Donald Trump is conducting a real-world test of what happens when hawks in Washington get what they’ve been urging for decades: all-out war with Iran.
The early results are stark. This war is on track to cost the United States more than $1 trillion. It has resulted in enormous damage to American military bases in the Middle East, significantly reduced the stockpile of interceptor missiles on which the United States relies to deter China and other potential adversaries, put tens of millions of people around the world at risk of acute hunger, accelerated inflation in the United States, and led to the death or injury of hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iranians, including more than 100 children who were reported killed when a Tomahawk missile mistakenly hit an elementary school in the town of Minab.
Despite this economic and human toll, the war has achieved very little. While the president has been typically erratic in outlining the war’s aims, over the past three months he has generally stressed three objectives: eliminating Iran’s ballistic missiles, ending its nuclear program and helping the Iranian people overthrow their government.
None of that has happened. According to America’s own intelligence, the Islamic Republic retains roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile. The United States has neither eliminated Iran’s access to the highly enriched uranium that it could potentially use to build a nuclear bomb nor taken down the Islamic regime itself. Indeed, the Iranian government is arguably stronger than it was when the war began, having demonstrated its ability to cripple the global economy by restricting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
How or when this war will end remains uncertain. But one thing is clear: Such foreign policy catastrophes will keep occurring unless the people who champion them are held to account.
Had such a reckoning occurred after America’s invasion of Iraq, it is much less likely the United States would be at war with Iran today. By George W. Bush’s second term, most Americans believed the Iraq invasion had been a mistake. And they expressed their discontent for years after that by repeatedly voting for presidential candidates who had opposed the war, like Barack Obama, or at least pretended to have opposed it, like Donald Trump, rather than candidates who supported the invasion, like Hillary Clinton and John McCain.
Yet, when it came to appointed office, officials who had supported the war were rewarded. Mr. Obama chose a running mate, Joe Biden, and two secretaries of state, Ms. Clinton and John Kerry, who had voted to authorize the Iraq war. In his first term, Donald Trump chose a national security adviser, John Bolton, who had supported the invasion. When Mr. Biden became president, he selected as his secretary of state Antony Blinken, who was his top foreign policy staff member when he cast his disastrous vote for war.
This lack of accountability extends beyond the executive branch. A couple of years ago, the Quincy Institute, an anti-interventionist think tank, tallied which experts most often testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee between 2021 and 2024, under both Democrats and Republicans. The second most frequently invited think tank was the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which declared on its website on the eve of the Iraq war that “we know Saddam Hussein is making weapons of mass destruction — biological, chemical and nuclear — and remains a serious threat.”
Tied for the third most invited was the American Enterprise Institute, which boasted before the Iraq invasion that it had “taken a leading role in defining the threat that Saddam poses and outlining how Iraq should be reconstructed once he is removed.” Officials from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the American Enterprise Institute are, once again, among the loudest champions of war today.
That is not to say that every policymaker or pundit who supported a failed war should be banished from public debate. But at the very least, we should expect analysts and public officials whose judgment proves faulty to go beyond merely regretting their errors and show that they have rethought the assumptions that underlay them. I supported the Iraq war myself and wrote a book grappling with why I had been so profoundly wrong. That doesn’t undo the harm my commentary did. But only by more clearly challenging the mind-set that underpinned the Iraq and Iran wars will the American foreign policy class shed its addiction to military force and recognize that the United States should primarily prioritize diplomatic solutions with its adversaries, rather than trying to bludgeon them into submission.
And yet, rather than being asked to reckon with their past errors, advocates of war are routinely offered a clean slate to promote war yet again. On March 1, the day after the United States attacked Iran, Lindsey Graham, one of the Senate’s most voluble hawks, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “the largest state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, is close to collapsing” and declared that “we destroyed their missile program, the nuclear program.” When, two and a half months later, after neither proved to be true, he appeared on the same program, he was not asked to answer for those comments and predicted that “if we go back to military activity, weaken them further, then we can end this thing pretty soon.”
Twenty years ago, when U.S. troops were dying in Baghdad and Ramadi, it was hard to imagine this country launching another unprovoked war to oust a government in the Middle East. Yet another such war has now occurred, in part because Iraq transformed American public opinion far more than it transformed the foreign policy debate in Washington.
The recent House vote to try to halt the Iran war by invoking the War Powers Act is a sign that more politicians are finally heeding the country’s antiwar mood. But it’s a small first step. Without a deeper reckoning, we should expect future self-inflicted cataclysms to further undermine not only America’s power around the world, but the public’s faith in our democracy at home.
Peter Beinart, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalism professor at the City University of New York, an editor at large at Jewish Currents and the writer of The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter. He is the author, most recently, of “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.”
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