi targets.

  “...his [Soleimani's] responsibility for prior acts—including this run-up of attacks through this fall—are in fact true or at least well enough established to warrant the action…” (Chesney, 41:44)

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2. Presidential War Powers & Legal Authorities

a. Article II Constitutional Authority

• National Self-Defense vs. Congressional Power:

  “The executive branch conducts military operations based on its own analysis of its legal authorities. For obvious reasons, those analyses tend to skew a bit in favor of the executive...there's no accountability.” (Vladek, 23:18)

• Imminence, Self-Defense & Policy Judgment:
  • For Chesney, the predicate for action existed via a series of attacks—imminence as a legal standard is less significant than ongoing hostilities.
  • For Vladek, the lack of transparency and specificity undermines accountability and the possibility of genuine oversight.
• Risks of Unconstrained Authority:
  • The law has traditionally trusted executive judgment, but with a president inclined to push or break norms, the weaknesses of this system are exposed.

  “The truth of the matter is...the law doesn’t constrain like I thought it was.” (Chesney, 25:01)

  • Article II justifications are determined almost solely by the Executive Branch, with few checks from Congress or courts.

b. Statutory Authorities (AUMFs, War Powers Resolution, etc.)

• 2001 AUMF: Intended for Al Qaeda/Taliban, stretched far beyond legislative intent—"a terrible argument" re: Iran. (Chesney, 30:07)
• 2002 Iraq AUMF: A weaker case, as the focus was on regime change in Iraq—not targeting Iranian officials.

  “Its scope doesn't encompass an attack on an Iranian general...” (Vladek, 31:47)

• War Powers Resolution: Symbolic, not a source of use-of-force authority.
• Foreign Terrorist Organization designation, funding statutes: Do not grant force authorization.

  “FTO list...is not a grant of use of force. It triggers third party liability under the material support laws...it is not in any way a grant of authority.” (Chesney, 33:05)

c. International Law & Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC)

• Use of Force, Sovereignty & Proportionality:
  • Killing Soleimani in Iraq implicated not just Iran’s sovereignty but Iraq’s as well—adding complexity under the UN Charter and jus ad bellum principles.
  • Lawful if necessary, proportionate, and in response to an armed attack.
• Historical Analogy: Operation El Dorado Canyon (Libya, 1986) and Al-Qaeda strikes (1998) as legal precedent for Article II national self-defense.

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3. Memorable Moments & Noteworthy Quotes

a. Article II Accountability and Executive Power

“[T]here's no one other than the executive branch to police the contours of Article 2. Because suppose that I was right and you were wrong, it wouldn't matter.” (Vladek, 56:06)

b. Assassination Ban and Targeting Individuals

• Both agree: If a strike is otherwise lawful under Article II, it does not violate the assassination ban.

c. Presidential Bluster & Illegality of Retaliatory Threats

• Trump’s suggestion of retaliatory strikes on cultural sites—clearly a war crime, both agree, but highlight the alarming lack of internal pushback.

“If Trump issues an order...‘I want you to find some museums and...blow them up’—you think they'll just say, ‘Yes, sir’? I don't think so.” (Chesney, 62:07) “We have Trump threatening war crimes. Right? And so we agree, right? Targeting cultural sites is a war crime.” (Vladek, 62:39)

d. Escalation, Proportionality, and Policy Risks

“It could be...a significant deterrent blow...It might suffice it to say I am far more...if I had to put money down, I think it's far more likely that more Americans will die in response to this than perhaps had this not happened.” (Vladek, 77:29)

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4. Important Segments – Timestamps

• Opening background/context – 07:52–14:07
• US vs. Iranian/Russian/Chinese interests in Iraq – 14:10–17:51
• Chain of escalation (proxies, attacks, drone strike) – 18:00–21:15
• Legal basis for initial strikes & Soleimani – 21:15–28:20
• Article II, legal indeterminacy, & executive dominance – 23:18–26:17
• Dissection of AUMFs, War Powers, other statutes – 28:21–35:14
• Article II and war powers line-drawing – 35:19–41:43
• International law, UN Charter, state responsibility – 51:38–55:56
• Trump’s threats (cultural sites, disproportionality) – 61:10–64:41
• CBP detaining Iranian Americans post-strike – 68:21–73:29
• Policy implications, escalation, future risks – 73:29–80:09

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5. Conclusions & Final Thoughts

• Legalities Remain Murky, Executive Power Dominates:

  • The legal justifications for the Soleimani strike are at best a close call—largely dependent on untestable factual assertions and policy judgments by the executive.
  • There is bipartisan historical precedent for Article II-based unilateral military action in “retaliation,” but oversight is weak to non-existent.

• Policy Risks Are Severe:

  • Major risk of escalation and unpredictable blowback; “most predictable consequences...good for Iran and bad for us.” (Vladek, 79:48)

• Oversight Lapses & Norm Breaking:

  • The normalization of executive freelancing in war powers poses a long-term risk to constitutional order and national security strategy.

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Notable Quotes (with Timestamps)

• “The only constraint on the President in this area is really the President’s own judgment and the judgment of the people around him.” (Chesney, 24:56)
• “Historically...I would have been comfortable with this...because I had faith that the congressional leadership’s notification would have allowed for buy-in...I have no faith…that relevant factual information is being shared...” (Vladek, 45:01)
• “If the end result of this is they actually do force the withdrawal of U.S. forces...that’s a strategic success for Iran.” (Chesney, 15:33)
• “Targeting cultural sites is a war crime…[but] who’s gonna stop him?” (Vladek, 62:02)
• “We need to be open to the possibility that it could be a significant deterrent...It might suffice it to say I am far more...likely more Americans will die in response…” (Vladek, 77:29)

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Tone and Style

The discussion is deeply legalistic but conversational, occasionally irreverent (“crazy shit,” “bluster, bluster, bluster”), highlighting both the gravity and absurdities in U.S. security policymaking. Both speakers maintain a tone of critical realism, grounded in law but alert to the unpredictable nature of politics and personalities.

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Summary for New Listeners

If you want a clear, candid, and unvarnished discussion about the law and policy behind one of the most consequential national security decisions of the Trump era, Chesney and Vladek’s deep dive spans constitutional war powers, the shifting sand of statutory authorities, executive pretense, and the looming risks of war and governance gone adrift. The takeaway: the drone strike on Soleimani is a case study in both the strengths and limits of law as a check on force—and the perils inherent when that check is more custom than code.

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Transcript

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[Benjamin Wittes]

Hey folks, Ben Whittes here. This episode is brought to you by the folks at Ground News. I want to talk to you about media and trust people. Listen to this podcast and read Lawfare's content because Lawfare brings people information and analysis of a particularly high quality and that generates trust in an era when trust in news and media sources is low. Ground News is another organization that is working to create trust in media and media worthy of trust. It's an app that doesn't just bring you news on subjects you're interested in, it curates that news so that you can see information that people of your own political persuasion are likely to miss. It's not publishing its own stuff, but it's also doing a lot more than aggregating. It's identifying stories that are filling a blind spot that is pervasive for the left or for the right, for example. The app also shows you bias ratings and factuality ratings for each news organization covering a story so that you can see whether the story you're interested in is mostly being covered by news organizations of the left, right or center. Let me give you a specific example. I just returned from Ukraine, so I was particularly interested to see how Ground News would handle stories about the war there. It flagged that an important story about deadly Russian strikes in Ukraine is being largely ignored by right wing press. On the other hand, it also flagged that left outlets are ignoring a story about Ukrainian nationals in Germany charged with trying to send parcel bombs to Ukraine at the direction of Russian intelligence. These blind spot notices are really useful as a way of seeing what information you are probably not seeing on stories of interest to you. Or consider the recent story about President Trump proposing voting reforms that demand voter ID and proof of citizenship of would be voters. The Ground News app shows 29 media organizations reporting on this story, and it shows radically different headlines associated with it depending on the ideological valence of the outlet from the free press Washington power struggle Jeffries moves to block Trump's plan for federal election oversight. By contrast, the Daily coast headline Republicans bail on states rights so Trump can rig elections again. You can see information about each news organization's bias tendencies and its factuality ratings. You can even see information about its ownership. I find Ground News an impressive tool for checking my own biases and the biases of the media I consume, and for seeing the news that people like me generally don't see. I encourage you to check it out. You can get Ground News's Vantage subscription for 40% off, which allows unlimited access to Ground News app by visiting ground news.comlaw that's groundnews.comlaw one more time. Ground news.comlaw check it out. I really think you'll be glad you did.

[Marissa Wong]

I'm Marissa Wong, Internet Lawfare with an episode from the Lawfare archive for March 8, 2026 on February 28, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes targeting Iran that have reportedly killed at least 1,045 people in Iran, including the regime's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. These strikes are a part of the US Campaign to debilitate Iran's nuclear and missile capabilities and destabilize the current regime. The Trump administration's willingness to strike Iranian military assets dates back to January 2020, when a US drone strike assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force. For today's archive, I chose an episode from January 11, 2020 in which Robert Chesney and Steve Vladek discussed the legality of the strike that killed Soleimani and what it means for the future of US Iran relations.

