The Iran War As History: The Box Scores Of Foreign Wars

The Iran War As History: The Box Scores Of Foreign Wars Will Iran be a “blip”? The president certainly hopes to keep it that way. President Donald Trump is determined to put the Iran War in the rear-view mirror. On the other hand, the two countries have been trading fire in recent days, and Trump calls Iranian leaders “scum." He further says they want to assassinate him. So the situation is, shall we say, fluid. Still, it’s clear that Trump wants a deal more than he wants war. In symbolism-heavy speeches on July 3 and 4, the president cast the Iran conflict as a great American victory, past tense. At Mt. Rushmore, he situated this latest war in a litany of American wins: “We knocked the hell out of Iran.” On the National Mall he said of Iran, “We wiped it out,” boasting that the US had sunk “the entire Iranian Navy, 159 ships, to the bottom of the sea, all done in just a moment’s time, happened very quickly.” In point of fact, the war is not over, even as a ceasefire has been in place since June 17. Peace and war at the same time? Yes, it does seem a bit like Schrödinger’s Cat, and yet as with quantum mechanics, there’s a logic to it. Significantly, Trump has given Vice President J.D. Vance the task of finalizing an actual peace treaty. The significance being that Vance was known to be an internal opponent of Operation Epic Fury. By contrast, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, commonly identified as the leading internal advocate, has gone quiet. And others in the administration, too, have taken lesser roles in efforts to resolve the conflict. So the current spat notwithstanding, we’ve moved, officially, from war-war to jaw-jaw. Stipulating that the resolution could be disrupted many more times, by friend or foe, it’s possible to start assessing the conflict. In fact, many mavens have already begun. For the most part, their verdict has been harsh. Sample headline: “Iran is a Bigger Defeat Than Vietnam.” Ouch. Fair-minded skeptics of the conflict—many of them gathered in these pages—might protest: Is it really the case that the Iran War, which cost 13 American lives over 15 weeks, rates as worse than the Vietnam War, which stretched over more than a decade, costing the U.S. nearly 60,000 lives? For his part, Vance is vastly more optimistic. Speaking on May 5, he referred to the war as “a little blip.” Okay, that might not be everyone’s preferred choice of words, and yet a few days later, The American Conservative’s Peter Van Buren saw merit in the veep’s take: “The Iran War may prove to be little more than a blip on the world’s radar…. There is a strong argument that, even as the missiles continue to fly, the war is not that significant.” To be sure, history will judge; in the meantime, all of us can play at least a small role as jurors. And part of the judging process is finding fitting frames of reference—compared to what? In relation to when? It seems reasonable to see the 2026 Iran War as part of an epoch that began on September 11, 2001. On that terrible day, all the elements that have shaped American policy toward the Middle East this past quarter-century—jihadism, nationalism, neoconservatism—began to collide. (And we might add another ism, which we can call Centcomism. That’s the implicit ideology of the U.S. military’s Central Command, which has long been the fast-track for Pentagon careerists. Centcomism holds that there’s a military solution to every problem in the area; it starts with a PowerPoint, builds up with air power, spices in Special Forces, and culminates with the 82nd Airborne.) Yet for our purposes here, we can call this the Neoconservative Era.. Like it or not, we’ve been living in it; hawk and dove alike have had to be mindful of all the lingo: “axis of evil,” “moral clarity,” “COIN,” “fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here,” and on and on. Twenty-five years of this. After 9/11, the neocons had the highest of hopes; they hit the jackpot with George W. Bush. Who can forget the 200-proof Wilsonianism of Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address: “History has called America and our allies to action, and it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight.” (Emphasis added, although come to think of it, Bush emphasized it, too.) The neocon tide was so high back then that it swept up, as well, most top Democrats, including John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. All of them—and John Edwards, Harry Reid, and Chuck Schumer, too—supported the war, at least in its early stages. One who didn’t, of course, was Barack Obama. Powered by popular revulsion against the Iraq quagmire, he bulldozed his party’s neocon establishment to win the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination and the general election—in a landslide. If anyone had a mandate to change course, Obama did—and yet he didn’t use it. His administration was captured by the Blob, to use the despairing term (coined by a frustrated Obama aide) for the permanent foreign policy establishment. The Blob delineated the Overton Window: What was, and was not, deemed to be acceptable discourse. Blob Overtonianism was, and arguably still is, heavily oriented toward “engagement” (read: intervention) in the Middle East, as well as other parts of the world. The Blob is hardly right-wing. Stout in its own defense, it represents the conventional wisdom, from alliances to climate change to international organizations. And it just so happens that right-coded neoconservatism blended with left-coded responsibility to protect to create a new synthesis for world-policing, as we saw, for instance, in Libya. The power of the Blob was such that the 44th president retained the 43rd president’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, and then further let himself get talked into “surging” more U.S. troops in Afghanistan. That’s how nearly three times as many American GIs were killed fighting in that country during Obama’s eight years than during Bush’s. (Historians will puzzle over what it was that earned Obama his Nobel Peace Prize.) Then came Trump, the avowed opponent of “endless wars” and most Blob bromides. In general, Trump 45 was, indeed, a restrainer; even though his administration brought in plenty of Blobbers—Nikki Haley, Fiona Hill, Jim Mattis, Mike Pompeo, Rex Tillerson. Trump even hired the