Republicans Know This War Is Going Badly

I may be dating myself, but I am of an age where I remember and lived through some of America's disastrous wars starting with Vietnam - I was in my teens and avoided the draft due to a high lottery number - through Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran.  In each conflict falsehoods and/or a military leadership that never would admit the dire nature of the true military situation lead to thousands of military deaths (especially in Vietnam) and the squandering of billions of dollars.  With Iran more than any of the other wars, the warnings of what starting a war could lead to were seemingly utterly ignored by the Felon - the Iranians are calling him the "orange pig" - and his utterly unfit Secretary of Defense who seemingly care nothing about the lives being lost, be they American, Iranian, or citizens of Gulf states.  The result is that the Felon is desperate to save face and have some sort of "victory" real or fabricated while Iran seems to clearly understand that by keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed, it has the upper hand economically even if it cannot match the U.S. military.  A column in the New York Times aptly describes where the Felon has put himself and the nation:

Because the diplomatic option is so unappealing, Trump seems poised to seize an even worse one: dispatching ground troops to invade Iran. He is sending thousands of Marines and paratroopers to the region, and The Wall Street Journal reports that the Pentagon is considering whether to send another 10,000 ground troops.

“This is a dangerous point,” Vali Nasr, a veteran Iran watcher at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “Maybe Trump has no choice but to go down this path, because to go to the table right now would really admit defeat. But this is the quandary of his own making.”

Meanwhile polling in America shows very strong opposition to the war, particularly if it comes to involve a ground invasion even as gas prices at the pumps keep rising and aiding financial strain to average families and the stock markets continue to fall.  As a second piece in the New York Times notes, even Republicans are beginning to realize that the Felon's war of choice is not going well and that no clear off ramp is in sight:

It is not just Democrats in Congress who fear that Donald Trump’s war in Iran is going sideways. After a classified Pentagon briefing on Wednesday, Republican lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee appeared shaken.

“We will not sacrifice American lives for the same failed foreign policies,” said Nancy Mace, warning about the possibility of American troops in Iran. The committee chair, Mike Rogers, complained that members aren’t getting nearly enough information about war plans. Troop movements, he said, should be “thoughtful and deliberate.” The implication was that they might not be.

“This is the first week where I have felt that there’s been really any resistance to this war from Republicans,” Jason Crow, a combat veteran and Democratic member of the committee, told me. His colleagues’ public comments, he suggested, only hint at the depth of their anxiety. In closed meetings, he said, they express many concerns “that they’re unwilling to show publicly.”

Some conservatives are still arguing that pessimism about the war stems from a blinkered and biased elite. . . . . But at least some of the Republicans hearing directly from the Pentagon aren’t so sanguine. “On a bipartisan basis, it was pretty clear to us that there was no plan, no strategy,” said Sara Jacobs, another Democratic member of the committee. The briefers, she said, “could not articulate an endgame, and we are three weeks into this war.”

The big question now is if an American ground invasion is imminent. I suspect people are underestimating the possibility because it’s such a manifestly terrible idea. Americans certainly don’t want to see troops on the ground: In a Reuters/Ipsos poll last week, only 34 percent of respondents said they would back the deployment of Special Forces soldiers into Iran, and a mere 7 percent support a larger-scale attack. The markets — one of the few forces that can constrain Trump — seem to assume a relatively quick resolution to the war, which is most likely why oil prices haven’t risen as much as some anticipated.

Yet despite all the reasons America shouldn’t escalate its war with Iran, there’s a good chance it will. Trump is sending thousands more troops to the Middle East, and in the past, when he’s massed military forces outside a hostile country, he’s used them. “Some U.S. officials think a crushing show of force to conclude the fighting would create more leverage in peace talks or simply give Trump something to point to and declare victory,” Axios reported on Thursday.

Jacobs, the Democratic congresswoman, told me that the Pentagon’s request for $200 billion to fund a war that’s burning through hundreds of millions of dollars a day is a tell. “That’s not a one-time cost to wrap things up,” she said. “That’s a down payment on a long war.”

This would not, obviously, be the first time the United States ramped up a war of choice just to avoid a humiliating defeat. In his memoir, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wrote about how, during the Vietnam War, the C.I.A. warned that failure “would be damaging to U.S. prestige,” leading the United States to prolong a pointless conflict in the hope of saving face. During years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, Crow recalled, military leaders would repeatedly claim “that one more big troop surge, one more big offensive, would get it done and put us in a better position and win the war.”

Never before, however, did America arrive at the threshold of a quagmire so quickly, with so much advance warning about the precise errors it was making. . . . . And yet here we are, lurching toward a new version of a familiar catastrophe, suffering from some national form of neurotic repetition compulsion. “This is like the horrible, lame-dad cover band version of the worst of American foreign policy,” said Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy.

Someday, perhaps, when we’re picking up the pieces from yet another ill-conceived war, Republicans will explain that behind the scenes, they opposed it. One of the biggest problems in Congress, said Crow, is the gap between what people say privately and their willingness to demonstrate “the strength of their convictions” in public. “I’m always trying to close that gap with folks, and I always remind people that it’s never too late to do the right thing,” he said. He may be right, but the sooner the better.