War-A-Lago welcomes you to Donald Trump’s chaotic Iran War | Opinion
The 20% of Idahoans alive in the early 1960s will clearly remember how the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution propelled the United States into the deadly throes of the Vietnam War. This resolution gave President Lyndon Johnson authorization, without a formal congressional declaration of war, to use conventional force in Southeast Asia. This pretext for war was based on flimsy and unproven evidence that U.S. ships had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin by North Vietnamese naval vessels.
From this authority, the Vietnam War continued until the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, after 58,220 U.S. military personnel were killed and thousands more wounded along with millions of civilian casualties.
The Vietnam War lasted more than 11 years and tore our country apart. In the post-war period between Vietnam and the Gulf War, caution and precision-guided weapons were used to avoid the quicksand of a forever war.
Fast forward to 1991. Congress supported President George H.W. Bush to deploy his 34-nation coalition to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in Operation Desert Storm/Desert Shield. As a member of the House of Representatives, I voted “nay.”
This Gulf War was quick: It lasted from Jan. 17 to Feb. 28. However, 148 service members lost their lives in this military action.
But the swift victory in Desert Storm changed strategies. A faux confidence emerged from that lightning quick military victory. Nearly a decade later in 2003, President George W. Bush launched a congressionally approved “shock and awe” attack against Iraq intended to stun, confuse, overwhelm and paralyze Saddam Hussein and his military forces. If only.
Just like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a president lied to Congress about his reasons for going to war. This time it was the declaration that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs. As we soon discovered, Iraq did not have WMDs. Nevertheless, we were committed to fight an urban war unlike the desert conflict of the Gulf War. As we grimly recall, it continued for eight deadly years until late 2011.
That war cost the United States more than $700 billion while 4,492 service members died, 32,292 were wounded and 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed. In a 2014 poll, only 24% of Americans said the Iraq War was worth it.
These memories stayed vivid, until now.
President Donald Trump’s regime-change operation in Venezuela, the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, was conducted stealthily without loss of American lives. However, battle assessments showed near-miss calamities in Caracas that could have quickly spiraled into the vortex of the Battle of Mogadishu (depicted in “Black Hawk Down”) where 18 U.S. military service people died along with hundreds of Somali casualties.
Americans now clearly see how the quick and successful Maduro mission influenced subsequent major military action in Iran — mimicking the sequence from the Gulf War to the Iraq War when an initial military incursion looked playbook perfect and the next turned ugly.
The U.S. jumped into a war of choice in Iran, persuaded by Israel and lobbied by Saudi Arabia. It’s inescapable to consider that we are acting as mercenaries of another nation. Did we just outsource our military might to another country under a sub-contracting arrangement? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly manipulated Trump’s malignant narcissism to play our wannabe strongman president for a fool.
Speaking of fools, Americans were deceived by the bait-and-switch tactics of the performative negotiations between the U.S. and Iran held in Oman just before the Iran version of shock and awe commenced.
The February nuclear weapons discussions conducted by our mini-me diplomats — Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff — were never intended to keep peace hopes alive. It was a clear deception by our team that misled Iran, our allies — and Americans.
Diplomacy requires immense patience. That quality is never used to describe President Trump. After all, he’s a very busy authoritarian overdriving his headlights. He mandates illegal tariffs, signs unconstitutional executive orders, markets meme coins, positions the Trump clan on ethically challenged real estate deals, acquires luxury jets, vaporizes fishing boats, denigrates U.S. Supreme Court justices, wrecks the White House, adorns Washington, D.C., buildings with scornful likenesses, reduces the State of the Union to self-promotional fluff, belittles our allies and schedules a lot of golf (97 days of golf within 410 days in office at a cost of $135.8 million) while he creates global chaos.
Our daily doses of propaganda from War-A-Lago roll on. The strategy is right out of a wartime playbook intended to render the target (us) dazed and confused. Trump never bothers to describe — or is incapable of describing — the “imminent danger” or “grave threat” to the homeland. The history of untruthful pretexts for war continues.
It endures with a complicit Congress and belligerent enablers — until it doesn’t. Cracks are appearing as markets tank, the economy stalls, allies balk, midterm primaries surprise and this war of choice metastasizes.
Americans are not disengaged citizens. They are appropriately offended when played for fools. The whack-a- mole foreign policy announcements change hourly as our self-branded War Secretary Pete Hegseth lectures us with military jargon, childish swagger and battlefield shorthand.
We’ve been lied to thousands of times by Trump and his team of ideological amateurs. Maybe — just maybe — the firehose of mendacity will be choked off, and we can return to a civil country where Congress and citizens use the intended checks and balances from our democracy toolbox.
So much of America’s soul has been damaged by one confused and unstable man.
God help us.
Larry LaRocco, of Boise, represented Idaho’s 1st Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat from 1991-95. From 1969 to 1972, he was a captain in US Army Military Intelligence. This column was originally published in the Lewiston Tribune.