[Benjamin Wittes (Host)]

I'm Benjamin Wittes, and this is The Lawfare Podcast. January 11, 2020 the National Security Law Podcast is something you should be listening to every week. The brainchild of Bobby Chesney, lawfare co founder, and Steve Vladic, both of the University of Texas Law School is the deepest dive on the National Security Law subjects of the day, available every anywhere in podcast land this week, however, the conversation between the two of them on the Solemani killing and the law thereof was so fabulous that we thought we would inject it into your feed through the Lawfare podcast feed as well. So here's what we did. We took the podcast, we edited it down just to the substantive discussion, discussions of the law, of the strike. So some parts may be a little choppy move from subject to subject, but we took out everything else and we brought you just the discussion, which is as deep a dive as we get on the subject. It's the Lawfare podcast, episode 494, the National Security Law Podcast. Guys, talk. Solemani.

[Bobby Chesney]

Hello from Austin. Welcome to episode 149 of the National Security Law Podcast. We're brought to you by the Strauss center at the University of Texas. It's Monday morning, January 6th, 2020. I'm Bobby Chesney on Steve Vladek. We're going to focus today, I think, Steve, on Iran. Is that right? Iran and Iraq. All right. It's hard to know where to jump in on this, but probably it's best to provide some, some background before we start tearing into the legal issues.

[Steve Vladek]

But maybe it's most important, legal and, and policy.

[Bobby Chesney]

Yeah. But it's.

[Steve Vladek]

Someone I know gave a pretty good quote to the Washington Post.

[Bobby Chesney]

Yeah. And I wanted to kind of reprise. Thank you. I want to reprise that a little bit.

[Steve Vladek]

Oh, you too? Yeah.

[Bobby Chesney]

There is a lot of legal discussion coming up and I think you and I have experienced plenty of times before, but certainly in the past couple of days, it seems hard for some people to hear an assessment of legal frameworks without assuming that, ah, if you're arguing something is or isn't legal, it must be because you want it to be possible to have done that or to have not done that.

[Steve Vladek]

So this is. But I do want to sort of flag, as part of our discussion of the law and policy of everything also the insanity of what the president is doing and the extent to which some of his public reactions, I think, should be giving ever more cause for concern that something is not computing. And this is what many of us feared about a president who kind of goes a little cray cray.

[Bobby Chesney]

Well, so let's get to that. I think that for those of us like me who were never Trump conservatives,

[Steve Vladek]

as opposed to me. Well, I'm back to my Twitter trolls. Right? Well, right. Yeah.

[Bobby Chesney]

You, whatever you were, you weren't a conservative.

[Steve Vladek]

True.

[Bobby Chesney]

That could be your title back before when he, when it was still the primaries and suddenly it began to appear that There might actually be some momentum behind that person. A lot of what those of us who were taking this very rigid view against him were concerned about was that he would be a dangerous steward of foreign policy and national defense.

[Steve Vladek]

That hasn't turned out at all, though.

[Bobby Chesney]

Well, here's the thing. I mean, let's start right there. I mean, up to this point, I think it's fair to say that in his, in his interactions with North Korea, with Iran and others, he's had this strange combination of sort of. There's the sucking up to strong men. Strong men. There's the blustering and the sort of, the stereotypical bullying and blustering behavior. There's precipitous actions sometimes where he does do things that are confrontational, like, you know, backing out of the nuclear agreement with Iran, that sort of thing. But, but for the most part, it's been known about him for a long time that he's relatively pro isolationist in his views about military entanglements, or at least he often frames himself that way. I think a lot of people felt that that actually was one of his more guiding light commitments insofar as he had any. And so part of what's striking about this is that after so many concrete examples of him wanting to reduce our military footprint overseas and kind of viewing that as, as sort of, I guess, I guess he views it through some kind of financial lens or whatever he views it through, suddenly he's leaning in so aggressively. I think it's part of what caught everyone so by surprise in this latest turn of events. But let's, let's talk about what these last turn of events are. We should assume everyone's.

[Steve Vladek]

And I do especially like the defense of this, that this is. He just wants to get our troops out of Iraq.

[Bobby Chesney]

I hadn't heard it put that way.

[Steve Vladek]

But there's, there are people out there saying that, you know, defending this nonsense on those grounds.

[Bobby Chesney]

Well, whatever else is true about this, it's not like it's super well thought through, you know, three dimensional chess. So I think we can, I think

[Steve Vladek]

we can rule that out on his part. Although there is, I mean, there's, I'm

[Bobby Chesney]

only talking about him.

[Steve Vladek]

No, but there's reporting about, you know, Pompeo and, you know, the Secretary of Defense and Esper and Miley and all these guys that like this actually had been in the works for a while. All right, so.

[Bobby Chesney]

Right, but you're not saying that those guys were hoping to bring all the troops home and get the U.S. out?

[Steve Vladek]

No, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. No, to the contrary.

[Bobby Chesney]

Right, that's what I'm saying.

[Steve Vladek]

Like, but that, but that's the disconnect here. Right?

[Bobby Chesney]

Well, there are many different decision makers with many different motivations that all coalesce in this one intersection that gave rise to this.

[Steve Vladek]

All right, so, so this all started, what, with the, should we start with the attack on the contractor?

[Bobby Chesney]

So, no, I think I want to go deeper. And there's a report that Reuters. So with this topic, US Iranian below the radar uses of lethal force and other aggressive forms of interaction, you could of course, go back decades, and many people are going back decades and pointing out that this is but the latest in a really, really long, sort of lifetime long series of exchanges of sometimes violent, sometimes nonviolent interactions. But I want to highlight a report that Reuters put out on Saturday. I'm going to read from this because it provides some really helpful context, I think. So again, this is from Reuters and I'm quoting here. In mid October, Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani met with his Iraqi Shiite militia allies at a villa on the banks of the Tigris. Looking across at the US Embassy complex in Baghdad, the Revolutionary Guards commander instructed his top ally in Iraq, Abu Mahdi Al Muhandis and other powerful militia leaders to step up attacks on US Targets in the country using sophisticated new weapons provided by Iran. Two militia commanders and two security services briefed on the gathering told Reuters. And then the article goes on to kind of unpack things. Talks about an increase in the supply of Katyusha and other missile capabilities from Iran to the militia groups, especially Kateb Hezbollah, which is Mohandas's group, and how the idea, at least according to these, these Shiite Iraqi sources who talked to Reuters, the whole idea was to bait the United States into some sort of military action which might then A, distract the Iraqi public from its growing unrest over Iranian influence in Iraq, turning their attention instead towards the US Foreign troop presence, and B, perhaps even bait the United States into doing something so provocative that it could end up getting the United States kicked out of Iraq, which is arguably what's unfolding as we speak, in any event.

[Steve Vladek]

So could we say a bit about why that would be good for Iran?

[Bobby Chesney]

Yeah, let's frame this, let's pause there and frame some competing. What are their interests in the area? What are our interests?

[Steve Vladek]

So, I mean, short of actually invading and taking over Iraq, which didn't work so well the first time they tried it, I think it's been clear for A while that Iran, Iran has had as a goal significant influence over just politics in Iraq, government in Iraq, but also sectarian violence in Iraq on the theory that instability in Iraq is good for Iran. Right. And so support for Shia militia groups. Right. Sort of support for sort of different factions. Right. In the Iraqi unrest and civil war, just sort of stirring the pot. Because all chaos is good for Iran, but particular chaos is especially good for Iran.

[Bobby Chesney]

Certainly, certainly I agree in general with all that. So if you're the Iranians, what would you like to have? You'd like the US Military to be out of next door to.

[Steve Vladek]

Presumably it gives you free. Especially because one of the things you're probably worried about so long as the US Has a military footprint is provoking the US Right. It's sort of, you will have a freer hand to conduct operations in an Iraq where there's no US Military.

[Bobby Chesney]

There's no great mystery to it. It's just like China would prefer for the United States not to militarily be in Japan and in South Korea. Iran would certainly.

[Steve Vladek]

It's no mystery. But I think we sometimes lose sight of the forest looking at the trees.

[Bobby Chesney]

So if we ask like so who wins? If the upshot of all this in the end is the United States is kicked out of Iraq, that's a strategic success for Iran.

[Steve Vladek]

Now can I take this one step further? There are folks who also think it is therefore a strategic success for Russia. I think that's a little more complicated. Right. I mean, I think it's certainly anything that diminishes the U.S. s influence in the Middle east probably is good for other powerful nations that also have interest in the region. I don't think it's quite as one to one.

[Bobby Chesney]

So you know, I would argue that for China it's bad in that China benefits from the shipping stability we, we provide there. I do think Russia is a decently strong indirect beneficiary insofar as their main strategic interest, I would argue, is influence in Syria. If we are out of Iraq, our ability to continue to operate in Syria is, is further reduced, if not eliminated, which is going to be the next generation domino follow on effect.

[Steve Vladek]

Although the complication obviously is isis. Right. Because in as much as Russia wants, you know, sort of to support the Assad regime. Right. Conditions in which ISIS can flourish are not necessarily conducive to that.

[Bobby Chesney]

I think, I think that their view would be that we will take care, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it and without you guys around, we can crush it.

[Steve Vladek]

That's right.

[Bobby Chesney]

Much more aggressively and illegally. But yeah, well, no doubt about that. Clearly, both in the Shiite leaderships, and I use that plural on purpose, in Iraq and the Russians and others in the Assad regime, all of them are right now not primarily concerned with crushing the Islamic State so much as preserving regime stability or leadership stability. All right, so turn around, look at it from the US Perspective. We could do a similar analysis. What are we there for? You have a multiplicity of interests. Security of energy resources is obviously looming very large. Suppressing ISIS is supposed to be, and for many leaders is in fact a first tier security interest as well. Placing pressure and hemming in Iran is clearly a strategic priority. It is hard to see how any of those are advanced. Those strategic interests are advanced by getting kicked out of Iraq.

