What the Iraq War Foretold About How the Iran War Will End
Thousands gathered in Tehran for a mass funeral honouring 110 unidentified soldiers killed in the Iran-Iraq war.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
- As much as Americans want the war to conclude, they also overwhelmingly agree that Iran should not possess such a weapon.
- President Trump, who also criticized the war in his 2016 campaign, kept soldiers there to continue fighting ISIS.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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