April 17, 2026
Matthew Stevenson
Before the United States decides
to stump up another half a trillion dollars for Pete Hegseth’s Excellent
Adventures, it might want to answer the question why the country has only won a
handful wars in the last hundred years?
Victory disease is defined as “dangerous overconfidence, arrogance, and complacency that arises within a leadership or military force following a string of decisive victories,” and most imperial powers in decline, including now the U.S., suffer from it chronically.
On paper, measured by budget appropriations, the U.S. army is the greatest show on turf—with endless gadgets, cruise missiles, and stealth bombers.
Since World War II, however, the United States has fought to the occasional draw—as happened in Korea—but in most of its splendid little wars it has been defeated.
The United States has lost wars in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Iran (1979), and Afghanistan, and smaller engagements in places like Syria, Libya, and Lebanon.
The 1991 Gulf War did end with the Iraqis out of Kuwait and its malls, but that fighting ended at intermission, with the issues in Iraq and the Middle East still unresolved.
In Vietnam, the United States tried everything in its “arsenal of democracy” (except maybe nuclear weapons or democracy itself), but got nowhere.
The Vietnam War cost the lives of some 58,000 soldiers, but really the death toll—when you add in the suicides of returning veterans—was in the hundreds of thousands (not counting the deaths of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, As Professor Christian Appy writes in his excellent book, American Reckoning: “We didn’t know who we were till we got here. We thought we were something else.”
The 9/11 Forever Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq largely followed the template of the defeat in Vietnam.
At the wars’ beginnings (maybe as now in Iran?), the United States won the sound-and-light shows—with spectacular D-Day air campaigns that destroyed power grids, airports, and rail networks—only for American forces to become bogged down in unwinnable guerrilla wars. For the moment Iran is following this libretto.
In Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson’s orders to his generals were beyond the capabilities of the army in the field, roughly 500,000 men.
The senior army commanders approached Vietnam as if each hamlet was Bastogne and as if the war was a rerun of the Battle of the Bulge—not combat-in-the-round against a largely invisible army. In a country larger than California, eight combat divisions don’t cover much ground.
Attrition as a strategy might have worked for Ulysses S. Grant at the Wilderness (on the march to Appomattox) but it was unsuited to Vietnam—a labyrinthine country of mountains, rivers, and jungles—although senior army commanders never adapted.
Now in Iran Trump is saber rattling with 2,500 marines and few minesweepers.
Instead, in both wars, it took more than ten years to figure out that neither the American government or the army was up to its assigned tasks. Nor did it help in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan that the U.S. government justified these wars through a series of lies told to the American people—something those defeats have in common with Trump’s “little excursion” in Iran.
Trump went to war in Iran without a clear reason, without a declaration from Congress, without any allies (except for Israel’s remittance men using war to stay out of jail), without troops at the ready (those marines sailing toward Kharg Island had to be sent from Okinawa), and without knowing how victory would be defined.
Even worse—from the perspective of Napoleon who often spoke of deluded generals “painting pictures”—Trump’s war plans in Iran are an invention of the president’s addled brain.
For Trump attacking Iran was always just “a deal”: to get rid of Ayatollah Khamenei; to curry favor with Jewish voters in the mid-term elections; to make voters forget about his Epstein rape allegations; to weasel more money out of the Saudis and the Gulf States for his son’s private-equity schemes; and to play soldier in the bunkers at Mar-a-Lago. Hence, the casus belli changes with each Fox talk show beamed into his echo chamber.
In less than two months, the war to liberate Iran’s street demonstrators became a war to deny Iran the use of enriched uranium, which became a war to destroy Iran’s power grids and then a battle to control the Strait of Hormuz—war as a Netflix serial not unlike Succession.
Likewise, few Americans—even those supporting the blitz—have a clue why the United States is at war with Iran (unless, of course, Trump wants “to impress Jody Foster”).
Even on his good days, which are few and far between, Trump sounds more like Peter Sellers’ Chauncey Gardiner (“I like to watch…”) than either the Austrian Foreign Metternich or the British Viscount Castlereagh.
Through endless nights, Trump drones on about Iranian oil “paying for the war” or going into business with the ayatollah to collect tolls in the Strait of Hormuz. Then he reverts to the mean and calls all Iranians “scumbags” or “crazy bastards,” debased language that suggests more than a little desperation in the demented and wandering Trump.
