Low level wars most Americans have forgotten about aren't in the news and don't tend to influence politics much. Both GW Bush and Barack Obama left office while we were at war because they reached their constitutional limit. Bush's 2004 win was not completely because of the war, but it probably helped him a bit.
All the 1 term presidents who lost re-election were running in peace time. Though the US's attitude towards war in general is shifting and has definitely shifted from the post-WWII era "we're the police of the world" attitude.
As malignant narcissists do.
Back when I was at Boeing (late 80s and early 90s), there were a lot of Iranians who had found themselves stuck here when the Revolution happened and had to find jobs instead of completing their advanced degrees. One guy I worked with closely had been raised by a rabidly Muslim mother and had tried to be like her as he grew up, but had too many doubts.
As he began to doubt Islam, he started researching the history and found that Shia Islam was far more decentralized before WW I than it is now. When the British controlled Persia/Iran they tried to solidify their power by finding religious authorities who would speak in their favor and pretty much made the ayatollah position into the sort of position it is today.
The Islamic revolution in Iran is blow back from 60 years of British and then American interference in the country.
Yes. There is an excellent book on how the occupation was botched by conservative ideologues
Imperial Life in the emerald City:
https://www.amazon.com/Imperial-Lif...qid=1561159343&rnid=2941120011&s=books&sr=1-2
I've been studying military history my entire life and I knew the occupation had been botched, but this book was even a surprise to me. Against all odds after an invasion the Iraqis wanted peace and initially were very interested in cooperating with the US. If the US had behaved like it had in the post WW II occupations, or even the Balkan occupation, the occupation would have worked despite having way too few troops to conduct a proper occupation.
The rule of thump is 20 troops per 1000 population and the US had around 1/10 that, which is why the looting got so out of hand. The Iraqi military was very weak to begin with and Arabs don't tend to fight very hard for secular causes. That's a contributing factor why the Israelis have won against the odds in every invasion.
Most of the Iraqi army just went home, stashing most of their equipment where they could get it later. Most people knew that as soon as the occupation was over, the civil war was going to start. Iraq is stitched together from three very different groups who hate one another and with Saddam Hussein gone, war with each other was an almost certainty.
The US backed insurgence against the Taliban was highly successful too and would have wrapped up Afghanistan quickly if the Bush administration hadn't illegally diverted resources directed at the Afghanistan War to the build up for Iraq. According to Richard Clark the day after 9/11 the PNAC people were talking about how the attacks would give them permission to take out Iraq. Clark was actually directed to issue a memo stating that Iraq was behind 9/11 and he refused.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks Congress gave the president a blank check to stop al Qaeda anywhere in the world and that's been used as an excuse ever since. That's why Pompeo was saying the other day that Iran is linked to al Qaeda so the US has an excuse under the authorization issued in 2002 to attack Iran. The statement is ludicrous. It would be like claiming the Vatican was allied with the Calvinists at the height of the Reformation.
It's one example of a history of slanted wargames. Back in the 70s in an exercise for the Cold War getting hot, the US was exercising the US doctrine at the time for moving a large US carrier force into the Arctic over the top of Norway and attacking the Russian base at Archangel (which was built into a large port during WW II). The officer in charge changed one parameter. He changed US carriers from impossible to sink to just very difficult to sink. The US Navy lost badly.
Another case of this was when the Japanese were running war games for the planned invasion of Midway island. One Japanese officer playing the Americans placed American carriers to the Northeast of the Japanese approach instead of remaining in Pearl Harbor where Yammamoto said they were supposed to be. The American side won a huge victory. Yammamoto told the officer playing the Americans to put the US carriers back at Pearl Harbor and ran the game again where the Japanese won.
Guess where Nimitz put the US carriers? Exactly where the Japanese officer playing the Americans had put them and it resulted in the Japanese losing 2/3 of their fleet carriers in one day.
If they're any good the enemy always does something the other side doesn't expect. The US is very strong in a straight up confrontation on the battlefield. This was demonstrated in the 1991 war in Kuwait and Iraq. The US tank forces wiped out the Iraqi tank forces in an afternoon with no losses.
But the stronger the front, the weaker the back. By the nature of their existence strong field armies are very poor at dealing with insurgency style warfare. Insurgencies are among the toughest type of warfare to counter, especially when the insurgents are fighting on their home turf. Since 1945 almost all the wars that involve western powers have been insurgencies the western country loses. The US is no exception.
I wouldn't call Iran peace promoting, but they have been carefully abiding by the terms of the nuclear treaty to stay friendly with the Europeans. There are stories in the US news now about the Iranians starting up their enrichment program again, but I'm very skeptical.
I saw a CNN report yesterday where a reporter went in a boat to one of the tankers that were damaged and he was talking about how it was done by limpet mines. He described damage that limpet mines can't really do (the explosion penetrated both hulls and into the cargo tank. And showed the damage to the ship. The crew had reported being hit by missiles and the damage is consistent with that from small missiles.
