The war against Iran lost at the polls on November 3, but won a congressional vote on November 10. Nothing happened between those two dates to explain the reversal, except for eleven empty seats.
On Tuesday, the House of Representatives sent the articles of impeachment that Thomas Massie, the Republican critic of Pete Hegseth, had filed against the defense secretary to the Judiciary Committee. That is the procedural way of burying a measure. The resolution lost its privileged status and was left in the hands of a Republican committee that has no intention of taking it up. It will lapse automatically when the congressional session ends in January. The motion passed by seven votes, with eleven Democrats absent: Julia Brownley, Lou Correa, and Nancy Pelosi of California; Laura Gillen of New York; Steven Horsford of Nevada; Jonathan Jackson of Illinois; Brittany Pettersen of Colorado; Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico; Haley Stevens of Michigan; Marilyn Strickland of Washington; and Frederica Wilson of Florida.
Each absentee had an explanation, and there was a little of everything, from an award ceremony in San Francisco to one congresswoman who arrived after the gavel had already come down. None of it explains the group as a whole. Democratic leaders, who had explicitly declared their support for impeachment, did not bother to count the votes one by one, which is what any caucus does when it genuinely wants to win. This was a vote announced in September, aimed at the most unpopular official in the cabinet, just one week after an electoral victory built around opposition to his war. And eleven Democrats were absent.
Hegseth is not just another cabinet secretary. He is war-mongering with an office of its own, the man who renamed the Defense Department the Department of War and is directing an offensive that never went through Congress. Removing him would have been the first institutional act by the United States government against this war. Everyone knew the Senate would never muster the two-thirds majority needed to convict him, which was precisely why the vote was symbolic. Political messages are fought over in the realm of symbolism. Mike Johnson, the still-serving speaker of the House, urged lawmakers not to send the allies a bad signal in the middle of hostilities. In this war, the ally has a name and a surname.
The offensive against Iran is Israel’s strategic war, fought with American soldiers and American dollars. As we argued in The Monsters of Chiaroscuro, this is not the usual Anglo-American arrangement in which the principal hires an agent. Here, the delegation of power has been reversed. Normally, a great power outsources the attrition of its adversary to local forces. In this case, the regional partner managed to get the hegemon to put its own people in harm’s way and foot the bill, including the political bill. The fact that a declining power cannot shake off its client’s war even after its own electorate has rejected it says quite a lot about who is leading whom. Hegseth is the piece that guarantees that continuity.
That same night, The Hormuz Letter, an X account that follows the Gulf war, pointed out that the eleven absentees had one thing in common: money from AIPAC, Washington’s most powerful pro-Israel lobby. No one produced evidence of a phone call or an order. None was necessary. At the end of October, AIPAC announced that it would stop endorsing candidates in its own name and financing them through its PAC, or political action committee, the vehicle commonly used to raise funds within the parties. The organization acknowledged that it was going through one of the most difficult periods in its history. The money is still circulating, now through individual donors and its super PAC, which is considerably harder to trace. The brand had become politically toxic and had to be removed from the shop window.
With the brand out of sight, absence is the neatest form influence can take. Voting to bury the impeachment effort meant being tied to the war in front of a base that had just voted against it. Voting against the motion meant having to answer to donors. Staying away carries no liability. Nothing remains on the record, neither to be criticized nor to be rewarded. Massie himself once said that every Republican legislator has an AIPAC representative, a kind of babysitter whom they consult before certain votes. That kind of power does not need to issue orders. It takes up residence in a legislator’s mind before the phone ever rings.
The messenger did not help, either. Massie is the Republican who has confronted the lobby most openly over the past decade. AIPAC worked against his reelection, and Hegseth personally campaigned for his primary challenger in Kentucky. The prospect of the Trump movement’s anti-Israel Republican dissident taking down the secretary of War was a trophy that no one in either party was prepared to hand him.
Some will say that Democrats would rather wait until January, when they have a majority of their own and control of the hearings, than hand a victory to a Republican who is on his way out. That may be so. One thing does not rule out the other. Structural power works this way. It imposes nothing when it is enough for interests to align on their own. What needs explaining is why the calculations of the Democratic leadership and the interests of a foreign state coincide so precisely every time Washington debates a war in the Middle East.
Tehran was not surprised. The Tasnim news agency, which is close to the Revolutionary Guard, had followed the proceedings since September. Its conclusion confirms what Iranian diplomats have argued since the beginning of the aggression: the cost of the war can make its way to the American ballot box without ever making its way into American institutions.
In January, there will be no Massie and no one else’s arithmetic to hide behind. Democrats will have to introduce their own articles of impeachment, with the war against Iran at the center rather than buried in a footnote, and vote on them with the chamber full. That is when we will see whether the eleven have other things on their calendars.
