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Last week, Democrats dominated elections as Donald Trump, a lame-duck Republican, waged an unpopular war in Iran that he started and that a majority of Americans want to end. Notice the parallels to 20 years ago: In 2006, Democrats dominated the midterms as George W. Bush, a lame-duck Republican, waged an unpopular war in Iraq that he chose to start and that a majority of Americans wanted to end.
Back then, with Democrats in control of both chambers of Congress for the first time in 12 years, The Atlantic asked 44 foreign-policy specialists about withdrawal from Iraq. Most people surveyed for this 2007 article predicted that policy would move in the direction that voters wanted: an end to the war. Around that time, 130,000 to 150,000 U.S. troops were in Iraq. Seventy-three percent of respondents said that America would not have a significant military presence in Iraq (defined as 50,000 troops or more) five years in the future. And they were correct––although that oversimplifies what came next. Revisiting what happened with regard to Iraq is a helpful reminder that winning elections by campaigning against a war is far easier than actually ending the conflict.
In January 2007, days after the Democratic-majority Congress was sworn in, Bush gave the anti-war coalition the opposite of what it wanted: He told the public that he had already begun “the surge,” which would increase U.S. troop levels in Iraq to roughly 170,000. Democrats in the House passed a nonbinding resolution disapproving of the policy. Nearly two months later, they passed a $124 billion emergency spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan, which also mandated that within months the United States would start pulling troops out of Iraq. But Bush vetoed the bill, arguing that “setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure,” and that the U.S. should not tell enemies its plans. That December, under pressure to support the troops, Congress approved $70 billion in additional funding for Iraq and Afghanistan.
The following year, as conditions in Iraq improved, Bush began reducing America’s military presence and handing security matters over to the Iraqis. Barack Obama, who had campaigned on ending the “dumb war,” won the White House and continued winding down military activity. By 2012, nearly all U.S. forces were gone—but that didn’t last. Obama ended up redeploying troops to Iraq in 2014 to respond to the rise of the Islamic State. President Trump, who also criticized the war in his 2016 campaign, kept soldiers there to continue fighting ISIS. Not until his second term, earlier this year, did the final withdrawal of U.S. forces occur. All told, America’s military stayed in Iraq for years under multiple Congresses and presidents who won elections by appealing to voters who wanted the war to be over.
The Atlantic asked the foreign-policy experts one other question back in 2007: How should the United States withdraw from Iraq? The most popular answer (46 percent) urged a phased withdrawal to minimize chaos; the least popular answer (5 percent) favored an “immediate, full-scale withdrawal.” Today, most Americans want the war in Iran to end, but how it should end is less certain. Here the Iraq withdrawal ceases to be a close parallel: America seems less able to dictate events in Iran, because that war is being waged against an intact regime, rather than against insurgents after a military victory, and Iran’s ability to challenge American interests––by closing the Strait of Hormuz, attacking American military bases, and striking U.S. allies in the region––could complicate plans.
Plus, America’s enemies in Iraq did not have the capacity to develop a nuclear weapon in 2006. Iran’s ability to go nuclear is contested, and if it obtained “a nuclear weapon during my term,” Trump told 60 Minutes over the weekend, “I would be excoriated far worse than what’s happened.” He may be right. As much as Americans want the war to conclude, they also overwhelmingly agree that Iran should not possess such a weapon. But Trump’s statement elides confident claims he made last year about bygone missile strikes destroying Iran’s nuclear capabilities, undermining his own public rationale for war.
Come January, America will once again have a Republican president who maintains that he made the right call by going to war and a congressional majority under pressure to end the war. If Trump presses ahead, knowing he’ll never face voters again, Congress could stop him if it is willing to cut off military funding for Iran operations. But do Democrats have the votes to do so and the willingness to live with the results? As in 2006, lawmakers tend to hesitate when foreseeing potential political risks—in this case, being blamed for an American loss or a nuclear Iran.
Instead, they may be tempted to take measures short of actually forcing Trump’s hand. Already in June, the Republican-controlled Congress passed a bipartisan resolution telling Trump to get congressional approval to continue the war or to withdraw the military from Iran. When he ignored the legislation, lawmakers let him keep fighting anyway without consequence.
Trump has since acknowledged that the war helped Democrats win the House and the Senate, and said that he expects the conflict to end soon. But today, in announcing that Vance, an Iran-war skeptic, will no longer take part in negotiations, Trump seemed to abandon the idea of a diplomatic resolution. “We don’t need a deal with Iran,” he wrote on Truth Social. “We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!”
It seems possible that Americans will be clashing over Iran policy for years to come. The history of the Iraq War suggests that, even when voters want peace, finishing conflicts that a president favors is far harder than starting them.
Related:
- Trump could leave the Iran mess to his successor.
- The U.S. and Iran are fighting a massively asymmetrical war.
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- Scott Colom is Mississippi’s first Black senator in 150 years.
- The spectacular rise and fall of Jensen Huang
- Thomas Wright: The Jensen Huang scandal should change everything.
Today’s News
- The Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned amid an investigation into allegations that he had multiple affairs, including one with a woman linked to Chinese intelligence and another with a company executive who reported to him. His departure prompted calls for congressional investigations into potential national-security breaches, while President Trump defended Huang.
- The Democrat Scott Colom defeated the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith, in Mississippi’s closely contested Senate race, expanding Democrats’ majority after last week’s midterm elections. Colom will become the state’s first Black U.S. senator since Reconstruction, following a prolonged ballot count.
- Trump said that the United States no longer needs a deal with Iran, reversing his earlier support for Vice President Vance’s efforts to restart negotiations to end the war. Trump instead directed Vance to focus on investigating alleged corruption and crime in Democratic-run cities and states, while the U.S. maintains and expands its blockade on Iranian trade.
Dispatches
- Video Village: James Gray makes good movies with big-name actors and big budgets, but hasn’t gotten mainstream acclaim, David Sims writes.
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Evening Read
The Last Trumpist Standing
By Adam Kirsch
Does Donald Trump mean anything? The question could be asked about the president’s promises, which he usually fails to keep, and his podium remarks, which are devoted to free association. But for conservative politicians, policy makers, and intellectuals, the question has a wider bearing. Since 2016, the right has been trying to figure out what Trump means as a political phenomenon. Presidents are transformative when they stand for an idea: Ronald Reagan was personally popular, but what made him historic was the reorientation of American politics toward Reaganism, an assertive brand of small-government, big-stick conservatism. Trump has certainly been transformative, so it stands to reason that there is such a thing as Trumpism …
Events can’t be explained until they’re over, when they turn into history. So it’s only now, as Trumpism seems to be fading as a political force, that its true meaning can be seen clearly. The winner in the fight to define it is the last Trumpist standing: Stephen Miller, the new White House chief of staff.
More From The Atlantic
- Adam Harris on why Black voters abandoned Trump
- The quest to build an immortal AI companion
- Netanyahu’s January 6 moment
- Why U.S. policy makers see Palestinian suffering as an abstraction
- Julian Gewirtz: The scandal is bigger than Jensen Huang.
Culture Break
Think. As literary scams proliferate, authors don’t know whether their readers are real anymore—and vice versa, Rachel Kadish writes.
Explore. Young math enthusiasts have watched as AI learns to do the tasks they were once distinctly good at—but at a drunk-math party in San Francisco, Lila Shroff found a reason for hope when it comes to the uniquely human love of numbers.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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The post Campaigning Against the Iran War Is Easier Than Ending It appeared first on The Atlantic.
