As the U.S. war against Iran passes the six-month mark, the conflict’s disastrous impacts are being compounded by the inability of the United States to negotiate or implement a resolution, with the two sides trading attacks again as of today. The war’s “triple illegality,” the tremendous cost to human lives and civilian infrastructure, the immense and mounting economic costs, the dangerous drain on military resources and readiness, and the sheer magnitude of its strategic failure put the war on par with the other biggest foreign policy failures of the modern era.
Congress must establish a bipartisan commission to understand how and why the United States got into the disastrous war with Iran, examine the errors made and vulnerabilities exposed during the conflict, catalogue its impacts, and propose reforms to prevent repetition of mistakes this grave. Alongside gaining an understanding of the actions of the president and senior executive branch officials, there are clear lessons to be learned for Congress in how to right-size its own power, fulfill its constitutional duties, and act as a more meaningful check on executive authority. Likewise, there is reason to examine what guardrails within the executive branch could be strengthened or built anew.
An Iran War Commission, which we propose here, would have a solid pedigree. When the United States experienced catastrophes in the form of the intelligence failure that preceded the September 11th attacks, a collapse of the economic system in the 2008 Financial Crisis, and the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, Congress acted relatively quickly to create a bipartisan congressional commission to investigate the matter. The 2026 Iran War and its second-order effects match the scale of those prior events. Congress can draw lessons from preceding commissions to help the Iran War Commission succeed.
Why Create an Iran War Commission
Oversight and accountability come in many forms, of which a congressionally-established commission is just one. In the short term, Congress will need to engage through its usual processes, ranging from hearings to requests for information to legislative action, on various aspects of the Iran war and its repercussions well before a commission completes its work. The existence of a Commission — while vital, as we lay out here — is not a substitute for Congress’ other oversight and legislative responsibilities.
Members of Congress may choose, for example, to legislate in a way that authorizes rapid replenishment of depleted weapons and ammunition stocks without authorizing further offensive war. Or they may choose to enact a measure under the War Powers Resolution or a funds cut-off. They may also weigh in through a variety of means on the “economic war” that the Trump administration announced in mid-August following what had essentially become a stalemate on the battlefield. And much as it did after the Vietnam War, with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s “Fulbright hearings,” Congress may begin holding serious, bipartisan oversight hearings to examine the justification, tactics, and consequences of the war (indeed, dozens of oversight questions were apparent two days into the war, many of which have yet to be answered and should form part of Congress’ oversight agenda in addition to informing the work of the Commission).
Regardless of whether Congress takes any or all of those types of actions, a commission is needed for an overarching and thorough understanding of the war, how the United States got into it, and its impacts. As Andy Wright wrote in 2021:
The commission model of fact-development and policy inquiry offers as one of its chief design concepts a degree of insulation from immediate partisan interests of legislators who will stand for reelection during the course of an investigation. It also offers an ability to select a panel of commissioners from an array of fields with gravitas and appeal that transcends its individual members’ political orientation. That is the ideal, but opportunities to fall short abound. There is a dynamic relationship between design, personnel, and stakeholder investment that is both elusive and essential to that quest for legitimacy.
Particularly important in the context of the Iran War Commission will be its insulation from partisan interests, given the war has become a hot button political issue ahead of the midterm elections. Moreover, the serious issues raised by the Iran war do not fall neatly within one congressional committee of jurisdiction – rather, they range from foreign relations, to defense, to intelligence, to energy, to commerce, to appropriations. This makes a Commission vital for its ability to draw on expertise across a range of salient issue areas.
Key Features: A Strong but Nimble Structure
In April 2021, Just Security published a comparison of six congressional investigatory commissions and their design features, including:
- National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (9/11 Commission) (2002)
- Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (2009)
- Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy (“Moynihan Commission”) (1994)
- National Commission on Terrorism (1998)
- National Commission for the Review of the Research and Development Programs of the United States Intelligence Community (2010)
- National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Office (2000)
Since then, the United States has seen the creation of House select committees (not commissions), the aborted attempt at a COVID commission, and the launch of the Afghanistan War Commission. Drawing from those experiences, we propose the following key design features for an Iran War Commission.
Thematic scope
The Commission should transparently catalogue the war’s many impacts. These include:
- The war’s impacts on the United States (including on the U.S. military and its readiness, on public trust in government, the war’s direct financial costs, and the broader domestic economic consequences);
- Impacts on Iran (including civilian casualties and other harms for the civilian population, consequences for regime consolidation and durability, impacts on Iran’s nuclear program and its ballistic missile capabilities, and Iranian public views of the United States);
- Consequences for the region (from casualties and damaged infrastructure to impacts on regional economies, bilateral relationships, and the balance of power among Iran and regional States);
- Impacts on maritime navigation (in the Strait of Hormuz and beyond);
- Other cross-cutting and global impacts, including on the global economy, on nuclear non-proliferation goals and strategies (in Iran, in the region, and globally), and on the United States’ international standing.
In the tradition of the 9/11 Commission, the Iran War Commission should focus on forward-looking solutions to identified problems. The Commission might recommend legislative reform of the War Powers Resolution, among other congressional actions. With respect to military strategy, it might consider the opportunities and limits of reliance on air power, propose rigorous updating of military planning and strategy assumptions, and recommend improvements both to the design and governance of AI systems employed in the targeting cycle and the processes that guide human-machine teaming in combat operations.
Among the focused set of issues the Commission should be charged with examining are the following:
Intelligence before the war and decision-making: The Commission must get to the bottom of the flawed decision-making process that took our country into this catastrophic war. As part of this inquiry the Commission should assess any intelligence failures or failures to act on reliable intelligence, including what intelligence was provided to decision-makers prior to Feb. 28, 2026 but ignored or discounted.
