Old fortification in Oman. Photo by Matthew Stevenson.
Before the United States decides to stump up another half a trillion dollars for Pete Hegseth’s Excellent Adventures, it might want to answer the question why the country has only won a handful wars in the last hundred years?
Victory disease is defined as “dangerous overconfidence, arrogance, and complacency that arises within a leadership or military force following a string of decisive victories,” and most imperial powers in decline, including now the U.S., suffer from it chronically.
On paper, measured by budget appropriations, the U.S. army is the greatest show on turf—with endless gadgets, cruise missiles, and stealth bombers.
Since World War II, however, the United States has fought to the occasional draw—as happened in Korea—but in most of its splendid little wars it has been defeated.
The United States has lost wars in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Iran (1979), and Afghanistan, and smaller engagements in places like Syria, Libya, and Lebanon.
The 1991 Gulf War did end with the Iraqis out of Kuwait and its malls, but that fighting ended at intermission, with the issues in Iraq and the Middle East still unresolved.
The three most glaring defeats—Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—are examples of undeclared wars that involved the combined arms of the army, navy, and air forces, which at war’s end departed in rooftop helicopters with the American flag stuffed into a garbage bag or whatever.
In Vietnam, the United States tried everything in its “arsenal of democracy” (except maybe nuclear weapons or democracy itself), but got nowhere.
The Vietnam War cost the lives of some 58,000 soldiers, but really the death toll—when you add in the suicides of returning veterans—was in the hundreds of thousands (not counting the deaths of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians,
As Professor Christian Appy writes in his excellent book, American Reckoning: “We didn’t know who we were till we got here. We thought we were something else.”
The 9/11 Forever Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq largely followed the template of the defeat in Vietnam.
At the wars’ beginnings (maybe as now in Iran?), the United States won the sound-and-light shows—with spectacular D-Day air campaigns that destroyed power grids, airports, and rail networks—only for American forces to become bogged down in unwinnable guerrilla wars. For the moment Iran is following this libretto.
Was it the politicians (with confused war aims) or the generals (fighting the last war) that cost the United States victories in so many wars?
In Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson’s orders to his generals were beyond the capabilities of the army in the field, roughly 500,000 men.
The senior army commanders approached Vietnam as if each hamlet was Bastogne and as if the war was a rerun of the Battle of the Bulge—not combat-in-the-round against a largely invisible army. In a country larger than California, eight combat divisions don’t cover much ground.
Attrition as a strategy might have worked for Ulysses S. Grant at the Wilderness (on the march to Appomattox) but it was unsuited to Vietnam—a labyrinthine country of mountains, rivers, and jungles—although senior army commanders never adapted.
Now in Iran Trump is saber rattling with 2,500 marines and few minesweepers.
In many ways, Iraq and Afghanistan were reruns of Vietnam, in that the George W. Bush and Obama administrations assigned impossible missions to an unprepared army (which thought that it could go home once the Saddam Hussein monument had come down in Baghdad).
Instead, in both wars, it took more than ten years to figure out that neither the American government or the army was up to its assigned tasks. Nor did it help in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan that the U.S. government justified these wars through a series of lies told to the American people—something those defeats have in common with Trump’s “little excursion” in Iran.
The only person to declare war on Iran was Donald Trump, who approached the campaign as if playing with ships in one of Jeffrey Epstein’s hot tubs.
Trump went to war in Iran without a clear reason, without a declaration from Congress, without any allies (except for Israel’s remittance men using war to stay out of jail), without troops at the ready (those marines sailing toward Kharg Island had to be sent from Okinawa), and without knowing how victory would be defined.
Even worse—from the perspective of Napoleon who often spoke of deluded generals “painting pictures”—Trump’s war plans in Iran are an invention of the president’s addled brain.
Knowing nothing about geography, history, or religion, Trump chose to imagine war in the Middle East as a variation on new TV game show, in which the key is to get other people’s money to backstop your paper empire.
For Trump attacking Iran was always just “a deal”: to get rid of Ayatollah Khamenei; to curry favor with Jewish voters in the mid-term elections; to make voters forget about his Epstein rape allegations; to weasel more money out of the Saudis and the Gulf States for his son’s private-equity schemes; and to play soldier in the bunkers at Mar-a-Lago. Hence, the casus belli changes with each Fox talk show beamed into his echo chamber.
In less than two months, the war to liberate Iran’s street demonstrators became a war to deny Iran the use of enriched uranium, which became a war to destroy Iran’s power grids and then a battle to control the Strait of Hormuz—war as a Netflix serial not unlike Succession.
Few, if any, Americans knew why we were “in Vietnam,” just as the only geopolitical justification for the Iraq War was W’s utterance about Saddam Hussein: “We’re taking that fucker out.”
Likewise, few Americans—even those supporting the blitz—have a clue why the United States is at war with Iran (unless, of course, Trump wants “to impress Jody Foster”).
Even on his good days, which are few and far between, Trump sounds more like Peter Sellers’ Chauncey Gardiner (“I like to watch…”) than either the Austrian Foreign Metternich or the British Viscount Castlereagh.
Through endless nights, Trump drones on about Iranian oil “paying for the war” or going into business with the ayatollah to collect tolls in the Strait of Hormuz. Then he reverts to the mean and calls all Iranians “scumbags” or “crazy bastards,” debased language that suggests more than a little desperation in the demented and wandering Trump.
How can he figure out the Middle East if he needs posted signs to find his way around the White House?
