Most Americans probably don’t look back at March 2012 — if they remember it at all — and think of terrifyingly high gas prices. In the month when “The Hunger Games” ruled the box office and President Barack Obama was on his way to a comfortable re-election, the price of Brent crude closed the month around $123 a barrel. That would be about $175 a barrel in today’s dollars.
As of Tuesday, despite Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its attacks on its neighbors’ energy facilities, it’s hovering around $100, slightly higher than the average inflation-adjusted price since January 2001, roughly $95.
That ought to provide some perspective on the panic over the war in the Middle East. To hear the critics’ version of events, an unprovoked and unnecessary attack on Iran, launched at Israel’s behest, is already a foreign-policy fiasco that has put the global economy at risk without any clear objective or endgame. As Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, told NBC’s Kristen Welker over the weekend, “We’ve never seen this level of incompetence in war-making in this country’s history.”
Really? Let’s take a tour of some of the recent history.
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During the 1991 Operation Desert Storm against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, a campaign that is widely considered a brilliant military success, the U.S.-led coalition lost 75 aircraft, 42 of them in combat. In this conflict, four manned aircraft have been destroyed, three to friendly fire and one in an accident. Not a single manned plane has yet been lost over Iran.
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The U.S. air and land campaign in that operation lasted a full six weeks. Today it’s remembered as a lightning-fast war. The current conflict with Iran is less than four weeks old.
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In the 1989-90 invasion of Panama, whose military phase lasted a few days, the United States lost 23 soldiers, with 325 more wounded. So far in this war, U.S. losses are 13 dead. Among the more than 230 wounded, most have swiftly returned to duty.
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During the Persian Gulf crisis that began with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the U.S. economy went into recession and the Dow fell by about 13 percent before the allied air war began. Since conflict with Iran began last June with Operation Midnight Hammer, the Dow is up by 9 percent as of Tuesday morning.
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At the outset of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States made a failed decapitation strike against Saddam Hussein and his senior leadership, some of whom became leaders of the insurgency. In this war, much of Iran’s top leadership was killed on the first day and there is still no proof of life from the new supreme leader. Yousef Pezeshkian, the son of the current president, has written that if Iran can’t prevent the continued assassination of its leaders, “we will lose the war.”
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Between 1987 and 1988, in the final stages of the so-called tanker war, the Reagan administration reflagged Kuwaiti tankers and had the U.S. Navy escort them out of the Strait of Hormuz. An Iranian mine nearly sank an American frigate. The conflict wound down after the United States sank a handful of Iranian navy ships. This time around, we have destroyed almost all of Iran’s navy with no naval losses of our own.
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In 1991, Iraq fired roughly 40 missiles toward Israel. Hardly any were intercepted despite the deployment of Patriot batteries there. In this war, Israel is registering an interception rate of 92 percent against more than 400 missiles. Iran’s overall rate of fire has dropped from 438 ballistic missiles on the first day of the war to 21 on Monday. Drone fire has also declined from 345 to 75 for the same dates.
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In the months leading up to the second Iraq war, the George W. Bush administration made a case based on erroneous information that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. In the current war, there is no question that some 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium lies stashed and buried in Iran — possibly enough, with further enrichment and conversion into uranium metal, for 11 nuclear bombs. If the outrage of the Iraq war is that Hussein didn’t have W.M.D. capabilities, is it now supposed to be somehow more outrageous that Iran does?
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One of the worst mistakes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was the attempt by U.S. administrators to remake societies in both countries — well-intended efforts with some noble results that nonetheless were beyond our grasp. In this war, despite some varying rhetoric from President Trump, the goal has been reasonably clear and consistent: Iran cannot have nuclear weapons or other means to menace its neighbors. As for regime change, we hope the Iranian people use the opportunity of their leadership’s weakness to seize their own destiny. But we won’t do it for them.
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The Bush administration had little support from Arab nations during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. Now The Times reports, “Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has been pushing President Trump to continue the war against Iran, arguing that the U.S.-Israeli military campaign presents a ‘historic opportunity’ to remake the Middle East.” Hopefully, one way in which it can be remade is through a peace treaty between Riyadh and Jerusalem.
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In hindsight, the single biggest error of the gulf war was to end it too soon, before Saddam Hussein’s forces were thoroughly routed. President Trump should not make the same mistake.
I am not blind to the Trump administration’s failures in planning, particularly its unwillingness to make a stronger public case for war and get more allies on our side before the campaign began. I am also purposely comparing the war with Iran to past wars of similar scale, rather than our true military fiascos in Vietnam, Korea and the two world wars — in which tens of thousands of Americans died due to poor tactical planning and bad strategy.
Still, if past generations could see how well this war has gone compared with the ones they were compelled to fight at a frightening cost, they would marvel at their posterity’s comparative good fortune. They would marvel, too, at our inability to appreciate the advantages we now possess.
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