Selling a war before you start it
Trump couldn't be bothered to come up with a rationale
The George W. Bush administration began making plans for an invasion of Iraq shortly after the 9/11 attacks. It spent more than a year amassing evidence and intelligence reports (some of it misleading and some a good deal worse than misleading), building coalitions with allies, obtaining authorizations and permissions from Congress and the United Nations, and attempting to persuade the American people that attacking Iraq was in the nation’s best interests and was part of an overall war on terror. The actual invasion that began in March of 2023 was politically divisive but not at all surprising, and Bush had a good deal of bipartisan political cover to support his efforts.
This past Saturday, Donald Trump launched an air war on Iran and then at 2AM released an eight-minute video filmed at his Florida home.
These two approaches to warfare are obviously incredibly different from each other. (And see Julia Azari’s excellent piece on key distinctions between these two campaigns.) But it’s worth getting into why one is actually better than the other.
One certainly shouldn’t romanticize the Bush administration’s approach. At the time, Bush’s efforts were contrasted, unfavorably, from those of his father’s administration building support for Operation Desert Storm in 1990-91. That earlier effort resulted in a vast 42-nation coalition and a broad (thought importantly limited) mandate to free Kuwait from Iraqi control. The 2003 war, however, consisted of a smaller “Coalition of the Willing,” and it was clear the junior Bush didn’t exactly have the world’s consent for a multi-year occupation of Iraq.
Beyond that, as was somewhat clear at the time and became clearer in the following years, the Bush case against Saddam Hussein was built on a lot of misleading and even false evidence. Bush and others warned about Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” (which could not be found) and repeatedly raised the possibility that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons (which they weren’t). The facts that the war dragged on for many more years, resulted in the deaths of thousands of US soldiers and the wounding of many thousands more, and was basically built on lies and exaggerations did substantial damage to US politics and, I would argue, to the reputation of leaders in the Republican Party.
Trump definitely did not do any of that. He’s cited an array of reasons for the attack after starting it, including a claim that Iran was about to attack the US and its allies (which the Pentagon and other Republicans aren’t even buying) or that Iran was building nuclear weapons (something belied by Trump’s own State of the Union Address a few days earlier). He even suggested this was payback for Iran seizing American hostages in 1979. He called for the Iranian people to use this opportunity to overthrow their government. But overall, there really wasn’t much of an attempt to sell this attack or build support for it before launching it. (On Monday morning, two days into the campaign, Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth sought to narrow the goals somewhat to military objectives but didn’t provide a whole lot more clarity.)
So is it better for a president to build a shaky rationale for a war or to build no rationale at all and just do wars because he can do them?
David French had a useful piece this weekend in the New York Times making a good case for building the support coalition first. For one thing, as he notes, having to sell the case for war to members of Congress, even of one’s own party, provides something of a reality check:
To make the case to Congress, a president doesn’t just outline the reasons for war; he also outlines the objectives of the conflict. This provides an opportunity to investigate the weaknesses of the case for the conflict, along with the possibility of success and the risks of failure.
This seems particularly important for an administration that’s so given to going with the President’s gut impulses as policy. Another good reason to try to sell a war proposal broadly is that it’s important for the people actually fighting the war to know they’ve got a consensus behind them. As French points out, Bush probably could have just ordered an attack on Iraq in 2003, but he wanted Congress and the UN Security Council to back him:
Regardless of any person’s feelings about Operation Iraqi Freedom… when our troops went into combat, they knew they were supported by a majority of the American people. They knew politicians on both sides of the aisle had voted to send them into battle.
The choice I’ve presented above isn’t great. And generally, I would hope that any president would only commit the nation to war when it’s absolutely necessary and would do so only with the specific authorization of Congress and with the support of the American people, and would use verifiable information when building that support. But just launching a war just because one can and continuing until the next shiny object comes along is not consistent with the behavior of a democratic republic, and even looks paltry compared to most empires.
It is always helpful to include, when discussing the Bush administration's responses to 9/11, that Iraq had absolutely nothing to with it, and that Bush deliberately misled the public on this.
Having been among the millions (tens of millions?) here and abroad who opposed and demonstrated against the Iraq war before and after the W administration launched it, I get the distinction you're drawing between the current attack on Iran and the two Bush wars. I agree with you that this attack on Iran is more shambolic and inexplicable in terms of sensible/reasonable foreign-policy goals. The "factual" predicate for this attack seems to change by the hour. Whatever the differences, I doubt this attack will make the Middle East a safer, more peaceful region. I think it's more likely to have the opposite effect - there and here.