Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
President Donald Trump visits Al-Asad Air Base, Iraq, December 26, 2018.
When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, one of the few sensible positions he took was that the Iraq War was misguided and the United States should refrain from starting new wars for bad reasons, particularly in the Middle East.
So much for that.
But as fears rise of America stumbling toward yet another catastrophic conflagration, the stark differences between 2020 and 2003 suggest that, for all of Trump’s horrific decisionmaking, this is unlikely to be a disaster on the scale we saw before (and of course are still living with). There’s little doubt it will be bad—bad for America and bad for the world—but it is unlikely to be the moment all our worst fears about Trump came true.
To begin, we should take stock of how we got to where we are now, which like many of Trump’s policy moves involved profound stupidity, deep insecurity, and childish impulsiveness. As reporters learn how Trump’s decision to assassinate Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani came about, the picture coming into focus is pretty much exactly what one might have predicted, knowing this president.
As The Washington Post reports, Trump was “motivated to act by what he felt was negative coverage after his 2019 decision to call off the airstrike after Iran downed the U.S. surveillance drone,” in particular that “details of his internal deliberations had leaked out” and he “felt he looked weak.” He also, as ever, had Barack Obama on his mind: “[H]e felt the response to this week’s attack on the embassy and the killing of an American contractor would make him look stronger compared with his predecessor.”
In case that wasn’t stupid enough for you, The New York Times reports that when military officials presented Trump with options for how to respond to Iran’s latest provocations, “[t]he options included strikes on Iranian ships or missile facilities or against Iranian-backed militia groups in Iraq. The Pentagon also tacked on the choice of targeting General Soleimani, mainly to make other options seem reasonable.” When Trump eventually ordered Soleimani’s assassination, military officials were “stunned” and “flabbergasted,” scrambling to carry out the order.
The repercussions are already being felt, even before Iran begins whatever kind of retaliatory attack it decides to undertake. The Iraqi parliament voted to demand that all foreign troops, i.e. Americans, leave the country. NATO suspended its anti-ISIS operations in Iraq in order to prepare for possible attacks from Iran-backed militias. Iran announced that it is no longer bound to cooperate with the nuclear agreement it signed in 2015 (you may remember how Trump said his “maximum pressure” campaign would have them crawling back to the negotiating table to give us whatever we want on their nuclear program).
Nevertheless, this is not 2003, mostly because it couldn’t be even if Trump wanted it to. Back then, George W. Bush managed to pull off what may have been the most extraordinary propaganda campaign in American history, convincing much of the public that Saddam Hussein was about to attack the United States with his terrifying arsenal of weapons of mass destruction—and might have had something to do with 9/11 to boot. And they bought it: Just before the invasion began, nearly two-thirds of the public favored going to war.
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That was possible for a number of reasons, including the still-fresh memory of al-Qaeda’s attack, Bush’s healthy popularity, and the monumental degree of effort the administration put into its persuasion campaign. None of that is true now. Trump is highly unpopular, America hasn’t been attacked (yet), and as always, everything Trump does is ad hoc, with no preparation or planning. There is no elaborate propaganda campaign and no admired administration figure like Colin Powell who could deliver a stunningly dishonest presentation to the United Nations arguing for war and have the political class pronounce as one, “Case closed.” The best this administration can muster is to send some surrogates to Fox & Friends.
While it’s always possible that events could shift public sentiment, at the moment most Americans are inclined to disbelieve everything Trump tells them, for the simple reason that they don’t like him and they know he’s a liar. That’s the context in which any attempt to win support for a war will have to be made.
Another critical contrast to 2003 is the stance taken by the opposition party. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, Democrats were gripped by two related fears: fear of Bush’s popularity and fear of being called weak. As a result, the most prominent among them stampeded to Bush’s side. Among the Democrats who voted in favor of the congressional resolution authorizing the war were the party’s leaders in the House and Senate, along with Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and many others.
Nothing of the sort will happen now. Trump will not bother to seek congressional authorization for a war against Iran, because he won’t get it, at least not in the House. There are almost no Democrats who would be willing to trust him to order a pizza, let alone a war.
More to the immediate point, not a single prominent Democrat, including congressional leaders and the presidential candidates, has supported Trump’s decision to assassinate Soleimani. They seem to be in complete agreement that whatever Trump decides to do in Iran, it will be a terrible idea and they won’t support it. That will make it almost impossible for Trump to win public backing beyond his own base of voters.
It’s hard to say what decisions Trump will make or what choices he’ll confront as this extremely volatile situation progresses. But here, too, the contrasts with George W. Bush are stark. Bush was motivated by large impulses: grandiosity, hubris, the naïve belief that if his ambitions were epic enough then nothing could go wrong. Trump, in contrast, is driven as always by the pettiest of motivations: fear and insecurity. Bush refused to entertain doubt or consider pulling back on the war; Trump has shown in many different situations that he’ll back down and cut his losses if things get dicey.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean that we aren’t in a profoundly dangerous situation. Iran will respond in some way to Soleimani’s killing, then Trump will feel obligated to respond to that, and we could find ourselves in a tit-for-tat that escalates rapidly. This is very bad.
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Nevertheless, we don’t have to look far into our history to understand that it could be even worse. That’s not much comfort, but it’s about all we’ve got.