How can he figure out the Middle East if he needs posted signs to find his way around the White House?
Daniel Warner
Is the U.S. war against Iran Vietnam 2.0? Or is it another example of America’s persistent reliance on military force to solve political problems?
The Vietnam War remains one of the clearest examples of the limits of overwhelming military force. The scale of its human and environmental consequences still shapes how later conflicts are judged. While it is too early to compare the two wars in depth, Vietnam remains precedent-setting as a demonstration of a failed military intervention. Approximately 3,000,000 Vietnamese were killed, including civilians and military personnel. Long-term collateral damage is estimated at about 150,000–400,000 birth defects linked to exposure to Agent Orange.
The Vietnam War cost more than 58,000 American lives.
Despite its military superiority, the U.S. failed to achieve its primary political objective. Southeast Asia did not become a communist sphere of influence even after the U.S. dropped more bombs on Vietnam than all of World War II combined.
In the current U.S. war with Iran, estimates of Iranian deaths vary. Conservative numbers place the death toll at roughly 3,400 to 7,600 killed inside Iran. The composition of those deaths matters. Reports suggest a significant proportion are civilians, including children, alongside military personnel and paramilitary forces.
Total confirmed U.S. service members killed: 14.
Is comparing more than three million deaths, hundreds of thousands of birth defects and generational environmental damage in Vietnam with several thousand deaths after only weeks of bombing in Iran simply comparing apples and oranges?
Yes and no.
On one side, the differences are obvious. The Vietnam War was a prolonged conflict. Most analyses place the main period of combat between 1965 and 1973, although U.S. involvement in Vietnam stretched over close to two decades. The Iran War has just begun, although U.S. involvement in Iran goes back to at least the 1953 overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The duration of actual combat, number of deaths, and environmental damage are clearly not comparable.
Nonetheless, the United States’ confrontation with Iran does show disturbing similarities to Vietnam. Both wars blurred international humanitarian law distinctions between civilians and combatants; both were not formally declared by Congress; both relied heavily on executive authority.
But what is most similar to both the Vietnam and Iran wars is the overwhelming reliance on military force. “Bombing them back into the Stone Age” echoes across more than 50 years.
Has the lesson of Vietnam been learned? What explains America’s continued reliance on force?
For over fifty years, the United States has used its overwhelming military capabilities in conflicts with foreign countries. President Eisenhower famously warned of the “military-industrial complex,” but he might also have warned about the repeated use of the complex’s weapons in conflicts whose political objectives were never met. What were the results of millions of Vietnamese deaths and generational destruction as well as 58,000 American casualties? The dominoes never fell across Southeast Asia.
Vietnam did not end America’s reliance on military intervention. Later conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq raise similar questions about the limits of military power. In Afghanistan, the United States’ 2001 invasion quickly removed the Taliban from power. But what followed was more than two decades of insurgency, fragile governance, and continued dependence on foreign military and financial support. Despite massive investment in reconstruction and security forces, the Afghan state collapsed, and the Taliban returned to power after the U.S.’s sudden withdrawal in 2021.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq showed a comparable pattern. While U.S. forces rapidly toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime, the dismantling of the Iraqi state created a power vacuum that fueled sectarian violence and insurgency. The collapse of political institutions and security structures contributed to years of instability and enabled the rise of groups such as ISIS. Although Iraq eventually established elections and new political institutions, the country continues to struggle with political fragmentation, corruption, and periodic violence.
In both Afghanistan and Iraq, initial American military success gave way to long-term instability. Defeating an enemy militarily did not translate into sustainable political order. What leads us to believe that the situation in Iran will be better?
Military force alone has rarely been sufficient to win “hearts and minds.” The post–World War II cases of Japan and Germany are often cited as counterexamples, but they are not directly comparable because their reconstruction involved extensive political, economic, and social efforts that went far beyond mere military intervention.
The question, therefore, may not be whether the Iran War will become another Vietnam, but whether the United States has fully absorbed the lessons of its previous interventions. From Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, American military power has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to dominate battlefields and overwhelm weaker regimes. What it has not achieved is the creation of stable and legitimate political orders in deeply complex societies. There has been plenty of regime destruction, but little nation-building.
