The New War with Iran

[_EAllusion]

Do you think GWB invaded Iraq as a way to boost his popularity and win the next election?

No. He was incredibly popular in the build-up to the Iraq war due to the rally-around-the-flag effect caused by 911. He didn't need to get any more popular at that time. The causality here is reversed. Bush used his popularity as a cudgel to maintain support for the war that, as we know in retrospect, was based on misleading the public.

Bush's popularity waned as his rally-around-the-flag effect did and the Iraq war turned into the quagmire critics said it would. Then it cratered in the wake of the failed effort to privatize social security and the bungled response to Katrina. Then it went to worse-than-Hoover bad when the economy went into a second Depression on his watch.

Those events whitewash just how crazy-popular he was in the beginning of 2003 where all the correct criticisms of his war-mongering were treated as an unacceptable fringe in the mainstream. Then, only a few short years later, having supported the Iraq war was an albatross around almost everyone's neck who did it.

Barack Obama, and not Hillary Clinton, won the Presidency in 2008 specifically because he gave a speech in a failed attempt to run for a state seat wherein he repeated the common criticisms of the Iraq war at the time. Just a few short years later.

I think he really believed the best thing to do was try to set up democracy in Iraq.

I think this is a somewhat naïve, sunshine and rainbows, take on the motivations for the Iraq war, though it is the case that the pax Americana neo-con thinking did influence the decision to invade Iraq.

If Trump were just winning popularity points with the war hawks, he would have went to war with Turkey over the Kurds.

Turkey is a NATO member and an ally of the US that houses our nuclear weapon platform in the region. What are you talking about? It would be catastrophic if the US got into a shooting war with Turkey. Iran, on the other hand, is a hostile power. Trump's admin has been dotted from the outset with people who either cheered on or were the architects of the Iraq war who are absolutely thirsty for war with Iran.

There is a conventional belief that the President pulling the US into war will create a rally around the flag effect, similar to what Bush II received after 911 or Bush I after the Persian Gulf, that can sufficiently boost popularity to help election chances. Trump himself clearly thinks this as he tweeted multiple times during the Obama presidency about Obama starting a war with Iran to boost his popularity. It was common belief at the time that Clinton's military action against Iraq on the eve of his impeachment was a at least in part an effort to distract and ween support away from his removal from office.

I'm not sold that this conventional wisdom regarding Presidential popularity is correct. One of the most surefire ways to make a President unpopular is to have the public dissatisfied with military action under that President. I think this idea mostly comes from misunderstanding the historical context of US military actions. But my beliefs don't have to be Trump's and it is not implausible that he has a motive based on his already previously established thinking.

Trump is a leader with strong-man instincts who is self-serving above all else and at least at one point thought military action against Iran is good for presidential popularity. It is not implausible this was part of his motive or even his main motive.

[_Maksutov]

I don't even know how this started or why it started.

There was this Shah in Iran...

[_EAllusion]

So in the build up to the Iraq war on ZLMB I distinctly recall a post from Beastie talking about how she thought it was impossible to get into another Vietnam war, yet here we were. It was a longer discussion of of her thoughts about seeing this happen in real time. I saw it as rather eloquent and it stuck with me.

I'm not old enough to have lived through the Vietnam war. I grew up with the conventional wisdom that the US learned its lessons with Vietnam and that what happened there was a mistake of the past. This informed my, and I think most people's, understanding of why the Persian Gulf war played out as it did.

To watch the US cheerfully go into another Vietnam, when that was obviously what was happening at the outset, blew up my understanding of that conventional wisdom. But for Beastie, it was something else because there was cultural memory I lacked.

Watching some of the same Iraq war gears already turning in the media and public discourse yesterday evening and today now gives me an emotional understanding of what Beastie was talking about there. It's just difficult to watch people repeat the same beats of Iraq war justification with the same flaws and same brutish jingoism as if they were asleep 15 years ago.

[_EAllusion]

Oh good. Mike Pence is claiming that Soleimani assisted with 9/11. That didn't take long.

[_EAllusion]

Regarding whether war with Iran will make Trump popular, here's my simple theory:

War is perceived to go well? Trump's popularity goes up.

War is perceived to go poorly? Trump's popularity goes down.

The Iraq war had a clear trajectory where the the US military rolled over Iraq and toppled its government with minimal loss. This was quite popular. Then the US's plan to win the peace was a garbage fire and as the costs in blood and treasure built up with no end in sight, the war became increasingly unpopular. Americans can get enthusiastic about a good old patriotic killin' fest, but if it doesn't feel like America is winning and real costs happen, the taste for blood turns sour.

