The Spire

Tucker Scott ’26

Opinions Editor

It’s another forever war! Just like Iraq! Anytime America takes any strong foreign action, isolationists from both parties emerge to claim that the battle has already been lost despite the fact that it has barely begun and America is winning. In fact, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani invoked the Iraq War when he was asked about the military action. Why he didn’t invoke the smoldering crater that terrorists left is revealing. I also wonder why we care what a mayor has to say, given that he has zero national power, but I digress; that is not relevant for the particular claim. 

Calling it another “forever war” is confounding, given that it has been a little over two weeks since the strikes began. We were in Iraq for almost 9 years, Afghanistan for 20, and we still have troops in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and anywhere between 129 and 178 other countries. That includes anywhere from 170,000 to 173,000 active-duty troops stationed worldwide and 750 to 800 military bases in at least 80 countries.

The Iraq War was a “forever war” because the goal of the operation was muddled, unclear, and unspecified. If President Bush had simply said we were going into Iraq to kill Saddam Hussein and then leave, then it wouldn’t be a forever war. But instead, he got bogged down with talk of nation-building and the responsibility of America, which ultimately was why President Obama pulled us out of the region. 

That does not mean that every military action we take is a forever war. President Trump and his entire administration have made it clear that they are not interested in nation-building. They are doing just like what they did in Venezuela, they are eliminating the threats to America, and then whatever happens happens. If they want to be our ally, great, and if not, we’ll bomb them until they stop being a threat. To say that President Trump is interested in some long-term occupation is patently crazy. He was against the Iraq war before it was a popular position inside the Republican Party, heck, before it was a mainstream position inside the Democratic Party.

As to the claim that there is no justification for the strikes, or that it’s somehow not America first, that’s ridiculous. There’s the obvious reason: that Iran was trying, again, to go nuclear. They also tried to assassinate the President, have murdered 1,000 to 1500 American servicemen and women in the last 50 years, and have funded terrorist and terrorist groups like Hamas, the Houthis, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah, and even, for a time, ISIS, just to name a few, according to the International Centre for Counter Terrorism. That’s just talking about how many American service members they killed, I’m not even talking about how within the last two weeks, they killed at minimum 40,000 of their own citizens And who knows how many of America’s allies they’ve kidnapped, tortured, and killed or how much money was lost because Iranian funded terrorists were threatening shipping in the Red Sea. It is expressly and obviously in America’s interest to make sure that Iran never gets a nuke because they will, as the former ayatollah himself said, strike America.

It’s super easy to be isolationist because the counterfactual always exists. It’s easy to claim after the fact that an intervention has negative consequences because no duh. Any action has consequences, both good and bad. The question is not whether something bad came out of action, but whether something worse was avoided. Imagine if we did nothing and let the Iranians get a nuke. What then? We’d have another North Korea on our hands, except much, much worse, because the Iranian regime is expansionist, theocratic, and terroristic in its goals to wipe all non-Shia Muslims off the map. The whole reason why there is no hope to “win” the Russo-Ukrainian War and the best hope is a draw is because of the fear that if the Ukrainians go too far or the West intervenes, Putin will go nuclear. Imagine if we funded the populists in the Russian Revolution against the communists. It’s extremely likely that WWII just doesn’t happen, and suddenly a century of war is avoided because of one preliminary action. Or if we funded the effort against Mao Zedong in China, the same thing.

Now that doesn’t mean that we should always take military action. The Libyan war was misguided because Muammar Gaddafi was contained, and the rebels we funded were fundamentalist radicals. That action led to the Arab Spring, the downfall of Middle Eastern secularism, and an immigration crisis that the West is dealing with. America should not be scared to act strongly on the foreign stage to protect our interests; we have the most powerful military in human history. We had no interest in Libya, so we shouldn’t have acted. But we absolutely have an interest in making sure Iran doesn’t go nuclear. 

It’s easy to claim that war is bad. No one likes war, and frankly, I’m sick of hearing that there are these mythical war mongers working behind the scenes who want American servicemen to die. But what’s hard is making the tough call. In realizing that America has to act not for the betterment of the world but for the safety of herself and the future.

Featured image courtesy of Los Angeles Times