[Steve Vladek]

Could I add one more strategic interest? This may be a softer one, but just sort of given everything we've committed already to Iraq, that just the, the legacy of it. Right. That sort of, you know, holding up to our end of the bargain, which we haven't always done.

[Bobby Chesney]

You mean, sort of don't throw away whatever gains have been achieved in Iraq,

[Steve Vladek]

in many cases over the, you know, over the blood of American service members.

[Bobby Chesney]

Yeah, but see, okay, but so now this is where it starts getting tricky. Because one way to look at that interest, which I agree is an interest, is that that is already at risk because of the mounting dominance of Iran over the, the various Shia militias and the politicians and the apparent.

[Steve Vladek]

And the apparent upsurge in sectarian violence again in Iran.

[Bobby Chesney]

Right. And so from that perspective, the main threat to that strategic interest and then by extension to the others, is Iranian leveling up of provocations. And this was a way of interjecting a sharp shock to the system on Soleimani's part that Soleimani was already doing this and escalating bit by bit and not being deterred from taking those further steps. This was a way to change that balance of calculations. So from that perspective, I don't think it's actually as cut and dried as this is obviously insane to have done this. But let's get back to the more immediate track record. So entirely apart, it's an important part of the conversation to acknowledge that there's a widely believed and asserted and I have no reason to doubt this is true set of facts about Soleimani and the Al Quds forces responsibility directly and indirectly for the death of American service members and American personnel over the years, not just in Iraq, but certainly in Iraq more recently. The claim would be that they're directly arming and directly, at least at the strategic level, issuing direction and control to these proxy militias in Iraq. So here's back to that Reuters article. And again, we just set up how in October there was a decision to try to level things up and to try to prompt the US to take some sort of provocative action by continually increasing the scale of the attacks and the sophistication of the attacks. The article goes on to say, quote, On December 11, a senior U.S. military official said attacks by Iranian backed groups on bases hosting U.S. forces in Iraq were increasing, becoming more sophisticated, pushing all sides closer to an uncontrollable escalation. His warning came two days after four Khatyushir rockets struck a base near Baghdad International Airport, wounding five members of Iraq's elite counterterrorism service. Skipping ahead, on December 27, more than 30 rockets were fired at an Iraqi military base near the northern Iraq city of Kirkuk. The attack killed a U.S. civilian contractor, wounded four Americans and two Iraqi service members. Washington accused Kateb Hezbollah of carrying out the attack, an allegation it denied. The United States then launched airstrikes two days later against the militia, killing at least 25 militia fighters, wounding 55. That, of course. Okay, that's the end of the quote. That, of course then immediately led to the apparently at least partially instigated by Soleimani incursion into the US Embassy and then the airstrike that followed against Soleimani and Mohandas themselves and killing them. That's where we got to today. So do you want to jump in at this point? We can talk about what glimpses we're getting in the media about the process of the decision making, which is pretty interesting, but we have only an incomplete picture there. We could talk about the legality of the first airstrike on Khattab Hezbollah. We could talk about the legality of the killing of Soleimani. Where should we jump in?

[Steve Vladek]

I don't know.

[Bobby Chesney]

Let's kind of go in that chronological sequence then. I guess before the Soleimani decision, you've got this airstrike against Khattab Hezbollah. It seems to me at the time that that didn't generate a great deal of angst because I think people didn't perceive the same escalation risks because it was an attack on Iraqi PMF forces who were Iranian proxies. But it wasn't perceived as directly attacking Iran.

[Steve Vladek]

I mean, it wasn't attacking a senior Iranian military command.

[Bobby Chesney]

Right. So people didn't. People didn't pay as much attention, didn't get as wound up about it. But from a legal perspective, domestic law, what's the authority to attack this group that is not the Islamic State or in any way connected? And indeed was was from that perspective part of the fight against the Islamic State. What was the domestic legal authority for that? And I think everyone including myself who looked at this thought, well, if it's true that these guys just launched 30 rockets that killed an American and wounded others, of course you have unit self defense and national self defense concepts under Article 2 under Article 2 of the Constitution. So I didn't view that as a particularly tricky question. And to be frank, I bring the same analysis to bear on the subsequent step of attacking Soleimani, although I recognize of course it's a more difficult and complicated question from a legal perspective, let alone from a policy perspective. That's kind of where I'm coming at this from.

[Steve Vladek]

I think on the first strike I see the argument but I mean this is what we're going to get into with Soleimani. I have always understood the Article 2 analysis to include escalation risk as one of the relevant considerations. Maybe it shouldn't be part of the analysis. At least that's how I've always thought about that. We don't want a scenario where the president can use one act of self defense as a way of basically getting us into a war that he couldn't get Congress to otherwise authorized.

[Bobby Chesney]

Should we unpack sort of in the abstract what little there is to say about the legal doctrine of Article 2 National Self Defense?

[Steve Vladek]

Yes, and I think this is actually probably the most important legal and con law point to take away from the last five days. Right. Which is what I really think the Soleimani attack exposes is just how problematic. Right. The sort of legal space we live in. I don't mean problematic from the perspective of what the answers are. I mean problematic from the perspective of there's no accountability. Right. That like, you know, the basically the way this operates is the executive branch conducts military operations based on its own analysis of its legal authorities. For obvious reasons, those analyses tend to skew a bit in favor of the executive right. Whether they're right or not. And you know, because of both congressional abdication and because of judicial abdication, what OLC says tends to be the law in this space, at least not because it is right or most convincing, but because it's just there's nothing else. And I think what we're so we've known that to be true forever I mean, for as long as we've been doing this, we've understood that. I don't think the average American understands that. I don't think that the first airstrike draws the kind of headlines where it's like, wait, the President can do this? And so I guess to me, the larger point of this whole thing is, you know, whether you like Trump or don't, whether you like Obama or don't, right? Whether you like the executive branch or don't, is this a sort of equilibrium we're comfortable with?

[Benjamin Wittes]

Right?

[Steve Vladek]

I mean, is this a world, Is this a sort of, is this approach to what the legal, not what legal answers are, but to who's answering legal questions? Is this one that we can be satisfied with?

[Bobby Chesney]

I think what you've just described is fair and is also entirely, entirely analogous to similar realizations that others have had about say, the national emergency statutory framework or any number of other things we've talked about on the past 148 episodes where hey, hello. It turns out the executive branch under this particular framework has all this discretion and it's really been constrained in the past more by the quality of the mind or the morals or the knowledge norm, the norm acceptance of the office holder than it has by the legal framework. And when it turns out there's someone who's willing to be a norms transgressor on some of those issues, or who acts in a way that's from a policy perspective, unpopular with those who take a more conventional view, then suddenly you realize like, oh wait, the law doesn't constrain like I thought it was. Now, in some of those areas, you've done especially good work in showing how, hey, here's a reasonable alternative framework that would be more constrained strain. So for example, on national emergencies, on this one, it's not nearly as clear to me what the more institutionally robust alternative in practical terms, in realistic terms, really would look like. Although that doesn't mean I'm not, I'm not gainsaying that it this is. This proves to be a pretty dangerous amount of discretion. But I'm not sure what the alternative would actually be.

[Steve Vladek]

I don't know. I mean, I have some thoughts, I don't think they're very popular thoughts, but. But I think it's a conversation we ought to be having because here's the problem, right? It's not just that we have historically trusted that the executive, the person with whom the buck stops, is going to be someone who, like him or not, agree with him or not, is going to make decisions that we at least understand to be reasonable ones. It's that the lawyers were understood to be constraints. And I guess I am increasingly skeptical and have been for some time that the lawyers, that the internal executive branch lawyers really are sufficiently effective. I'm sure they are more than zero constraints. Right. But I don't doubt that there is an OLC opinion either in the works or already completed about why the strike on Soleimani was lawful.

[Bobby Chesney]

But to be concerned about that assumes that such an opinion would be wrong. But I don't think it's wrong. I don't think we agree on that.

[Steve Vladek]

I think it depends on facts that we don't know. Right. I mean, so, you know, this is where I think. I mean, we talked about this a lot when we did our deep dive on Awlaki. Right? Because I think this is, you know, Awlaki is probably the case that people are most familiar with before Soleimani. Right. Anwar al Aulaqi, US citizen, who he killed in a drone strike in Yemen in what, 2010, 2011.

[Bobby Chesney]

And he was AQAP. He was known to be AQAP's primary English language propagandist, but was believed by the US government from intelligence to be intimately and personally involved in directing operational planning or at least instigating plots outside of Yemen.

[Steve Vladek]

And a crucial piece of the analysis was the notion that he posed an imminent threat to the United States. Right. Not just a threat in the abstract. And to me, the Article 2 legality, because I don't think there's a case that the 2001 AUMF authorizes the strike against Soleimani. I really don't think there's A case of 2002 AUMF authorized the strike against Soleimani. And with all due respect to the National Security Council spokesperson who said this to reporters last week, the War Powers Resolution certainly doesn't authorize the strike against Soleimani.

[Bobby Chesney]

Yeah.

[Steve Vladek]

Can we do this?

[Bobby Chesney]

Because I feel like we need to bring the readers around with us and not jump ahead of ourselves. Let's first identify. I think I'm now up to five different statutes to mention, or at least four that are not useful here. But keep getting brought up and then we'll come back to what we started talking about and we were building up to the Article 2.

