GOP candidates bloodthirsty, delusional about Iran
It’s like Iraq and Afghanistan never happened in the minds of the next generation of Republican warmongers.
Listening to the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday, I heard all the things I expect to hear from Republican candidates — from fearmongering about the Mexican border to deafening silence about the 26 million people who still don’t have health insurance in the wealthiest nation on the planet.
I also heard a lot of bloodthirstiness about the Palestinians. Sadly, at this point, I expect that, too. Even those MAGA Republicans who cosplay as “anti-war” when they’re talking about Ukraine are all in on this American proxy war. One thing that did slightly surprise me, though, was how eager some of these people seemed to be to start a war with Iran.
Referring to strikes on US forces in the region by Iranian-allied groups in Iraq and Syria and the US engaging in limited retaliation, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley said: “We need to understand this is Iran giving the green light telling them what to do, and we shouldn’t be doing the tit for tat like what Joe Biden has done. We need to go and take out their infrastructure that they are using to make those strikes with, so they can never do it again.”
Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) went even further, tying together Hamas, Hezbollah, and the fighters in Iraq and Syria to draw the conclusion that “you have to cut off the head of the snake and the head of the snake is Iran and not simply their proxies.”
But even if you don’t care about the ocean of death and suffering this would bring to Iranian civilians just trying to live their lives, how many Americans would die or come home physically or psychologically broken by the time it was all over?
Why would we do that to ourselves — again?
Afghanistan was the longest war in American history — and surely one of the most pointless. A year and a half after he sent troops to Afghanistan, George W. Bush invaded a second country — Iraq. In some ways that one was such a disaster that it made Afghanistan look good.
By contrast, Iran is — to put it bluntly — a real country with a real army. Not on an American scale, of course, but even so. The Iranian armed forces consist of 610,000 active-duty personnel, plus another 350,000 available for mobilization — not to mention the various closely allied forces, like Hezbollah, that the candidates were talking about on Wednesday night. Saddam Hussein and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan were also diplomatically isolated in a way that Iran just isn’t. It exercises massive influence in the region — including, thanks to Bush’s war, Iraq — and it’s allied with Russia. The potential for aid coming from all sorts of quarters during a war with the United States should give even as enthusiastic a warmonger as Nikki
Haley pause.
Maybe Scott and Haley just want to…what…to bomb the hell out of them for a few days and just get away with it without the Iranians lifting a finger in response? As delusional as that is, Haley seemed to say as much at one point: “Iran responds to strength. You punch them once, you punch them hard, and they back off.”
So, in her worldview, Iran is both an incredibly dangerous country that needs to have its whole “infrastructure” “take[n] out” in such a final way that they can “never” provide aid to forces fighting with the US again — but also so weak and cautious that if President Haley tried it, they wouldn’t even fight back?
Whatever else you want to say about all this, one thing everyone should stop saying — forever — is that any of these people are “anti-war”.
The full article penned by Ben Burgis first appeared on The Daily Beast.