For example, what did decision-makers know about potential threats to U.S. bases, diplomatic and intelligence facilities, U.S. nationals, and other U.S. interests in the region should a war commence? What was known about the threat to transit passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the vulnerability of energy infrastructure in neighboring states, and threats to critical infrastructure posed by Iran and its proxies? What intelligence or other analytical assessments were made about the likely responses of Iran’s leadership and the likely impacts on Iran’s nuclear program in the short, medium, and long term? On likely economic consequences for the United States and globally? On expected reactions from proxy forces in the region or other asymmetric threats and capabilities, like cyber attacks and threats of assassination?
War aims: Relatedly, what were decision-makers’ war aims before Feb. 28 and how were they developed? Were there specific goals related to Iran’s nuclear program, its ballistic missile program, its conventional weapons, or its regional proxies? Was regime change a war aim, and, if so, what was considered a successful outcome, and how likely was that outcome to be achieved? To the extent there were specific aims, did they match the strategies and battlefield tactics employed in the war?
Legal basis for waging war: The failure to prevent, and later stop, the war on legal grounds must also be examined. In that regard, we would emphasize that the Commission should grapple with how the war was commenced despite its clear constitutional and other legal infirmities, including with respect to the U.N. Charter, which as a treaty having received Senate approval (on an 89-2 vote) clearly constitutes the “supreme Law of the Land” that the president is bound to faithfully execute.
In particular, the Commission should examine the weaknesses in the current War Powers Resolution, and the inability of checks and balances to function effectively even when both chambers of Congress exhibit some will to act. It would be wise to investigate the deprofessionalization of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the approval of the president’s authority to wage full-scale war without Congress.
The Commission may also wish to examine the failure of legal diplomacy – that is, the unwillingness of U.S. allies to join in its war effort due to their views of its illegality – and whether executive branch lawyers, career and political appointees, warned of the likelihood of this result.
Conduct during the war, including legality and strategy: The conduct of military operations during the war has raised serious legal and strategy questions, including about the quality of legal advice and chains of communication within the military, and the quality of military planning and related assumptions. The Commission would be well advised to investigate, without any preconceptions, the following:
- Use of novel weapons/munitions
- Use of AI in the targeting process and the effectiveness and limitations of human-machine teaming across the targeting cycle
- Leader-level threats against Iran’s civilian infrastructure and Iran as a civilization
- Targeting of civilian political leaders
- Legality and efficacy of targeting “dual-use” infrastructure
- Mistaken targeting of civilians and civilian objects (the Minab school, the Lamerd sports hall strike, and others)
- Conduct of investigations into civilian casualty incidents
- The military’s reliance on air power and the apparent mismatch between strategic aims and tactics
- The depletion of U.S. weaponry, including costly and vital interceptors
- The inability to successfully counter known asymmetric threats and strategies
- The inability to successfully defend against attacks on U.S. and partner personnel, facilities, and infrastructure that were likely to be targeted
- Moving U.S. service members into hotels and other commercial facilities during active combat operations
Additional policy issues: The Commission should also examine institutional failures exposed during the war. Especially given this Defense Department’s lack of transparency and incapacities for self-correction, the commission should investigate whether there were flaws in planning preceding the Strait of Hormuz crisis, including the role of civilian oversight. The commission may also want to examine consequences of the State Department’s reduction of Middle East experts, and the Defense Department’s reduction of civilian casualty protection.
The Commission could also explore security vulnerabilities exposed during the conflict. That includes the exposure of U.S. military bases, intelligence sites, and personnel in the region to harm, as well as the vulnerability of critical infrastructure within the United States and exposure to other asymmetric threats.
Finally, the Commission should examine the viable off-ramps and exit strategies that were or were not pursued, the collapse of the June 2026 MOU and partial ceasefire, and whether U.S. diplomats and negotiators had sufficient expertise, and were sufficiently empowered, to bring the conflict to a close.
Temporal scope
There may be some temptation to expand the temporal scope of inquiry far back in time. That should be resisted as tantamount to a poison pill. The commission should examine the acute problems of the current war, which is a manageable, well-scoped subject.
Subpoena power
As the 2001 analysis in Just Security explained,
“Nine congressional commissions from the 101st–115th Congress were granted subpoena authority. … It is worth noting that these commissions rarely used their subpoena power; as 9/11 Commission co-chairs Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton recently emphasized, the threat of subpoena power is a powerful incentive on its own.”
Remarkably, the Afghanistan War Commission does not have subpoena power. We believe that will undermine the Commission’s efficiency and full effectiveness, though it will surely have successes along some dimensions. That commission’s experience will likely show how valuable it is for the Iran War Commission to have such powers.
Size and composition of membership
The total number of Commission members should not be so large that it is difficult to manage the work of the organization and difficult to reach final consensus. The 9/11 Commission was highly successful, in part, because its ten bipartisan members issued final recommendations without any dissent. Many of those legislative and policy recommendations were adopted by Congress and the Executive Branch. Nevertheless, it should not be so small as to exclude needed expertise.
Likewise, the Commission must have sufficient staff to work effectively and efficiently. This should include, at minimum, a general counsel, and staff with expertise in Iran, the Middle East and Gulf regions, military strategy, defense policy, nuclear non-proliferation (and in particular Iran’s nuclear program), maritime security, energy markets, domestic war powers, international law, civilian harm mitigation, and use of AI in the targeting cycle.
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Within the first two days of this war, we published, with our colleague Kate Brannen, dozens of questions this administration needed to answer. Many of them have never been answered, and many developed into even more wide-ranging concerns of public importance. The Iran War Commission would be fit for the purpose of getting to the bottom of the catastrophic decision to wage this war and the grave mistakes made after that point. It could also offer the country expert-driven recommendations for reducing the likelihood of such tragic folly of this scale happening again.