[Steve Vladek]

So it's our 2001 AUMF. Right. So we have exhausted ourselves on this show about why the 2001 AUMF, which Congress passed one week after 9, 11 to go after Al Qaeda and the Taliban, doesn't apply to Iran except maybe in a world where you have a theory about Iran harboring Al Qaeda in Iran.

[Bobby Chesney]

And let's be clear about that. So because the Vice President incredibly started touting or gesturing towards that theory which has a wide following in some more obscure corners of the Internet.

[Steve Vladek]

Minor shootings before or after the Vice President Talked about the 12 hijackers on 911 that I don't know about.

[Bobby Chesney]

But I do know that he made a reference to trying to tie Soleimani to some sort of way of connecting him to Al Qaeda. My understanding is that there certainly have been some transactional engagements between Iran and Al Qaeda despite their larger theological and policy disagreements and hostilities, including Iran tolerating the presence of and allowing the presence of basically Al Qaeda fugitives within Iran. But having said, I think it's only fair to acknowledge that. But there's no plausible basis on anything that's been been shown in the public record that I've seen to suggest that actually Iran in any way or fashion was actually affirmatively supporting Al Qaeda in connection with 911 or as an associated force or is co belligerent with it or any of the other tests difference. Two decades now have defined the scope of the 2000. No.

[Steve Vladek]

So 2001AMF off.

[Bobby Chesney]

That's a terrible argument. 2002 Iraq AMF is still in the books.

[Steve Vladek]

Is at least about Iraq.

[Bobby Chesney]

Well, yeah, I actually think it's a better argument than the 2001AMF. The whole, to me the whole question is did the rather long period where we were out of Iraq, it was over and done with. Did that effectively terminate Iraq the authority or can you really look at where we are today and say this is just non stop since the 2003 conflict

[Steve Vladek]

Congress authorized in jazz and this. I mean it's worth noting that. I mean the House voted to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF last year. Right. And it just got nixed in the conference version of the ndaa.

[Bobby Chesney]

Well, I think that actually that fact cuts against the position because Congress has taken up the question of whether to repeal it and has failed to do so.

[Steve Vladek]

Yeah.

[Benjamin Wittes (Host)]

Although.

[Bobby Chesney]

So it's clearly still operative.

[Steve Vladek]

But, but, but what is it up. But what does it authorize? Right. I mean the.

[Bobby Chesney]

That's why I think that's a better argument. I think, I think the fact that the House took it up and then didn't get it across the finish line is actually a bad fact. Maybe for those who want a narrow.

[Steve Vladek]

I'm less convinced it's a bad fact. I think it's. I think it's. I don't think it's a clear. I don't think it puts it.

[Bobby Chesney]

Well, we have to agree at least that it doesn't actually move the needle because.

[Steve Vladek]

No, I just think it's a relevant data point. Right out there in the world, there's conversation about whether the 2,000 people to AUMF is still doing anything. But on the merits, I mean, the two.

[Bobby Chesney]

I don't want to let this go. Quite. So if it's not, then why do they need to repeal it? And why would somebody resist repealing it

[Steve Vladek]

just to take off the table even arguments like the one that we're having right now?

[Bobby Chesney]

I don't know. I think it's a bad fact. But I think we agree that on the merits, its scope doesn't encompass an attack on an Iranian general because the

[Steve Vladek]

whole purpose was sort of regime like, the whole purpose was defending Iraq. Right. And bringing stability to Iraq and the notion, you know, maybe if the Iraqi government were actually like, maybe this operation had been carried out in conjunction with the Iraqi government, there'd be a stronger argument in that direction. But so far as we know, it wasn't.

[Bobby Chesney]

Yeah. So a third, you mentioned the War Powers Resolution, which of course by its own terms doesn't authorize anything, literally and more symbolically is not itself a grant of authority to do anything. So it really ought not ever to be talked about in that particular.

[Steve Vladek]

And it literally says. So like, I think that's why I said, literally, it's section 8B or 8C. Right.

[Bobby Chesney]

This shall not be cited as.

[Steve Vladek]

All right, so that hasn't stopped them.

[Bobby Chesney]

Another fun one that really annoys me is that there, there have been a few references to the fact that the

[Steve Vladek]

irgc, the, the, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The White House keeps calling it the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

[Bobby Chesney]

Yeah, that. So IRGC got added to the list of designated foreign terrorist organizations.

[Steve Vladek]

Ah, yes.

[Bobby Chesney]

And it's. I've seen several sources now acting as if that was the same thing as adding it to the list of associated forces under the AMF. No, the FTO list, my friends, has

[Steve Vladek]

like 60 organizations on it.

[Bobby Chesney]

It's got tons of them. We're not. We. It is not a grant of use of force. What is it? It is. It triggers third party liability under the material support laws. It has a bunch of Immigration and Nationality act consequences. It is not in any way a grant of authority. So there's four down. Let me give you a fifth one. Somebody was quoted the day after the Attack. Someone from the government was quoted as citing a provision in that provides funding for special operations. You know what I'm talking about?

[Steve Vladek]

Yes.

[Bobby Chesney]

Its special operations support 127 or something like that. 127. I believe it is. It's authorization for SOCOM to spend money on allies who are helping us in our counterterrorism operations. It's a funding statute.

[Steve Vladek]

It is. It is axiomatic, as the Supreme Court would tell you, that funding statutes are not authorizations.

[Bobby Chesney]

Well, but it's not even a funding to do this. It's a. It's money for.

[Steve Vladek]

Here's money. Something.

[Bobby Chesney]

It's money to give to allies. Right. Who are helping us. So those five statutes are nowhere should be driving this conversation.

[Steve Vladek]

So before we get back to articles, can I say one thing? The fact that we, Susan Hennessey pointed this out like the fact that we have heard a shifting series of statutory claims from different spokespeople in the administration is not exactly confidence inspiring that they went in with a clear sense of what they were doing.

[Bobby Chesney]

Well, I would like a friendly amendment. I would say it's clearly the case that they did not settle on a. In. In a regular process sort of way. Here's what the legal justification is. Here's if you get questions, here are the bullet points on how you answer them. Instead, people are freestyling. Now, in fairness, I do think reporters reach out to who they reach out to.

[Steve Vladek]

That's right.

[Bobby Chesney]

Many of these things we've just been knocking down are unnamed. Unnamed officials who are answering questions from reporters. Not all of them, but some. You know, no one names said the 127E thing.

[Steve Vladek]

No one names the 127. But there are named people like the Vice President, the national Security advisor and other name. The DoD spokesperson whose name I don't remember, but who is a real person who have pointed to each of the first four.

[Bobby Chesney]

Right. So we agree that it's a total shambles of a process.

[Steve Vladek]

But let's come to this podcast is a total shambles of the process.

[Bobby Chesney]

That's our, that's our motto. The article 2.

[Steve Vladek]

What's the motto with you?

[Bobby Chesney]

It's awful. So anyways, Article two, let's talk about how this basically works. The battle line. This is a war powers constitutional separation of powers issue that the Supreme Court

[Steve Vladek]

has talked about once.

[Bobby Chesney]

Yes, but boy did they talk about it in the prize cases in The

[Steve Vladek]

Civil War, 1863, that old chest died.

[Bobby Chesney]

The question arises in the following way. It is clear that Article 1 confers the power to declare, declare war on Congress is clear that Article 2 compare confers the Commander in chief power on the President. It's also clear that at some point during the Constitutional Convention there was some wrestling with the language of how the declare war power should be framed when given to Congress because there was an initial idea of having it be the power to make war. That caused some of the, the drafty, the drafters to say, well, make war sounds a little bit like sort of how you run things. We'd, we don't want to do it that way. We'd had the experience of congressional running things during the Revolution itself. It wasn't a happy experience. Long and the short of it is there's reason to believe from the drafting history that there was an express discussion at the convention about the distinction between running the war when America has been attacked, sort of in what we'll call the national self defense scenario, where it seemed clear or as near as we can tell that people felt, well, you don't need Congress to authorize it if you've been attacked, so we'll call that defense. Whereas the power to take America to war that was meant to be conferred on Congress. So this gives rise to two really big questions that overhang this entire debate when all future cases arise. One is what sorts of uses of the military require this debate to take place? That is, when do you have war or something close to war such that you maybe should not be able to proceed without Congress blessing it? Secondly, if you do have that type of use of force, where exactly is the line between offense and defense? When do you have, when do you have the sort of provocations that can trigger this national self defense scenario? Steve, as you mentioned, the prize cases in 1863, so in the midst of the Civil War, some of Lincoln's early unilateral war related actions were challenged in the Admiralty Court's process. And the Supreme Court thought it perfectly appropriate to weigh in on drawing the legal lines within or clarifying the legal lines on some of these issues and affirmed that there certainly is an offense defense distinction. Said that the President not only has the authority to use and direct the military when there's been an attack, but has a duty to do so. But that doesn't solve the hard questions, of course, of knowing just which types of provocations get you there. And of course it also does not weigh in because the Civil War wasn't a hard question in this respect. It doesn't weigh in on the question of what are the sorts of kinetic engagements that might be so small in scale that don't raise this debate at all. So you've got those two questions that then sort of get developed and practiced over time, over the century and a half that followed. One thing in recent years, over the past 20 years, we've had a number of uses of force. The bigger ones have been under color of AUMFs, they've had congressional approval. So we haven't really faced these sorts of line drawing issues. The more interesting developments in the past 20 years have come in places like Libya and on the sidelines of Syria, with Trump authorizing a strike here or strike there, not against the Islamic State, which is assimilated to the aumf, but rather against the Syrian government. Those scenarios are ones in which we've seen some development from within the executive branch about how exactly it understands just how much authority can be exercised before you have to have these debates about war powers. And both the Obama administration and the Trump administration and their predecessor administrations have chosen in a way that's very executive branch friendly to draw the line at a place that I think a lot of people as a layperson would say, wow, that's not war, that's not sufficiently war related. And this is the, this is where you get into the idea of national interest where the risk of escalation, as you mentioned, the risk of escalation is relatively modest, if not de minimis, where US Troops are not in sustained ground positions. That's a bit of doctrine that's developed, in my understanding, to define when you can use the military.