Referring to the Iran conflict, a recent Editorial Board article in the New York Times argued that “the world saw how a country that spends one-hundredth of what the United States does on its military can seek to outlast it in a conflict. It is a reminder of the urgent need to reform America’s military.” The deeper problem is not the structure or capability of the military itself. The more fundamental lesson from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan is the recurring tendency to treat military force as the central instrument of foreign policy in situations whose outcomes ultimately depend on political legitimacy and social stability.
Both Trump and LeMay refer to bombing “back” to the Stone Age as if that is where their adversaries belong. But the Stone Age may ultimately describe not where those being bombed belong, but the mindset of those doing the bombing. Just because the United States believes it has the biggest hammer doesn’t mean the world is full of nails. That is a perfect example of Stone Age thinking.
Kenn Maurice
The issue these pro-Israel figures are trying to drum up is the horrendous use of caricatures to dehumanize Jewish people. These images portrayed Jews in the most heinous ways and were intended to provoke a visceral hatred toward their community. They were effective in Germany and across Europe in the early part of the 20th century and helped pave the way to the Holocaust.
But to equate those horrible caricatures with actual photographs of violent and supremacist settlers is quite a leap. And it is also an attempt to divert attention from the current campaign of ethnic cleansing being carried out in the West Bank, Gaza and southern Lebanon.
Israel has emboldened and supported violent settlers in the occupied West Bank for decades. They are protected and assisted by the Israel Defense Forces and enjoy unprecedented impunity in Israeli courts. Their campaign of ethnic cleansing has only expanded exponentially since Israel’s Western-supported genocide in Gaza.
In the end, people will see what they want to see. And that is generally guided by their biases, principles and prejudices. But the facts continue to exist regardless of our particular or peculiar proclivities.
Real antisemitism is abhorrent and should always be unequivocally opposed and condemned. But Zionism is not Judaism. One is a political ideology based upon racist supremacy which has culminated in genocide. The other is an ancient ethnic and religious category and identity. To equate the two is actually one of the worst forms of antisemitism.
In addition to this, Israel is a genocidal apartheid state. It is ethnically cleansing vast swaths of the region so that one ethno-religious group has dominance over all others.
What I find the most telling about all of this is that the ones braying on about this photograph have been notoriously silent about Israel bombing a synagogue in Tehran. A synagogue older than the state of Israel itself. Apparently, a photograph is more horrifying to these people than an act of violence committed against an ancient Jewish community in Iran.
Nicky Reid
Long before the latest peacetime artillery pogrom, the IDF had already spent the better part of a month attempting to empty out every square inch of the region south of the Litani River with the same kind of scorched earth campaign they used to cleanse Gaza before obliterating every bridge crossing said Litani River. 600,000 people have been herded north to join another 600,000 Lebanese citizens in being internally displaced by Zionist terrorism.
Israel has made their intentions for this slice of the Levant sickeningly clear. They have already publicly abandoned their mythic crusade to disarm Hezbollah in favor of focusing exclusively on the blatantly illegal goal of simply annexing another chunk of the Holy Land and declaring it a “buffer zone.” They aren’t the least bit shy about just what they are attempting to “buffer” either.
Israel has released official statements reassuring the region’s Christian and Druze populations that they will be allowed to return home to Israeli-occupied rubble, but have also harshly warned these populations against so much as even sheltering any member of that region’s Shiite majority, who have very pointedly not been welcomed to return.
There is a word for this, and it starts with a ‘G,’ but even the most progressive First World observers don’t seem to want to use it. This seems particularly strange considering how many westerners have finally broken the taboo of accusing Israel of committing genocide in Palestine, but the word feels pretty damn appropriate here too.
Israel has openly declared war on Lebanon’s population of Shia Muslims, successfully removing many of them from the region of that nation that has long been their stronghold and instructing them in no uncertain terms never to come back, but still most westerners continue to avoid using the G-word here and I do believe that the reason why tells us a great deal about the violent current of First World depravity informing the larger regional war that has grown to engulf the entirety of the Middle East.
In a word, it all comes down to Shiaphobia.
