If people knew how terrible war was going to be, they wouldn’t go to war. From Ted Galen Carpenter at theamericanconservative.com:
Politicians often fail to grasp how terrible a proposed conflict would be.
President Donald Trump continues to give mixed, but generally hardline, signals regarding U.S. policy toward Iran. With respect to the nuclear weapons issue, he has shown greater openness to negotiations with Tehran than he did during his first term, when he torpedoed the multilateral agreement then in effect. However, Washington’s position is still characterized by maximalist demands on most of the specific issues, even setting a deadline of just two months for Iran to make a deal with the U.S. Moreover, even the new, marginally more conciliatory stance regarding Tehran’s nuclear program is fully offset by the administration’s extremely belligerent posture toward Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen. This week, Trump warned that he would hold Iran responsible for any attacks carried out by that faction. U.S. forces had already launched a new wave of airstrikes in Yemen.
Other GOP hawks, including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), have advocated using force against Iran for years, and they show no signs of softening that position. “I have, for a long time, been willing to call quite unequivocally for regime change in Iran,” Cruz said in December 2024. Hardliners have tried to preempt warnings that a military intervention would risk triggering yet another endless war in the Middle East. Writing in 2015, Cotton contended that those opposed to attacking Iran “want to make you think it would be 150,000 heavy mechanized troops on the ground in the Middle East again as we saw in Iraq, and that’s simply not the case.” Instead, he assured readers, “it would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. Several days of air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities.”
