'Daddy, is Iran going to nuke New York? Should we leave?'

I live in New York City, where almost 3,000 people died on 9/11. My kids were born after that date, so they never knew a world where their home hadn’t been attacked, where it wasn’t vulnerable in a way most of us hadn’t imagined on Sept. 10, 2001. Thus I can’t say I was 100% surprised when my daughter asked me the question above. All the same, my heart felt like it dropped right into my stomach.

My daughter is far from the only young person to express concern about a potential war with Iran landing on her doorstep. In the wake of the U.S. attack that killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force, so many young men were worried about the possibility of being drafted into the Armed Forces and, potentially, having to kill or die in the service of our country, that the website for the Selective Service System temporarily broke down due to the huge volume of people looking for information.

x

Due to the spread of misinformation, our website is experiencing high traffic volumes at this time. If you are attempting to register or verify registration, please check back later today as we are working to resolve this issue. We appreciate your patience.

— Selective Service (@SSS_gov) January 3, 2020

A New York Times article examined the widespread fear of war with Iran expressed by members of the “post-9/11 generation.” Multiple examples came from a single household.

When Molly Patterson picked up her 17-year-old daughter from school in a suburb of Detroit on Friday, she was stunned when her daughter immediately asked whether her boyfriend would be drafted. The next morning, Ms. Patterson discovered that her 14-year-old son had been up until 3 a.m.; he was feeling stressed after reading about the possibility of war and texting his uncle about whether he could be sent to fight.

This prompted a memory I hadn’t thought of for a long time: my own feelings during the first Gulf War. I was 19 years old in 1991, as U.S. forces were preparing to move into Kuwait to confront Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army. I have a distinct visual memory of being home from college on winter break, sitting alone on the edge of the bed in my room, and wondering the exact same thing as Ms. Patterson’s barely teenage boy above, namely whether I would be drafted and sent to war, like the men of my father’s and grandfather’s generations.

Thankfully, war right now looks less “imminent”—to use a word that’s been central to U.S.-Iranian relations since this current crisis began—than it did just after The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote decided to take out Soleimani. However, that doesn’t mean, as Trump childishly tweeted this week after Iran’s missile attacks, that “All is well!”

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy laid out the reality in a press release on Wednesday:

We must not forget that Trump is the one responsible for getting us to this crisis point in the first place, by leaving the Iran nuclear deal and pursuing a unilateral, non-strategic maximum pressure campaign. Now, the Trump administration has enabled Tehran to restart their nuclear program, turned the people of Iraq and Iran against us, brought about a halt to our counter-ISIS mission, and prompted Iraq to vote to eject all our troops from the country. In short, we are weaker, and Iran is stronger, because of Trump's actions. I am glad that the road to war may be narrowing, but the damage done to U.S. national security interests is enormous and potentially irreparable.

And, just to clarify for the sake of that lying demagogue Nikki Haley, I do not mourn Soleimani’s death, and neither does Sen. Murphy, and nor do any other Democratic leaders. Soleimani is responsible for the death of countless civilians from numerous countries. He was, as Kathy Gilsinan of The Atlantic noted, a “terrorist kingpin.” The question is not the extent of Soleimani’s crimes, but whether the U.S. should go to war with Iran, and whether that is a smart or a dumb move—not to mention a moral or immoral decision—for our country to make.

As we have faced that question over the past week, we’ve also had to deal with the lies about Iran—quickly debunked by Susan Rice and John Kerry, among others—that spewed forth from Trump and his White House. Those lies have been outlandish, and yet perfectly in line with this administration’s everyday routine. Perhaps the most dangerous mistruth, in terms of pushing us closer to war, was Mike Pence’s whopper connecting Soleimani, and thus Iran, to 9/11.

x

Assisted in the clandestine travel to Afghanistan of 10 of the 12 terrorists who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) January 3, 2020

A fact check done by The New York Times pointed out that even the Treasury Department document cited as backup for this lie by Pence’s own office “did not directly link the hijackers to any forces overseen by General Suleimani, or specify how many may have been granted passage,” and added “The notion that General Suleimani abetted the attackers at all also appears dubious.”

There have been people and institutions on the right that have been pushing for us to go to war with Iran, in some cases for decades. While still in office, Vice President Dick Cheney, not satisfied with having gotten his boss to invade Iraq, pushed hard for a military attack on Tehran, which could well have led to war, as The Guardian noted in 2007:

”The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months, the Guardian has learned….A well-placed source in Washington said: "Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo."

