(transcript via ChatGPT)
JULIAN ZELIZER:
Hey everyone, welcome back to Then and Now. I’m Julian Zelizer of The Long View.
JONATHAN ALTER:
And I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
So, Jon, the news in Iran has clearly accelerated since we last spoke. We are now in a full-scale military operation there, and the situation continues to unfold. There’s been a lot of discussion about how this compares with Iraq in 2003, when the United States went in. Back then, we were in the aftermath of 9/11. We had already gone into Afghanistan and temporarily knocked down the Taliban regime.
The buildup to the war in Iraq, as we know, was a full-scale push by the administration that included faulty intelligence and misleading information and claims about Hussein and his connection to 9/11, and weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to be what the administration said. It became a long war, a controversial war, a costly war, and one that had a huge effect on American politics, including on President Trump, who until recently positioned himself against it. So thinking about that moment, how do you see the comparison between that and where we are today?
JONATHAN ALTER:
It’s important when you do historical analogies not to overdo it and assume that history is going to repeat itself. But, as Mark Twain said, it does rhyme.
At that time, one of the key lines was from Colin Powell, who unfortunately put his credibility on the line to peddle lies about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. That war and this war were both predicated on lies. Trump lied when he said Iran posed an imminent threat. Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee said they won’t have an ICBM until 2035 at the earliest. So that was a flat-out lie. He also lied when he said their nuclear capacity had been obliterated last June.
But there are important differences. When Colin Powell invoked the Pottery Barn rule, if you break it you own it, that was true for Iraq. That’s true when you have boots on the ground. It’s not true if you’re just using an aerial assault. You can basically play 52-card pickup with a country and then walk away. And that’s what Trump is going to do in the next couple of weeks. He’s not going to let this become a quagmire.
When Hegseth says we could have boots on the ground, Hegseth is an idiot, but that was actually the right thing to say. You never want to say to your enemies you’re not going to put boots on the ground. That’s not smart. Bill Clinton did that with Serbia in 1998, and I wrote at the time in Newsweek that it was a big mistake. You don’t take anything off the table.
But I think even Trump is not crazy enough to send hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Iran. So that’s unlikely to happen, and that would be a very big difference from the Iraq War.
The big similarity is this: it’s easy to start a war. It’s a lot harder to end it. Extracting ourselves from this and dealing with the inevitable surprises is going to be very challenging, not just for Trump but for the country in the next few weeks.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
And I’ll just add, Jon, one other difference. For all the many problems of the Bush administration, they at least approached Congress and made a misleading case but took that part of it as essential to the process. Here, Congress was basically written out altogether. So it’s another step up in presidential war powers.
JONATHAN ALTER:
Yeah, that’s true. And I do think they should go to Congress. But Obama didn’t go to Congress either. The tradition going back quite a ways is that if it’s air power alone, administrations say they don’t have to go to Congress. That’s not right, but that has been the way it’s gone for presidents of both parties.
The other thing to keep in mind is this: I think this was a bad idea. They should not have done this. But it’s also a bad idea to stop right now. If you’re going to destroy the Iranian Navy, finish the job so that you don’t have to go back later to keep the Straits of Hormuz open. So I think this war does need to go on for at least a few more days until they complete the mission of taking out the Iranian Navy.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
Well, that was Then and Now, and we’ll be back next week to talk about a new issue. Thanks, Jon.
JONATHAN ALTER:
Thanks, Julian. Bye-bye.
