When the United States went to war with Iraq for the first time in 1990, there weren’t many protest songs. At most, some of the songs that were supportive of the troops expressed ambivalence about the mission. The supergroup pop hit “Voices That Care,” a sort of “We Are the World” of the Persian Gulf War era, featured Will Smith rapping: “Right or wrong / We’re all praying you remain strong / That’s why we’re all here and singing along.”
One surprising exception was the singer-songwriter James Taylor, who in 1991 released an uncharacteristic rockabilly tune titled “Slap Leather.” The man may have seen fire and rain, but on the day he wrote this song, he was seeing red:
Get all worked up and we can go to war / We’d find something worth a killin’ for / Tie a yellow ribbon around your eyes / Big mac, falafel and a side of fries, yeah / Big Mac falafel / Stormin’ Norman / I just love a parade.
Taylor later told an interviewer that George H.W. Bush had irritated him with comments to the effect that the successful expulsion of Iraqi troops from Kuwait had cured “Vietnam syndrome,” a popular term for the reluctance to use military force after the debacle of the Vietnam War.
This all comes to mind following President Donald Trump’s toppling of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, which in turn came months after the bombing of nuclear sites in Iran. Trump campaigned as someone who understood the Iraq War was a mistake—which, believe it or not, was not quite the consensus Republican position even as late as 2015—and pledged to avoid similar military adventures. Trump more or less governed this way in his first term, with some significant exceptions. Trump 2.0 has so far looked a little different, though he has also engaged in a lot of high-stakes diplomacy.
Some feel that Trump has exorcised the ghosts of Iraq. Trump’s smaller military interventions are different from that war, especially in ambition and scope. Trump has so far focused on the things the military does well—killing people and breaking things, to put it colloquially—rather than what it is not really not well suited for, such as democracy promotion. And so far, regardless of whether these operations were wise or just, they have, at least in the short term, worked.
Trump may not be a restrainer himself, but he has advocates of foreign-policy restraint both in his political coalition and inside his administration advising him. He also has shown a willingness to quit while he’s ahead that wasn’t evident in Lyndon Johnson or George W. Bush.
But it’s also easy to see how what Trump is doing could lead to more war if he isn’t careful. Even if Trump himself avoids this outcome, it now looks less certain that this would continue under a future Republican administration, even though he has actually done more to advance restrainers—including Vice President J.D. Vance—in his second term than his first. Trump’s loose talk about “running” Venezuela and the return of weapons-of-mass-destruction alarmism threaten to rehabilitate Bush 43-era talking points that were until recently thought discredited even on the right. Trump even recently scoffed at “boots on the ground” being a problematic phrase.
The lesson Trump has learned from Iraq is to try to keep missions small and manageable without being too idealistic about what is being done. One imagines if Trump had invaded Iraq in 2003, he would have handed the keys to Tariq Aziz and left with numerous barrels of oil.
But you likely don’t get the disastrous 2000s war in Iraq without the seemingly successful one of the early 1990s. The failures of Vietnam would have continued to constrain us militarily if it weren’t for smaller, successful military actions under Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.
Not all of those military actions were wrong, and some marginally contributed to our victory in the Cold War. A prudent military operation shouldn’t necessarily be opposed simply because its success may embolden future leaders to try something riskier and dumber.
But the threshold for the use of military force remains lower than it ought to be. Some George W. Bush-era hubris is creeping back into our foreign-policy thinking, down to the premature declarations of “mission accomplished.” In the Republican Party, the old hawks never fully went away. And Trump has supplanted the Bushes as a commander-in-chief the GOP base loves, even if the rest of the electorate is less enamored.
Trump still has time to sing a different tune.
Read the full article here