Bush's numbers were effected by this.

Iran isn't early 2000's Iraq, though. For one, work was done to build support for the Iraq war in the US that deliberately conflated 9/11 with it and played on the appetite to seek revenge for and allay fears about terrorism. While it was clearly dubious at the outset, justification for Iraq as an serious threat to the US was made. War with Iran has, up to this point anyway, polled very poorly whenever the public has been asked about it.

For two, Iran's military capacity is significantly stronger than Iraq's was at that time. They might not fold like a paper-hat. The American public has for decades been allowed to think of war as something the volunteer military does while they go about their lives. Iran might put up enough of a fight to force the public to make tangible sacrifices. Loss of lives might pile up more quickly. There might not be the early glow of easy victory like there was with Iraq.

There's also no plan to win the peace that wouldn't be catastrophic. It's not clear how long it would take for that to dawn on the public in large numbers, but it could be quick.

I'm not sure our act of war results in an actual war or not at this point, but I'm not buying that war is automatically great for Trump's popularity. What I do know is that the Republican party, and its media allies, have gotten only more authoritarian since their nascent authoritarianism of the Bush years. The US at war could lead to more anti-democratic action using the moral blackmail of a war-time mentality.

[_ajax18]

On the flip side of the issue is that we’ve been in a proxy war with Iran since for a long time. The deceased General of Iranian special forces has been responsible for asymmetrical attacks against us and our allies for years, so I doubt anyone is weeping for the man. I suppose if you come into Iraq, organize an attack against our embassy, and you’re a known asshole you’re rolling the dice.

* shrugs*

- Doc

He figured Trump would be too scared of the negative political repercussions to follow through.

[_EAllusion]

He figured Trump would be too scared of the negative political repercussions to follow through.

Killing one of the most important military and political figures in a nation is an open act of war. It's a calculation about the US's willingness to go to war with Iran over proxy war skirmishes.

Since it is extremely stupid for the US to go to war with Iran, there may have been some chutzpah about the US's capacity for rational self-interest here.

[_Fence Sitter]

How exactly is Iran going to retaliate? Start aiding and abetting terrorists to carry out attacks on the US and Israel? I'm pretty sure that's what Iran does whether you fight them or give them 6 ton pallets of cash as Obama did. It doesn't really change how Iran behaves.

You ask this question as if those people operate under the same cultural beliefs we do here. I have family in military intelligence (I know big woop but still) who have told me what Iran could do is launch all all out attack that would inflict significant damage to our to our forces in the area for about 6-8 house before we removed them from the map. They have a big enough arsenal that if they simply launched it all at once we could not possibly prevent it all from hitting. So they could go out, as it were, with a bang. If you have relative in the military in this area, this is a huge concern right now.

The question isn't what they could do, the question is; are they angry enough not to care about the results of trying?

[_EAllusion]

Iran was estimated to be a couple years away from developing nuclear weapons when it mothballed the program in the settlement negotiated under Obama. Since Trump tore up that deal while lying about Iran's compliance, it's been an open secret that they've been inching back towards their previous posture.

Iran's official position has been is that it has no intent build a nuclear weapon because it is a moral abomination according to the state religion, but Iran is a deceptive regime, so that official stance means nothing. What I've read over the years treats it as an open question how much appetite there is in the regime to have nuclear weapons vs. appear to be trying to acquire them to force concessions.

In any case, with their top figures are being killed by the US while Donald Trump fellates Kim Jong Un on the regular, they probably should try to run out the clock and get nuclear weapons. We won't be able to "wipe them off the map" then. Certainly not without an apocalyptic cost.

Again, I'm not an Iranian expert, but my naïve view is take some small, symbolic retaliation to buy time, then prepare for a war that can inflict serious damage on the US and its allies.

[_ajax18]

Again, I'm not an Iranian expert, but my naïve view is take some small, symbolic retaliation to buy time, then prepare for a war that can inflict serious damage on the US and its allies.

That's a pretty safe prediction given that Iran has been orchestrating terrorist attacks and preparing for war for quite some time. We just seem to be assigning different motives to it depending on how we want to spin the story here in the US.

We're not invading and occupying Iran. I'm not sure how you can say it's already a Vietnam or Iraq situation.