Shia Muslims have long found themselves the victims of rampant and frequently brutal discrimination across the Muslim world, going all the way back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad. A minority among an already besieged faithful, Shiites provoked the wrath of the Umayyads with their critique of what they saw as the unjust power of the Caliphs and have never been forgiven for this rebellious trespass against theological conformity.
All other theocratic differences aside, it appears to be this population’s willingness to confront the corruption of the majority that has defined their plight above all else, a plight which has not only seen eleven of the twelve Shia Imams murdered at the hands of a variety of despotic autocrats, but has also led to the construction and proliferation of entire extremist Sunni sects like the Wahabi and the Salafi who are largely defined by their advocacy for genocide against all infidels, with the Shia serving the role of the original transgressors.
We have seen this play out in one horror show after another across the Muslim world, whether it be the systematic displacement of over 50% of Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Shia Hazara community or the glorified Sunni apartheid state of Bahrain, which has long shackled that oil-rich nation’s slim Shia majority with the status of second-class citizens.
More often than not, it has been Western imperialists fueling the bigotry, too, targeting Shia communities for their inability to capitulate and conform to our pseudo-Islamic Wahhabi quislings and generally using them as convenient scapegoats to keep the Sunni majority distracted while we rob them blind, too.
In many ways, for better or worse, Iran’s consistently defiant Islamic Republic is the natural result of the systemic plight of the Shia. After centuries of being raped and pillaged by one corrupt caliphate after another, the Twelvers formed a caliphate of their own, defined not only by their spiritual resistance to the West and its proxies but their willingness to put their money where their mouth is and support Shia and occasionally even Sunni resistance to colonial subjugation anywhere and everywhere it surfaces.
Sadly, this has also led Tehran to play the part of the foreign interloper, intervening even where they aren’t wanted by a Shia community far too vast and diverse to ever be properly represented by any kind of centralized authority. On more than one occasion, we have seen the Mullahs falling victim to that old Nietzschean trope and resembling the very same kind of corrupt caliphs they once defined themselves by disobeying.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has undoubtably become a corrupt and venal hierarchy of bloodthirsty fundamentalist imposters who have become totally disconnected from Islam’s roots as a force for social justice that had originally put them to the left of their Abrahamic cousins, but they must not be confused with the merciless beasts that even liberal westerners have convinced themselves that they are and they certainly must not be tarred by the downright absurd farce that they are somehow “the greatest state sponsors of terrorism on the planet.”
This simple act of historical sanity seems to be an obnoxiously challenging feat for the West to even attempt to grasp but after having our asses handed to us on a tarnished brass platter by the Islamic Republic, even after we assassinated the first two or three layers of their government, I feel like any form of peace is compulsory upon grasping it.
I guess, at the end of the day, you probably have to ask yourself a few hard questions before you can swallow the truth.
First, who is Hezbollah? Hezbollah is a militia formed by Lebanese Shia clerics during Israel’s brutal invasion of their already war-torn nation in the 1980s. They were trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard but formed well before this to defend a marginalized community subjected to near-routine massacres and pogroms during the Lebanese Civil War.
Now, who are the Houthis? The Houthi rebels, otherwise known as Ansar Allah, were actually a relatively moderate theological movement advocating for the revival of the Zaydi school of Shia Islam endemic to the mountains of Northern Yemen until their criticism of an American-backed dictator got their founder murdered and the Zaydi were forced to rely on the rifle to affect change. The Revolutionary Guard doesn’t actually appear at all during their rise until well after the Houthis established themselves as a force to be reckoned with.
But just who exactly are the Revolutionary Guard anyway, aside from a branch of the Iranian military connected to the so-called terrorists above? Well, they are the force responsible for organizing the Shia militias that crippled Al-Qaeda in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of post-Saddam Iraq. They are also the force that united a vast and diverse coalition known as the Axis of Resistance, more responsible than any conventional army for breaking the back of the genocidally Shiaphobic Islamic State.
Contrary to Western mythology, Iran’s Islamic Republic has found itself serving the role of the greatest state sponsor of grassroots antiterrorism on the planet. Now, with that being said, there is a very fine line between terrorism and antiterrorism, what with Nietzschean monsters being what they are, but let us at least get the score right and let us do so with a few more uncomfortable questions too.
First, who exactly is Al-Qaeda? