MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Discontent over the war in Iran is one of the main reasons voters handed control of both houses of Congress to Democrats. But can Democrats do much to stop the war when the commander-in-chief is still Donald Trump, who just yesterday said that despite Republican losses in the midterms, he wouldn't have done anything differently? How Democrats might change the course of the U.S. war in Iran is one of the questions I put to Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman in this week's episode of NPR national security podcast Sources & Methods.
KELLY: Tom, does that sound to you like Democrats are going to be looking for ways to block defense funding for the war?
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Oh, already, there's been a problem on the Hill of getting through the supplemental money for the Iran war, $67 billion. So they could just basically say, we're not going to fund this war anymore, and that could bring it to a close.
KELLY: Although President Trump has found all kinds of ways to bypass Congress. Does that necessarily become easy to shut this down when Democrats take control?
BOWMAN: You know, it's hard to say what exactly they could do besides the money.
KELLY: Yeah.
BOWMAN: What else could they do? Could they basically push the War Powers Act, get that through? Which basically means, you know, you can send troops over for two months, and then at the end of that, you have to withdraw them unless you get approval from Congress. They can play that card, too. Presidents in the past have kind of ignored the War Powers Act and kind of pushed forward with their military missions. But the money could be a way of just bringing this thing to a close or curtailing it somewhat. But getting back to what's going to happen in the future, you know, we do know the USS Theodore Roosevelt is heading to the region. That'll mean three aircraft carriers there. And...
KELLY: Really unusual, just to stay on that for a second.
BOWMAN: Well, exactly.
KELLY: Three aircraft carriers in one place.
BOWMAN: Right.
KELLY: For what?
BOWMAN: In 2003, they did it during the Iraq war...
KELLY: OK.
BOWMAN: ...And, you know, here we go, bombing Iraq. And earlier this year, there were three carriers there as well for the opening salvo in the Iran war. So keep an eye on that. And you're right. You know, President Trump has said, I may bomb. Then he talked to the Financial Times, said, no, I don't think I'll bomb right now. Then you have JD Vance basically reaching out to senior Iranian officials saying, let's sit down and make out some sort of a deal. So you have this kind of back-and-forth - what Trump is saying, what Vance is saying. Could they start attacks again on Iran? Possibly. But we just don't get a sense because you get this - what Trump is saying and what Vance is saying.
KELLY: Yeah. You're reminding me since we're going back a little bit in time, you and I, Tom, covered the fallout from another midterm rout back in 2006. Twenty years ago. We were babies.
BOWMAN: Crazy.
KELLY: We had no gray hair. To remind, 2006, the broad outlines of the situation were as follows - you had a deeply unpopular Republican president who had taken the country into a deeply unpopular war in the Middle East. And in the midterm elections in 2006, voters said enough and flipped both houses, the House - and flipped both the House and the Senate to Democrats. If this is sounding familiar, you know, the president back then was George W. Bush. The war was Iraq. Afghanistan was, of course, also ongoing. And President Bush decided - after this midterm rout for his party, he decided to shake things up.
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GEORGE W BUSH: The election has changed many things in Washington, but it has not changed my fundamental responsibility, and that is to protect the American people from attack. As the commander-in-chief, I take these responsibilities seriously. And so does the man who served this nation honorably for almost six years as our secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Now, after a series of thoughtful conversations, Secretary Rumsfeld and I agreed that the timing is right for new leadership at the Pentagon.
KELLY: So Donald Rumsfeld was out. Do the parallels to what happened 20 years ago end there, or, Tom, should the current defense secretary start polishing up his resume?
BOWMAN: Well, it's interesting. Reporter Jonathan Karl was talking with Trump just this morning, and the president basically said, I'm sticking with Pete Hegseth. He's doing a great job. And then Karl asked him, well, you're getting a lot of calls from people who say he's not doing that great a job, he's got to go. And Trump replied, yeah, I'm getting those calls. I don't know why. So we'll see what happens. Back in 2006, when the Democrats took over, they tried to put an end to the Iraq war within two years, by 2008. That didn't happen.
KELLY: No.
BOWMAN: What you did see were more hearings, more investigations, more oversight. You're definitely going to see that now when the Democrats take over. They'll be dragging Hegseth, if he's still around, up to the Hill probably every week. So the big question going forward is, will Pete Hegseth be the Donald Rumsfeld of 2026? We just don't know that yet.
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KELLY: That was NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman. He was speaking on our national security podcast Sources & Methods. You can hear the full episode, which also features NPR international correspondent Aya Batrawy, wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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