[Steve Vladek]

Developed within the executive branch.

[Bobby Chesney]

Yes, develop within the executive branch and implement it in practice to establish when you could use military force without going to Congress. Because you don't have to define the defense versus offense distinction because you're below the threshold of war.

[Steve Vladek]

Right.

[Bobby Chesney]

And again, the, probably the most developed discussions really were publicly vetted during the Libyan intervention. Once that started to extend, we saw a lot of development there. And then there was an echo of it, more or less similar when Trump authorized some episodic strikes against Syrian government forces rather than Islamic State forces, which

[Steve Vladek]

we've talked about a little bit.

[Bobby Chesney]

So I guess one, one thing to say, having set it all up that way, is is the Soleimani strike best understood as being defended from an Article 2 perspective on the ground that, oh, this is below the threshold of war doesn't raise these issues. Nevermind, nothing to see here, as long as there's national interest, it's not escalatory and we don't have boots to the Ground, it's okay. I don't think so. I think that it actually fares badly on that frame because the escalation risk is so clear and latent. But I think it's a different question to say this was defense, this was prize cases defense, this was national self defense. It is a war powers question. We're at that level, but it's within the President's authority because we were attacked

[Steve Vladek]

first, hence the War Powers Resolution notification. Yeah, interesting question because they haven't made notifications for all of these strikes.

[Bobby Chesney]

Right.

[Steve Vladek]

They've just some of them they haven't even bothered to notify.

[Bobby Chesney]

I'm not up to speed enough to know when precisely they've been doing it. And also I don't have enough faith in their process to think that they did that the episodicity of their notifications would reflect a considered position. But so the position I'm trying to carve out here is this was, this

[Steve Vladek]

is this is on the national self defense side, not the national interest.

[Bobby Chesney]

Exactly.

[Steve Vladek]

Low threshold side.

[Bobby Chesney]

And so therefore, if I'm right about that, and let me, let me underscore that this is based on the premise that the facts being asserted about Soleimani's responsibility for prior acts, including this run up of attacks through this fall, are in fact true or at least, or at least well enough established to warrant the action if it all proves to be false. Obviously that, that doesn't hold up, but I think what it does suggest is that the escalation risk of course still looms hugely large from the policy perspective. But I don't think it's actually part of the Article 2 doctrine that I have in mind as being most relevant here. I think that escalation risk is indeed important. If what you're arguing is, well, this may not be defensive, but it's low.

[Steve Vladek]

So on the, on the morning, so on the morning of December 7, 1941. Right. If FDR, you know, FDR authorizes the use of military force and self defense against the attack from the Japanese Navy. Right. He says you can go after the aircraft carriers. We didn't have the capability to do it.

[Bobby Chesney]

But if we spotted them.

[Steve Vladek]

Right. Then your argument would be obviously there. That's a huge escalation risk. Right. Like then we're going to be in an open all out shooting war. And FDR responsibility. We already are. Right. And so to hell with that.

[Bobby Chesney]

I think that would be a super easy case. I might even say it's a paradigm case with one wrinkle. It would be by definition anticipatory self defense. If you got them before they bombed us, before they launched the police planes, you can make arguments and have a hobbit, but if you could take them out in the middle of the Pacific, I would say, yeah, that was anticipatory self defense, but that was still self defense.

[Steve Vladek]

But so here's the problem, right? So actually I have two problems. The first is I have a problem with the entire line of low threshold national interest uses of Article 2 power, right? That I really do think that the prize cases are fairly understood as drawing a pretty bright line between, between defense and offense. And I just am not convinced that acting in our national interest when not in response to an immediate threatened provocation falls on the defense side. But. Right. So I actually have a problem with the whole line of OSC reasoning dating

[Bobby Chesney]

back to Libya, the Syria one offs.

[Steve Vladek]

I have a problem with all that and I think I've been consistent about that. I hope I've been consistent about that. As you say, I think I am persuaded that that is not this, right? And that the drift of power that we saw in all of those OLC opinions starting in the Obama administration and working their way into the Syria strikes is not as overtly implicated here. Although obviously it's of a piece, right, that like, if OLC can point to all of these accretions of power, then it looks like there's more and more precedent for what it's doing. The problem I have with the way you've, I think, quite elegantly framed this is, then everything rises and falls on imminence, right? Because if you know what, and this, and this is the question, why now, right? Like why last week as opposed to last year, the Obama administration knew where Soleimani was, right? Most of the time, right? I'm sure even at the end the Bush administration, we were tracking Soleimani, right, During this stuff. Like what is it about now? And is it really just the attack attacks, plural, last week? Or was this a long time in the making and they were just looking for an excuse, right? Or was it the sort of super cynical version, sort of wag the dog, right? An effort by the President to distract from the bad other domestic headlines like this is, you know, that's what gets my dandruff. And what frustrates me to no end is we will never know, right? Because historically I think the president would have felt obligated to provide a full, even if classified briefing, right, to the congressional leadership in both parties to assuage separation of powers concerns, to get buy in from the congressional leadership. We've talked before about how this is not a kind of action that requires Gang of Eight notification by statute, right, but just by tradition. And the President sort of went out of his way not only to not notify Congressional Democrats, but and I realize this is petty, but I want to say this out loud. He retweeted a frickin Dinesh d' Souza tweet, right? That basically said, yeah, the reason why we didn't tell Schumer is because that would be like telling the Iranians, right? I mean, like, you know, and so in a world, you know, historically, the reason why I would have been comfortable with this kind of Article 2 assertion of power is because I had faith that the congressional leaders leadership's, you know, notification would have allowed for them to either say, yes, we support this. No, we don't. I have no faith, right, given the toxicity of our current political climate, that the relevant factual information is being shared with anyone who the President thinks is an is an opponent at this moment in time.

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[Bobby Chesney]

So I want to separate the notification and role of Congress apart from the decision making. And let me talk first about. You mentioned that it, it all hinges on, or you say it all hinges on imminence to me. To you. Right, Right. So I take a different view. I think that actually imminence is a red herring. It's very important from a policy perspective. I get that in the public department diplomacy aspects. I think it's legally a red herring here. I think the critical point is the claim that I think at least some of these officials are asserting and I think is actually the plausible argument here, there is a series of existing attacks that have already occurred that provided already the predicate for action. Now you point out, okay, but then why not prior action? Why not, you know, at any point previously the decision as to whether to take advantage of the potentially available legal authority. That's a policy decision. And there's nothing wrong with prior presidents in this president previously having decided not to go there at any point in the past, I don't think that ever disables a future president from making the decision that, okay, at this point, the policy calculus is different. Now, do I have faith that Donald Trump went through some even halfway reasonable, serious, reasonably serious policy calculation? I'm not. Not particularly, no. I doubt that very much. I have a lot of questions about what exactly was going through this person's mind that won't surprise anyone who listens to the show because I've, as I said at the outset earlier, I've been saying for many, many years now that this is a person who I don't trust to make reasonable decisions in that respect. But just looking at it from an abstract perspective of could a president reasonably, in light of what may have been the facts here, have decided that Soleimani has ordered enough things to occur that have already caused enough violence to occur to open the door towards a response of this kind. I think that was already the case. It's not a situation in which there needs to be a reasonable basis to believe there was yet another attack coming, another rocket to be launched, another American to be killed. Then it would be okay as long as we thought that was going to happen. I do think that you need to believe that it's not all over and done with. But of course it wasn't all over and done with. I think it's pretty clear.

[Steve Vladek]

So, I mean, this gets into a fascinating debate that was going on on Twitter between Marty Lederman and Beck Engber. Right. And Ona Hathaway. I'm not going to do it justice because it was like a 4000 tweet debate. But does your framing of it that way require the existence of an armed conflict between the United States and Iran?

