A succinct email reached me from California this week, which read as follows. “Two lessons from Vietnam: 1) Don’t go to war unless you intend to win. 2) Never underestimate your enemy in tenacity or resourcefulness, no matter how out-gunned.” This was from a guy called Mike Eiland, whom you may not have heard of. Nor are the names of Frank Scotton or Frank Snepp likely to ring bells.
Yet in their day all were US intelligence legends, men who spent years in Vietnam, where they tried to speak truth to power, work with the Vietnamese and help avoid the killing of too many people. I met them way back, when writing a book on the war. Their old timers’ group still copies me in on their email exchanges.
As you might expect, they think what President Donald Trump is doing in the Middle East is recklessly irresponsible, even by the standards of a man who has built a presidential career out of indifference to consequences. The Iran assault reminds me of Pete Seeger’s old protest song: “We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on.”
The bit that scares me about Trump’s current crusade is that neither the president, nor Secretary of State Marco Rubio, nor Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, knows anything about the Middle East and its peoples, except what Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu chooses to tell them. The White House, National Security Council and State Department have been systematically purged of the experts who have studied the region for decades.
This campaign is nothing like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan or any other of America’s lost wars, because conditions in all these places were different. But I would identify one important common factor: The US waded into these morasses for its own national reasons, with only a fig leaf of pretended interest in the peoples it said it wanted to save.
In my own Vietnam book, I noted that in two decades of White House meetings to debate strategy, and indeed escalation, only Americans were present. There were no Vietnamese at the table. I argued that, in the end, Hanoi’s pretty nasty leaders won the war because they were Vietnamese, as the American puppets sporting sunglasses in Saigon were not, at least in any sense that their compatriots could recognize.
George W. Bush took the US and some allies into Iraq in large part to settle a family grudge against Saddam Hussein. He joined with British Prime Minister Tony Blair to exaggerate evidence on Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, and on Saddam’s alleged sponsorship of 9/11. A recent poll of 350 US historians identified the 2003 invasion as the gravest foreign policy blunder in American history, a few points ahead of a couple of Trump’s follies.
Some MAGA supporters will claim that Trump is only doing what earlier presidents did before him. Yes, and they also blindsided voters on their heedless military actions, as the White House is repeating today. But the world paid a price to learn lessons that this administration willfully ignores.
Trump offers every day a succession of changing stories about his objectives in Iran. He promises regime change, then his White House spokesperson says that is not on the menu. He says he will destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, which back in June he claimed to have achieved through a single bombing raid. He proposes to disarm Iran’s mullahs without putting American boots on the ground, then says he might place some boots after all.
Snepp, part of that Vietnam vets’ group I mentioned above, is once of the CIA and wrote one of the angriest books about America’s betrayal of the Vietnamese, Decent Interval. He has also emailed in recent days. “What is obscene is trying… to justify Trump’s flagrant disregard for Congress’ constitutionally mandated role in declaring war,” he writes. “If Vietnam taught anything it is that the two branches must both be engaged as the Constitution dictates. Otherwise what you get is underfunded, under-supported disaster.”
What we have learned over the past 14 months about Trump’s way of doing war and peace alike is that he never articulates clear objectives, so that nobody can accuse him of failing to attain them. Instead he makes up a story from one morning to the next, so that he can choose his moment to declare victory and walk away, regardless of where it leaves the country concerned.
He started out on Inauguration Day promising peace in Ukraine, and has since discovered that the only way he can achieve this is by bullying Volodymyr Zelenskiy into surrendering to Vladimir Putin. Ukraine’s citizens will pay a bitter price for Trump’s Iran folly because American munitions are being fired away in the Middle East.
Elsewhere, Trump took out Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and got his triumphant headlines, and now he seems content to leave the Venezuelan people to the mercy of Maduro’s equally vicious associates.
The least likely outcome of his latest campaign is a stable, peaceful Iran. The most plausible is chaos, and more misery for the Iranians. Nobody except Islamic fanatics mourns the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who presided over so much killing. But for Trump to embark on a huge war with the same insouciance with which another man might sit down to play poker, shrugging that he will see how the cards fall, is unworthy of any president.
Lyndon Johnson made terrible decisions about Vietnam, but nobody doubts he was a serious person who did some fine things. Trump is frivolous, driven by a vanity in which there is no place for compassion for the victims of his actions.
The only person getting everything he wants from Trump’s war is Netanyahu. It has been his lifelong ambition to persuade the US to join a war to crush Iran. Whatever happens in the coming weeks and months, Netanyahu will probably win the forthcoming Israeli election.
That will protect him from having to face longstanding corruption charges, and empower him to pursue another obsession: annexing the West Bank and forging a greater Israel. This is already happening progressively, apparently unnoticed in the West. What happens to the Palestinians, who will never be granted political or civil rights within Netanyahu’s Israel, is anybody’s guess.
Most of the world is appalled by the ignorance of Trump and his people. They cancel vaccination programs, withdraw food aid to the starving, deny climate change, tear down the pillars of the global order and renounce truth. Now they are playing at war, a game about which they know incomparably less than those who’ve done it for real in Vietnam and elsewhere. The entire world — and especially the population of Iran — will pay heavily for their recklessness.