arch-neocon John Bolton (although he only lasted 19 months, and some of the others, too, were quickly exited). And while Trump did push his reluctant foreign policy team to negotiate a phased exit from Afghanistan (uncompleted when he left office in 2021) he never broke with the neocons, the right lobe of the Blob. Now, after the Biden interregnum—in which the 46th president followed through on the 45th president’s Afghanistan deal, albeit with singularly disastrous execution—we have the returned 47th president. As we know, on February 28, Trump did what Bush did back in 2003—he chose war. Indeed, for a time, Trump was pitching regime change in Iran, further echoing Bush on Iraq. Yet soon enough, Trump shifted. It’s not quite right to say that Trump aspires to be a peace president, but he’s uninterested in being a crusader president. Having been persuaded by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that Iran could be a quick win, a la Venezuela, Trump went for it. (Interestingly, Netanyahu also helped persuade Bush, two decades ago, that Iraq would be a cakewalk.) Yet when reality started to bite, Trump, unlike Bush, Trump chose to cut his losses—I mean, declare victory. And so whereas Bush was eager to use his presidency to bring democracy to Anbar and Tikrit, Trump wants to get back to bringing prosperity to Alaska and Texas. So maybe the Iran War does, sub specie aeternitatis, start to look, well, blip-y. As data points to inform our judgment, we might consider these numbers, which represent this author’s accounting of American military fatalities in the Middle East and Central Asia since 9/11, broken down by presidency and major war: Bush 43: Total 4,865 (Iraq 4,239, Afghanistan 626) Obama: Total 2,054 (Iraq 302, Afghanistan 1752) Trump 45: Total 65 (Afghanistan 45) Biden: Total 23 (13 Afghanistan) Trump 47: Total 13 (Iran) These casualty totals refer to U.S. troops sent into hot zones. They do not include soldiers or civilians killed in terrorist attacks in otherwise peaceful areas—of which there have been many, beyond 9/11 itself. Also, these casualty figures include only U.S. military personnel, as opposed to contractors—the vast majority of whom were Americans. Brown University’s Costs of War project counts total contractor fatalities, from 2001 to 2021, as 8,189. That’s a big number. It seems that parallel, albeit submerged, wars were being waged by the likes of Blackwater, with substantial losses suffered. (Including the psychic toll on eager recruit Graham Platner, although admittedly, he might have been troubled beforehand.) Of course, it can be further objected that this human toll does not include the far larger number of civilian lives lost in the affected countries. Plenty have offered their estimates, and many have disputed them, up or down. Still, the U.S. casualty figures, Bush 43 to Trump, show a strong trend—for which Trump deserves credit. The neocon fear is that Trump—joined by top advisers Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff—is going to like spending and making money on deals and development projects, perhaps even inside Iran. (The Blob as a whole fears that Trump is also hostile to its other projects, including, but not limited to, open borders and foreign aid.) Meanwhile, even as uncertainty bobs in the Strait of Hormuz, oil prices are much lower than their highs. There is, for sure, a lot of supply out there. Those so inclined can thank frackers, now reinforced by Trump’s energy dominators. At the same time, the stock market is up, bigly. Trump has loosed the promethean spirits of capitalism and technology, as well as energy, and that means the U.S. can afford to run big defense budgets—including small wars or, in Trumpian idiom, “excursions”—while still leaving plenty of money for everything else. In the words of tech VC Joe Lonsdale, “America’s playing chess with eight queens. We are totally dominant right now.” If Trump has his way, the U.S. will be more Hamiltonian and less Wilsonian, seeing the world, as he does, through a mercantilist lens. If so, POLITICO reports, NATO will become a “cash machine,” good for not much more than American arms sales. And that mission, at least, seems to have been accomplished. Of course, the Middle East hasn’t gone anywhere. As we know, other presidents have tried to “pivot” away from the region without success. Most pertinently, the Iranians haven’t forgotten that we attacked them. On July 1, the 88-member Assembly of Experts, charged with electing Iran’s Supreme Leader, called for the assassination of Trump (and Netanyahu). And at the funeral of the previous Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was bombed to oblivion at the outset of the war, the eulogist said, “Why shouldn't we kill the one who killed my Imam and my Leader? It is a disgrace for us if we do not kill your killer.” The crowd chanted, “Death to America”—admittedly a chant that long precedes the current presidency. So yes, Trump’s fears of assassination have a sound basis. And other Americans, too, might worry about the long-term repercussions of the Iran War. After all, 9/11 came at the end of a slow-burning fuse. Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox In the meantime, prospects for a mutually agreeable deal on Iranian denuclearization deal seem slim. And while Trump might settle for long-term ambiguity, the Israelis might not. On June 30, Netanyahu signaled insouciance and perhaps also prescience: “The war will never end.” Yes, Trump says he’s the boss of Netanyahu, and is selling F-35s to Turkey, much to Bibi’s consternation. Still, Trump’s alpha-assertion has yet to be tested in a crunch. What happens if there’s another incident, possibly including Americans? A cynic would say that trouble in the Middle East is good news for CENTCOM, forever prepping for the next operation. The cynic would further say trouble is good news for neocons and for the Blob worldview—across the spectrum, many have made their careers as “experts,” and so will be loath to switch to something else. For many reasons, a blood-dimmed tide could once again rise. If so, Trump’s wishes notwithstanding, the Iran War could be more than a blip. Yet still, it appears that the Neoconservative Era is drawing to a close. After a quarter-century of bitter history, we seem to have a president, and for sure a vice president, determined to rear-view its many debacles.