The White House claims that Iran, whose influence in the Middle East has increased significantly over the last six years, is intent on building a nuclear weapon and is arming insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan….The vice-president, Dick Cheney, has long favoured upping the threat of military action against Iran.

That should sound awfully familiar. Ultimately—in one of his few good foreign policy decisions—Bush decided against invading another Middle Eastern country; this time the current occupant of the White House decided to bring us to the brink of war.

Think back for a second to how the most recent crisis began: An Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militia called Kataib Hezbollah fired rockets that killed a U.S. contractor on Dec. 27. This was certainly a serious provocation, and undoubtedly was a profound loss for the loved ones of the American who died. However, I don’t imagine many people thought that this one death would lead to war.

The U.S. responded to this provocation on Dec. 29 by attacking Kataib Hezbollah forces in both Iraq and Syria, resulting in at least two dozen deaths. Subsequently, members of pro-Iranian militias, along with sympathizers, protested at and broke through the outer boundaries of the American embassy in Baghdad, causing significant damage … but no casualties. Trump, described by The New York Times as “fuming” while watching TV news coverage of the attacks on the embassy, responded by ordering the strike that killed Soleimani, along with a top figure and other members of a pro-Iran Iraqi militia.

Although Trump claimed that he acted to prevent an “imminent” attack, two Republican senators who were briefed on the actions were highly critical, with Utah Sen. Mike Lee characterizing it as the “worst briefing I've had on a military issue,” and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul calling it “an insult to the Constitution." More recently, the prevaricator in chief claimed—with no evidence, mind you—that Soleimani was “looking to blow up our embassy.”

Yet after all these escalations, it’s important to remember that the whole thing started with the killing of a single individual.

***

As a historian, I’ve studied how dozens of wars began. Some were clashes of world-historical importance, a fight between diametrically opposed worldviews in which the fate of civilization was at stake. Others grew out of, shall we say, matters of less substance. One, in fact, reminds me a great deal of the events discussed above, in particular because it too was birthed by an act of violence committed by one country’s military against an individual citizen of another country.

I’m talking about—and I’m not making this up—the War of Jenkins’ Ear. This was a real conflict between Britain and Spain. In 1731, off the coast of Florida, Spanish naval forces boarded a British merchant ship, the Rebecca, captained by one Robert Jenkins, and cut off the man’s ear. This raised tensions between the two countries, in particular because British politicians and commercial interests thought a war would benefit them, and because Britain wanted leverage to ensure that Spain would continue to allow British slavers to continue selling enslaved people in Spanish colonies. A few years later, the shooting started.

By the time it ended, Britain had suffered losses of 20,000 men either killed, wounded, captured, or unaccounted for, and it lost over 400 ships; 9,500 Spanish personnel either died or were wounded, with 186 ships gone. Notably, disease was actually the prime culprit in causing the majority of these deaths. At the end of the war, Spain had successfully resisted British attempts to expand its military and commercial influence in the Caribbean, and the conflict was ultimately absorbed into the larger War of the Austrian Succession.

One fascinating legacy is that the War of Jenkins’ Ear—specifically the Battle of Bloody Marsh, in which British forces repulsed a Spanish invasion of a barrier island off the Georgia coast—is still commemorated annually at the Wormsloe State Historic Site in Savannah. While the circumstances today are different, the lesson is that, when two countries have seen one another as rivals or threats, the death of of one person, or even a single injury, has in fact led to war.

It’s tempting to dismiss a war fought because of a severed ear as irrelevant to today’s situation. Of course, the generals who presented Trump with an array of possible responses, including the “most extreme” one—killing Soleimani—apparently dismissed the notion that he’d go for that choice. They reportedly only included the assassination to make the other options “appear more palatable.” When Trump selected that extreme option, The New York Times noted in its coverage, “Top Pentagon officials were stunned.”

Trump’s military advisers never thought he’d take such a dangerous step, one that could so easily unleash a war with consequences beyond his understanding—limited as it is. Their miscalculation of what their boss would do has left millions of Americans fearing the worst, and resulted in my daughter asking whether we need to leave our home because it would be attacked by Iran.

It took some doing, but in the end I was able to reassure her that we could stay. For now.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)

from Daily Kos https://ift.tt/36NDpxV