[Bobby Chesney]

I don't think it requires one. I think it gives rise to one. Once you decide. Okay, let's. Let's simplify the fact pattern rather than keeping it real mushy. Let's say that the best understanding of the facts cut off everything prior to 2019. So the world begins in 2019, we're there. Solomoni begins to take an interest then. Obviously that's not at all how it was. It's been much more thick engagement over time. Well, let's assume that all there is is what I described earlier from the Reuters report, that one government decides to act through proxies, provide them with sophisticated weaponry, and then give them orders to begin launching those missiles both at the host states forces and at the US Forces there, and that they begin doing so. They don't succeed in killing Americans at first, but then they finally, with a barrage of 30 of them, kill one American, wound others. And there's every reason to believe there's more of the same coming. First of all, I would argue that they are, as a matter of state responsibility. If we want to put on our international law hats, they've got state responsibility for the actions of those militia forces that they are arming and directing. If that's the real fact pattern, I think that follows from Nicaragua and it follows from many other sources of international law. I don't think that's even a hard call if those facts are accepted as true. I would argue that when one state is doing that against the forces of another state, these sorts of military kinetic engagements, then I think you've actually got a state of armed conflict between them already. Now, both governments may choose not to publicly talk about it. That way, they may not take any particular actions for a variety of policy, political, diplomatic reasons. But as a legal description of what's going on, I think they've actually already got an international armed conflict between them. Even if that weren't the case, I certainly think that when the United States military conducts a military strike against an Iranian general, the international armed conflict models. The international law of international armed conflict comes into bear. IHL comes to bear. It is an IAC scenario. So I'm not sure if that's responsive to your question, but I definitely think LOAC at that point governs.

[Steve Vladek]

Okay, so I mean, I guess, I guess my bottom line here is I think it is not obvious that the strike was illegal.

[Bobby Chesney]

Right.

[Steve Vladek]

As a matter of domestic law, though, then again, the international law questions get much, much messier because it has so much to do with our relationship with Iraq.

[Bobby Chesney]

Right. There's some really naughty UN Charter usad bellum style questions around this.

[Steve Vladek]

This is a strike against a military leader of country C on the soil of country B by country A.

[Bobby Chesney]

If we'd killed him in Iran, it would be a straight up violation of the original white, analogous. Oh, violate. No, that's not at all where I was going. It would be a real sin.

[Steve Vladek]

Sorry, sorry. It would be violation of Iran's sovereignty and the question would be whether it was extreme excused by Article 51.

[Bobby Chesney]

Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. We, we would replicate the entire national self defense type debate, only we'd be talking about it through the lens of Article 51. Was this or was this not a scenario where Suleimani. Where Iran? We, we're focused too much on Suleimani as an individual, as if, as if he's bin Laden, as opposed to a manifestation of the Iranian state.

[Steve Vladek]

Right.

[Bobby Chesney]

So we would be talking about whether Iran had engaged in an armed attack already, opening the door for the United States to use force, necessary and proportionate force, in response. The fact that it occurs within Iraq gets so tricky because what are we even doing in Iraq? Well, we're there with Iraqi government consent, but for the moment is, yeah, we were. Their consent is modulated by constraints on whether and how we use force within their territory. It's all supposed to be Islamic State directed. So, and I don't claim to have an easy answer on exactly how you cash out the usad bellum UN Charter issues there, I do think that the underlying national self defense issue from Article 2 works out in analogous fashion, involves the same sorts of questions and the same factual predicates as does the Article 51 UN Charter discussion.

[Steve Vladek]

So anyway. Sorry.

[Bobby Chesney]

All right.

[Steve Vladek]

Yeah, so, but so to say all this to say, I think it's a close call on the Article two questions. I think, I think that's a closer call than you do.

[Bobby Chesney]

No doubt.

[Steve Vladek]

I also think that the fact that this debate is out there shows just how problematic it is that there's no one other than the executive branch to police the contours of Article 2. Because suppose that the. Suppose that I was right and you were wrong, it wouldn't matter.

[Bobby Chesney]

Or let's make it worse. Suppose the whole deal is that actually it turns out that none of these attacks were directed by irgc. Now I don't believe that.

[Steve Vladek]

No, no.

[Bobby Chesney]

But, but what if it turned out

[Steve Vladek]

to be true and, and the White House knew it and did this anyway?

[Bobby Chesney]

Yeah, we'll make it even worse. Right? It's a straight up wag the dog, right?

[Steve Vladek]

It wouldn't matter, right? Like, I mean it might matter politically, but I wouldn't, I don't even think it would matter politically because what Republican right now is going to stand up to President Trump over this? I haven't seen anyone.

[Bobby Chesney]

If you, if there was some sort of tape that showed that this was a straight up wag the dog scenario, I would argue that it would matter politically, but maybe I'm optimistic.

[Steve Vladek]

There are lots of things I like to think would have mattered. So let's talk about what's happened since. Right? Because what everyone thinks of the original strike, some of what's happened since is. How do I say it?

[Bobby Chesney]

Wait, before we leave it that shit. I definitely want to go there. Before we leave where we've been, I want to flag two things because I do think that it is important for listeners to think about how they feel about this in comparison to prior examples. I think the two probably most relevant prior examples, 1986 Operation El Dorado Canyon and the Reagan administration's large scale set of airstrikes against the Gaddafi regime, which to be sure, they were careful to say we weren't targeting Qaddafi himself. However they did, they did target one of his residences and ended up killing some of his family. So be careful how we parse the idea that we weren't targeting him. And Then also the 1998 Clinton administration use of force in Afghanistan, in particular after the East African embassy bombings attempting to kill Bin Laden and the Shura Council leadership of Al Qaeda, which missed because it took so long for the missiles to get there, but nonetheless was an attempt. In both cases, these were examples in which there was no authorization for use of military force from Congress. There's no statutory foundation. These were both national self defense article 2 Airstrikes conducted in ways that were arguably necessary in proportionate responses to prior attacks that killed Americans. In both those cases, much more visibly attributable and much more high visibility, more media covered events. The East African embassy bombings of course, were hugely bloody and in the focus of intense attention and relatively clear attribution pretty quickly. The 1986 El Dorado Canyon raid was an immediate response to the Libyan orchestrated bombing of the Lebel discotheque in West Berlin that killed U.S. service members. It was also part and parcel of a larger chain of what we today might call, you know, gray zone type engagements in which Libyans were engaging in all sorts of nefarious activity. I actually think it's quite similar. I think, I think what happened here was really analogous in some ways, except for the complexity of it taking place in Iraq instead of in Iran, as we said a moment ago. And because the Reagan administration went out of its way to say, hey, we weren't targeting Gaddafi personally. But actually I think once you're engaged in an international use of force of that scale intensity, if you're otherwise lawfully allowed to do it, I actually don't. I think that because it would be an armed conflict between the two states in that context, if who you're actually, if you decide to target Gaddafi himself, if he's the military commander of, of the Libyan forces in 1986, I think that would have been lawful and I think it was lawful here as far as the targeting of the individual as opposed to just bombing the building where you're going to kill lots of people.

[Steve Vladek]

I mean, one point where I think you and I don't disagree is in a world in which the strike is otherwise lawful as a matter of Article 2 authority. Right. I think you and I both agree that it doesn't contravene the assassination ban. Yeah, right.

[Bobby Chesney]

All right, so anyways, I throw that out there. That's food for thought. I'd be interested if anyone thinks, no, no, no, it's distinguishable. I'd love to hear why.

[Steve Vladek]

I mean, Iran's not Libya, right. And I mean that in A couple of respects. Right. I mean, like, I think, you know, I think the threat Iran as a country poses to the United States is. Is to me significantly greater than the threat that Libya as a country posed to the US circle in 1986. Which is not to say, I don't know.

[Bobby Chesney]

I don't think I agree, but I think it's similar.

[Steve Vladek]

One of them has a nuclear program, one of them doesn't.

[Bobby Chesney]

Neither one yet has a nuclear bomb, let alone the missiles to deliver them here. Both of them support terrorism abroad. I think they're quite similar.

[Steve Vladek]

Okay, well, and I will also say. And the Libya stuff was incredibly controversial, and there are a whole lot of people who thought it was illegal.

[Bobby Chesney]

True.

[Steve Vladek]

Yeah.

[Bobby Chesney]

There you go.

[Steve Vladek]

Yeah.

[Bobby Chesney]

My goal is only to. To establish an analogy. It may not be a helpful analogy.

[Steve Vladek]

Fair enough. I don't think this is the first time we've had crazy shit in this context. I'm cursing a lot today. All right.

[Bobby Chesney]

Okay. So it gets a little.

[Steve Vladek]

It starts predictably, then things run off the rails. Right, Right.

[Bobby Chesney]

So now we're at the bluster stage.

[Steve Vladek]

Yes. So to the shock of absolutely nobody who understands anything. Right. The strike produced immediate blowback from a whole lot of voices and a whole lot of sectors, which, you know, because the presence. The president led him to double down and to threaten all kinds of uses of force against Iran. So let's start with his tweet, threatening that he was going to identify 52 cultural and religious sites to target.

[Bobby Chesney]

Well, that's not quite what he said. Right. He said that 52 sites included May include.

[Steve Vladek]

Yes.

[Bobby Chesney]

Cultural sites.

[Steve Vladek]

Yes.

[Bobby Chesney]

I don't think he ever said religious sites, although that might or might not be so.

[Steve Vladek]

Okay, fine. 52 sites of clue call. So 52, obviously, is the number. That number has meaning here. Yeah.

[Bobby Chesney]

It's based on the hostages. Right?

[Steve Vladek]

Yeah. Targeting cultural sites. That's cool.

[Bobby Chesney]

So clearly you can't do that. If. If what he means.

[Steve Vladek]

But you say. You say, clearly he can't do that. Who's gonna stop him?

[Bobby Chesney]

I think. Do you think that. Do you think that military commanders, if Trump issues North, says, I want you to find some museums and some cultural sites. I want you to blow them up. You think they'll just say, yes, sir, I don't think so.

[Steve Vladek]

I've seen no evidence to suggest that they won't.