The only evidence of mines has been produced by the US.
As for Yemen, it's a tribal war at it's heart. The country has had several of them. The difference this time is the Saudis stuck their nose in the middle of it and if metastasized.
Since the Israeli attack on their nuclear plant many years ago, the Iranians have been building up their air defense capabilities and have one of the best air defense networks in the world. Any air strikes on Iran is going to be very costly.
Even Trump did this in Syria in 2017.
Ironically it's Trump's instability that probably brought the Koreans to the negotiating table. Lots of people call Kim Jong Un crazy, but it's just an act. He plays the crazy one to get things for North Korea. When faced with someone who really is mentally ill, he's suddenly acting very rational.
It's possible the United States could break up into two countries. The book
American Nations talks about the philosophical divide that has existed in what is now the United States since the colonial period. The two cultures that dominated in the early days were the Yankees in New England vs the Tidewater culture centered in Virginia and North Carolina. Tidewater faded as a power as the US expanded and the Deep South took up the mantle as the Yankee's antagonist.
The two cultures have very different attitudes about how to run a country. The Yankees are very egalitarian and want to create a utopia on Earth with lots of economic and social mobility.
Tidewater was settled by younger sons of the landed gentry and wanted to reproduce the manor system in the colonies. They reluctantly started importing slaves because there were not enough white peasants to go around, even with forced deportation of prisoners to the colonies. In Tidewater is was considered a noble thing to set your slaves free upon your death. Not everyone did, but there are some examples among the founding fathers.
The Deep South was a slave culture from the beginning. It started when sugar plantation owners in Barbados ran out of land to cultivate and came to the mainland in the Georgia colony. Georgia at the time was very small and had a small almost hippie colony that was quickly replaced by the slavers. The new colonists wanted to create a mass production agrarian system centered on slave labor. Their view of the world was one with a small cadre of white elites at top of the pecking order, another cadre of poor whites who were the slave supervisors and kept the administrative gears of society running, and then the slaves at the bottom.
The top two tiers were very military in their structure, officers and enlisted. The slaves were POWs from wars in Africa for the most part, so they fit into this structure too.
The Handmaid's Tale is placed in New England, but it fits better in the American South.
The Democrats go back to the first generation of political parties (ironically it is the real "old party") and it was started around the ideas of Jefferson who felt the states should have most of the rights and the federal government should be weak. Because Jefferson was Tidewater and not Deep South, he didn't want the hierarchies the Deep South wanted to see.
The Whigs formed out of the ideas of John Adams who was a Yankee and wanted Americans to be industrious, but classless. But also wanted a strong federal government that would unify the country. The Whigs faltered by the mid-19th century and were replaced by the Republicans who held similar values.
The fight has been the same for over 200 years now. Though a curious flip happened in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan won over the whites in the Depp South who had been Democrats from the beginning. Nixon started making inroads with his Southern Strategy, but Reagan completed the flip.
Reagan was so successful because he briefly unified both cultures under his flag as the Yankees had traditionally been Republican. But the Yankees took over the now hollowed out Democratic Party.
There are other cultures in the US. The Left Coast has always been allied with the Yankees, though they are more independent and value creativity more. New Amsterdam centered on New York City was making noises of leaving when the South succeeded in 1960, but changed their mind when rebels attacked Fort Sumpter. They have been allied with the Yankees ever since.
Appalachia is a different culture from the Deep South. They are culturally very conservative like the South, but aren't hierarchical and are very suspicious of anybody who seems to be wanting to "help" them because back in Scotland and Ireland where most of their ancestors came from, that usually ended up badly. Appalachia is also the most rabidly "American" of any US culture and that's why they mostly stayed Union in the Civil War despite slavery being legal in most Appalachian states at the time.
The interior West that stretches from a bit west of the Mississippi to the coastal strip in the western most states has been an interior resource colony for most of their existence and they are both dependent on and resentful of outside entities interfering in their environment. This area couldn't be settled without the railroads and couldn't be sustained with water projects and other big projects, but they are also resentful that they produce resources used somewhere else and they don't get much for it.
They sided with the Deep South in the 1980s, but they had sided strongly with the New Deal in the 30s too. They like the message of independence that the Deep South led coalition pushes to keep Appalachia and the Interior West on side, but they have ultimately been sold lies. Ironically some of the strongest social libertarian areas in the country are in the Left Coast.
The rest of the United States would be much better off if the Deep South were given their own country and left to their own devices, but it would be hell for many living there. Initially the Interior West and Appalachia would probably want to join them, but probably wouldn't like it. I don't think it would be fair on the innocents in the new country. And the Deep South would probably want to be belligerent with the rest of the US to keep people distracted from the dystopian hell hole they are creating. The rest of the US would probably become more like English speaking Canada fairly quickly.
If you like to ponder the things most people shy away from there is a good British radio show called Heresy.
BBC Radio 4 - Heresy
