18 Thoughts On Trump’s Maybe Iran War
No.
This should be easy: No. If you’re a frontline Democrat and your advisers and consultants are admonishing you with West Wing lines about supporting the commander-in-chief or pre-empting Republican attacks on your weakness or anti-Americanism, fire those people.
There are considerations beyond “no,” such as “should Trump be impeached if he takes the country to war under false pretenses anyhow?” But for now, “no” will do.
Opposing a war against Iran shouldn’t require any kind of delicate balancing act. There are a several dispositive reasons to oppose it, and none to support it.
Dems can oppose Trump’s Iran war because it would be immoral; Dems can oppose Trump’s Iran war because it would be illegal; Dems can oppose Trump’s Iran war because he has apparently walked right up to the point of no return despite a U.S. intelligence consensus that Iran isn’t building nuclear weapons; Dems can oppose Trump’s Iran war because Trump can’t be trusted to lead the U.S. in any war effort, particularly in term two, when he’s more corrupted and less constrained by reason.
It surely wasn’t written into his plan, but George W. Bush benefitted to a large degree from the fact that the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam almost 30 years before he invaded Iraq. In the intervening decades, some memories faded, and new generations of Americans saw the U.S. launch much smaller-scale wars that didn’t end in quagmire and humiliation. The Iraq war began just over 20 years ago, but combat operations didn’t end until very recently, and our Afghanistan entanglement didn’t end until just four years ago, thanks to Joe Biden, whose presidency probably ended in the backlash to the withdrawal. Why would any Democrat, even the least self-respecting among them, want to attach themselves to a misadventure like this when memories are so fresh?
Under different, better leadership, I would have more faith that today’s Democrats wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of 2002 and 2003 all over again, but Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are horribly selected to keep Democratic hands clean of a war Trump might join at the behest of Israel.
Trump doesn’t always chicken out, but he does frequently chicken out, and it’s fair to say he rarely follows through on his most maximal threats.
When he “chickens out” or dials things back, he almost always claims to have done so in the limelight of victory, seeking credit for avoiding disasters he’d set into motion. He’s likely to do something similar here.
There’s some small chance that Trump bluffs his way into a diplomatic agreement that precludes Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Democrats shouldn’t wait for this to happen before reminding the world that we had such an agreement (the JCPOA) until 2018, that Trump withdrew from it, and that any successor agreement will be less favorable to U.S. interests because he withdrew from it.
The real story is that manipulative neocons exploited Trump’s jealous hatred of Barack Obama to convince him to rip up the JCPOA, precisely so we’d arrive at the crossroads we’ve reached today. He’s giving them what they used him for, because he’s exactly the mark they thought he was.