[Bobby Chesney]

What's your evidence? I turn that back on you and ask for evidence that they would. I think that the burden is on someone who claims the military would obey a plainly illegal order to show me Some reason to think that the military would say, yeah, sure, no problem.

[Steve Vladek]

I just. I worry about that. I just. I.

[Bobby Chesney]

You know, it's good to be worried for sure, but I'm very doubtful.

[Steve Vladek]

All right, so we have Trump threatening war crimes. Right. And so we agree, right? Targeting cultural sites is a war crime.

[Bobby Chesney]

Yeah, it's. So there is no question that the principal distinction prohibits attacks on civilian objects, and the only exception to that is when they're being put to use. So if. If he can identify a cultural site where it's being used militarily, then it. Then it. Then they waive the protection for it,

[Steve Vladek]

but just destroy it on museum. To destroy a museum.

[Bobby Chesney]

Yeah. Now there's. There's a. There's a further layer there. There's a view that says that cultural installations that are civilian objects that also have a further layer of special cultural relevance may even get further protection. You don't need to have any debate about that. You can't attack civilian. They're not being protected.

[Steve Vladek]

Can I quote the tweet exactly? Because I think it's somewhere in between what I said and what you said.

[Bobby Chesney]

Okay, good. Yeah.

[Steve Vladek]

So the tweet says, blah, blah, blah, bluster, bluster, bluster. Let the serve as a warning if Iran strikes. Any Americans or American assets we have targeted, as in, we've already targeted, like,

[Bobby Chesney]

we know where they are.

[Steve Vladek]

Right. 52 Iranian sites representing the hostages, some at a very high level and important to Iran and the Iranian culture. Right. So. So I think he's saying, like, the list of 52 includes cultural.

[Bobby Chesney]

I agree. I agree that he's. You're right. I think I said maybe I want

[Steve Vladek]

to take out the.

[Bobby Chesney]

Yeah, no, he clearly was saying that we will attack something that will include. Now he's. He's. Obviously, we don't want to fall into the trap of responding to all his bluster, because he does bluster, but it's a real risk that he might issue an order to attack civilian objects. And I don't think the military would comply with that. I really don't.

[Steve Vladek]

So here's my. Here's my concern. Right? My concern is it would be. I would have been assuaged if anyone from his administration stood up and said, obviously, the President didn't mean that.

[Bobby Chesney]

Right.

[Steve Vladek]

Obviously, the President knows that you can only attack military targets, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And instead you've got people like Pompeo go on the Sunday shows and saying, oh, that's not what he said. Right. Like, like, literally say he said something else as opposed to if he said that, I would stop him.

[Bobby Chesney]

I'm not familiar with what was how they tried to walk back the statement, but to your point, if they were out there trying to walk back the statement, that's a sign that in fact, even they who otherwise are real hot to try to pursue this course of action in general recognize that lying about

[Steve Vladek]

what he said is better than actually saying what he said said was wrong.

[Bobby Chesney]

That's not what I said.

[Steve Vladek]

I know that's what I said. All right, okay, so step one, was President Trump threatening to attack cultural sites? Step two, this was the best tweet of them all, was these media posts will serve as notification to the Congress that should Iran strike any US Person or target, the US Will quickly and fully strike back and perhaps in a disproportionate manner. I know such legal notice is not required, but it's given everyone. Okay, so we agree. I assume that disproportionate uses of military force are unlawful. Yeah, I think that it'd be hard

[Bobby Chesney]

to construct if you were just going to use a few words and try. If you said on an exam like, hey, using like four words, it'd be too easy. Issue an unlawful order.

[Steve Vladek]

Right.

[Bobby Chesney]

Conduct a disproportionate strike against cultural. Now, of course, again, I want to stick and be faithful to my own rule of not playing too much into Trump's hands when he's blustering and BSing and doing these, you know, these bombastic statements and assume that that means therefore he's going to issue an order later. That's gonna be okay. I purposely direct you to engage in disproportionate response.

[Steve Vladek]

I agree, but it is too. We are too far into this nonsense of an administration to have the whole like, don't take anything he says literally.

[Bobby Chesney]

I'm not saying that we should.

[Steve Vladek]

I know you're not, but there are people out there who are. There are people out there who say you can't ever take anything he says

[Bobby Chesney]

literally and therefore everything he says is fine. No, I completely disagree with that. What he says really matters. This matters, and that's why we're going to talk about it. There's no doubt that whether he's referring to us ad bellum proportionality, that is to say that the response to an armed attack in self defense will be a disproportionate response or whether he means use in bello proportionality. That is to say we're going to intentionally kill more severe millions than the then would be warranted under the principle of proportionality Whether he means article 2 proportionality. There's proportionality in several different relevant frameworks. By definition, if it's disproportionate, then you, you've contravened the framework.

[Steve Vladek]

Whoops.

[Bobby Chesney]

And again, I don't think that if he somehow could articulate a way of, if he said like, you know, I want a disproportionate response, what he would get would be a response. There would be a weighty response, but it would not be an obviously war crime response. Because I don't think DoD is just going to go out there and say, okay, he want, he wants the principal distinction violated. Let's do it. He wants principle.

[Steve Vladek]

There's a whole.

[Bobby Chesney]

Let's do it.

[Steve Vladek]

I'm trying to remember, I'm trying to remember. There is a whole Western episode. I think it's in the first season. It's like one of the early episodes called proportional response. Or like it's a whole episode where like, there's like, what are the virtues of proportional response? And I was like, it's the law.

[Bobby Chesney]

Oh, I gotta see that. I've not seen that. I will say this though. We don't want to fetishize the idea of proportionality in the sense of making it sound like it's a mathematical calculation and thereby running the risk of making people think that there's any kind of formula can be brought to bear here. The truth of the matter is both on the Article 2 and AD Bellum proportionality, and to maybe a lesser extent, but nonetheless a disturbingly real extent on the collateral damage proportionality fronts. The question of exactly what's proportional has lots of room for disagreement.

[Steve Vladek]

I completely agree. But literally saying it's going to be disproportionate.

[Bobby Chesney]

Oh, I know.

[Steve Vladek]

Two other things. One small point and then one big one, right? To sort of wrap this up. So third, there were a bunch of reports yesterday that seem to have been sufficiently corroborated to now actually take seriously that Customs and Border Protection has been ramping up its detention of Iranian Americans trying to enter the United States. It's early, right? CBP denies that there's any policy change going on, that there's been any shift in how they approach arriving. We're not talking about people with no connection. We're talking about people who are living in the United States.

[Bobby Chesney]

Are we talking about American citizens who

[Steve Vladek]

also have American citizenship? There are reports of both. There are reports of dual citizens, there are reports of green card holders, and there are reports of other lawful but non permanent residents.

[Bobby Chesney]

Okay, people have the right to be in the United States. So I don't know this news story. Are they saying that people are being held in custody or are people being questioned?

[Steve Vladek]

So they're being detained for up to seven or eight hours and questioned. It's not clear that anyone's being held beyond that. Right. But that they're being subjected to aggressive questioning about their politics and their networks and all kinds of other things. Now I say these are just a couple of scattershot media reports. There's a press release from an immigrants rights groups in the Pacific Northwest. But if this is true. Right. And I stress the if. Right. That's a rather alarming escalation. And I suspect, I mean, it harkens back to the very beginning of the travel ban. Right. Where there was this knee jerk reaction where the original policy was so un nuanced that it swept up all these folks who had like clear due process rights to enter the United States, like green card holders.

[Bobby Chesney]

We're talking about someone who's got. Who's an Iranian citizen.

[Steve Vladek]

Yeah.

[Bobby Chesney]

Who's coming into the United States from

[Steve Vladek]

wherever, who's returning to the United States.

[Bobby Chesney]

Returning.

[Steve Vladek]

We're talking about residents.

[Bobby Chesney]

The claim is only for people who were here already. Okay, but. Okay, so let's hypothesize some individual who is an Iranian citizen, who's a student visa, goes back to Iran, comes back. I certainly don't think it's crazy. In the midst of where we absolutely can and should expect the Iranians to be looking for some way to respond to the killing of their arguably second most important government official for there to be enhanced screening if there's some.

[Steve Vladek]

So this, I mean, this goes back to one of the longest debates in our field. Right. Which is individualized suspicion versus mass suspicion. Right. And you know, I would hope fervently that any additional screening is based on facts beyond their national origin. Right. There's at least some reason why you believe that someone who's, say someone's been living in the U.S. i mean, one of the reports is a writer who's been living in the U.S. for 35 years. Right. Like some reason why all of a sudden you think that they warrant additional process beyond the fact that they are, you know, they were born in Iran.

[Bobby Chesney]

Clearly that would sound like both problematic and stupid way to devote scarce border security.

[Steve Vladek]

That's never stopped us before.

[Bobby Chesney]

But, but I can't say that the idea that in this context you can't say, all right, we need special focus on people who have ties to Iran of, of any Kind including people who are not Iranian citizens but spend a lot of time over there for whatever reason. I think it makes perfect sense for there to be some sort of leveling up of scrutiny at the border in this context.

[Steve Vladek]

There was. I. And for me, it all rises and falls on whether there's some individualized reason why this person is more suspicious.

[Bobby Chesney]

Can't we have it both ways? In the following sense, that there's in general a decision to focus on Iran as a target set in this sense, and then within that general leveling up to exercise sound individualized suspicion to determine just how long in probing the questioning is going to be. And indeed, isn't that probably, possibly at least what's actually going on here? That sounds reasonable to me. But the idea that you can't say, all right, we have a special concern with Iran right now, I think that can't be right.

[Steve Vladek]

That's not. That's not what I'm saying. Right.

[Bobby Chesney]

I know. I understand. Needs to be individualized, but I think that you. I think that it's not just a binary.

[Steve Vladek]

Yeah, but to say you have more faith in CBP than I do. I don't think.

[Bobby Chesney]

I don't think it's fair. I don't think that's fair because I don't have a lot of faith in CBP necessarily.

[Steve Vladek]

I have none. So.

[Bobby Chesney]

Okay, well, that is fair. But I think that the fact that there may be an across the board directive. Let's imagine they reveal tomorrow that CBP is issued a directive.

[Steve Vladek]

By the way, if they reveal that tomorrow, that means they will have lied yesterday.

[Bobby Chesney]

Oh, is that right? Did they deny there's any.

[Steve Vladek]

They deny that there's any. They denied that anything was going on at all.

[Bobby Chesney]

Well, that actually sounds almost incompetent because, in fact, I would argue they should be paying special attention to people with ties to Iran right now.

[Steve Vladek]

It was this, Bobby. The thing that got my dandruff was the denial. Right. Because it's like, wait a second. Like, you know, that says, you know, everyone stay calm. Like, you know, we're not. Nothing radical has changed. We're just reasonable.

[Bobby Chesney]

This is a dangerous time. And.

[Steve Vladek]

Right. Consistent with the travel alert that the State Department issued the other day for America. Right.

[Bobby Chesney]

Like, we're real concerned about Iran right now. We're being careful, but we're not doing anything that's unwanted.

[Steve Vladek]

Instead, the response was, nope, nope, nothing to see here.

[Bobby Chesney]

I agree with you that that's ridiculous.

[Steve Vladek]

All right. The last thing is just the policy implications, because we've really. We Patented the ground, the legal issues. Right. And I do think that we should talk about why. You and I both have the reaction that legal issues aside. Right. This is troubling as a policy matter.

[Bobby Chesney]

Well, I think. I think it'd be crazy to deny that this is super high stakes in high risk. I suspect you and I may disagree on whether, at the end of the day this was unwarranted. What do you think? I'm assuming that you think it was a terrible idea, but are you open to the possibility that in fact. No. There was. This is someone who keeps getting American blood in his hands and at some point we had to do something that would be effective to stop it.

[Steve Vladek]

But I mean, you said before something very important, right. That it's important to understand the strike against Soleimani is not against a strike against a person, but as a strike against someone who was a senior figure for Iran.

[Bobby Chesney]

This is an attack on Iran.

[Steve Vladek]

And so the question is, well, won't there be another sole? Right. And so, so like how this is one guy who poses a unique threat versus just we're attacking this guy in his official capacity. Right.

[Bobby Chesney]

So I think there's no question, obviously he's already got his replacement. I do think Soleimani to some extent was unique due to the tenure and charismatic elements of his leadership and the length of it and the, the extent to which he was. I really do think he was almost uniquely powerful in this respect. It won't be quite the same as before, but this is an institution. It's not like these ties and capabilities entirely.

[Steve Vladek]

But this goes to my view of the optics. Right. And of the policy, because it seems to me that there's no scenario in which Iran won't respond. Right. And that the question then becomes like, what does that response look like? And how do we respond in turn? And I have so little faith at the moment in the leadership of the executive branch to not take any action by Iran. Right. Even what we might think of as a proportional response. Right. And react aggressive, lawfully, or not react to the fullest extent that the law would allow them, if not beyond that.

[Bobby Chesney]

I think it's very likely that it. Look, I think it's not clear that Iran will react quickly. I think the actual tools available to it to react in a way that they feel they can control the escalation spiral. They have to be very concerned about this as much as we do, probably more than we do. I don't think it's obvious how they

[Steve Vladek]

respond, but don't, obviously, that they'll respond.

[Bobby Chesney]

I think they are going to feel tremendous pressure to be seen to be responding because of the level of provocation was so strong. But what, let's play it out.

[Steve Vladek]

So, and, and, and, and because there's a bit of an in your face then going like, I mean, you know,

[Bobby Chesney]

but, but again, so, so what would be enough to respond to the pressure they may feel to be seen to be punching back? So let's say they decide, all right, we're going to have our proxies there set up some IDs, and we're going to kill X number of Americans in, in Iraq. It's clear we are going to then respond militarily again.

[Steve Vladek]

Right.

[Bobby Chesney]

And in a larger scale.

[Steve Vladek]

Right.

[Bobby Chesney]

And it becomes a classic question of who's got escalation dominance here. So, so let's say that they do that we respond. We don't strike 52 cultural targets, but let's say there's one big airstrike that destroys an IRGC headquarters building and kills a bunch of people inside of it, inside Iran this time. So then they've got to respond again. It's not obvious that they just keep leveling up every time we level up too. It's not clear actually who's got the escalation dominance.

[Steve Vladek]

I agree, but that, but, and that's part of why I don't think it's possible to know now. Right. Whether this was a good idea. Right.

[Bobby Chesney]

But clearly we know that time will tell. It could be. We need to be open to the possibility that it could be that it turns out this was a significant deterrent blow to them. This causes them to pull back to some extent on their attacks on Americans.

[Steve Vladek]

It might suffice it to say I am far more, if I had to put money down, I think it's far more likely that more Americans will die in response to this than perhaps had this not happened.

[Bobby Chesney]

I think it's really hard to know. I think it's certainly possible. It's also important to build into that calculus, though, how many go on the tab if there had been no action and they continued to provoke and not get this sharp a pushback.

[Steve Vladek]

But there's also, there's also, I mean, insofar as some of that conflict is asymmetric, there's also the question of like, you know, it's not just escalation dominance. Right. It's also like moral dominance. Right. And moral superiority and whether there's something to be said for taking the high ground. The other piece of this, and I think this is any analysis of the policy ramifications of the strike is going to have to depend upon what this does, if anything, right to our footprint in Iraq. Right. So the Iraqi parliament what voted yesterday right to in a non binding resolution to expel the US military to otherwise cut off access, you know, blah, blah, things that don't actually have a direct immediate impact but that will put a fair amount of pressure on the Iraqi government to perhaps not go all the way but at least try to reach some kind of look like they're doing something to mitigate the footprint. Right. To sort of push back against the US a little bit.

[Bobby Chesney]

But I think there's no doubt that if the end result of this is they actually do force the withdrawal of

[Steve Vladek]

U.S. forces or even the subnet or even the substantial downsize, you know, we've

[Bobby Chesney]

got, we're talking about 5,000 acknowledged forces here, many of whom are there engaged in training in support of the Iraqi military. It matters. I'm not sure how big a blow it is if there's some sort of face saving negotiation where some number of them.

[Steve Vladek]

3,000.

[Bobby Chesney]

Yeah, exactly. I don't know how much that matters, especially if what remains is the special operations capability that I have the impression is based out of the Kurdish region in the north anyways, who by the way may well stay. No matter what the Iraqi parliament or the Iraqi prime Minister say, it's entirely possible that the relative independence of the Kurds in that area and the relative emphasis of US special operations capability up there that that all sort of remains.

[Steve Vladek]

But if nothing at all, don't you think that this only further complicates. Right. The political situation in Iraq?

[Bobby Chesney]

No doubt about it, no. In a way that favors Iran. Right.

[Steve Vladek]

And so that to me is my bottom line is that when all else is said and done, I think that the, the, the most predictable consequences of this strike to me come out good for Iran and bad for us.

[Bobby Chesney]

I think that's probably right and I think that there's non negligible chances it goes the other way.

[Steve Vladek]

Yeah, yeah.

[Bobby Chesney]

All right. I have no doubt that we're going to have more to talk about because I do think that there's. This is going to be a theme of 2020. We're going to be on this topic a lot as the story develops.

[Steve Vladek]

This is so depressing.

[Bobby Chesney]

Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week. I suspect we'll have something new to talk about on the business end of the show.

[Steve Vladek]

We also, we have the Guantanamo anniversary coming up this Saturday. Guantanamiversary Guantanaversary Guantanamo is about to be old enough Bobby to be sent to Guantanamo.

[Bobby Chesney]

Oh, I think that actually that line

[Steve Vladek]

actually was crossed a while back and not violate the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

[Bobby Chesney]

All right, got topics to talk about.

[Steve Vladek]

He's obviously Ms. Vladik we are at NSL Podcast. Stay safe out there. Bye everybody.

[Bobby Chesney]

Adios.

[Benjamin Wittes (Host)]

The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution and this week it's produced in cooperation with the National Security Law Podcast and therefore the University of Texas Law School and the Strauss center at the University of Texas. Thanks to Bobby and Steve for letting us use the audio. We are interested in your feedback on this. Is this a good cross posting situation? Should we be doing more of this getting the National Security Law Podcast discussion into the Lawfare Podcast feed? You should do your part and promote the Lawfare Podcast and the National Security Law Podcast. Tweet about it. Give a little love to Bobby and Steve, both of whom are both on Twitter. Should share it on Facebook. You should review us on whatever podcast distribution service you use. You should buy lawfare [e-mail] the Lawfare Podcast is produced and edited by Jen Patya Howell. Our audio engineer for this episode is Hadley Baker. Our music is, as ever, performed by Sophia Yan.

[Bill.com Advertiser]

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[Steve Vladek]

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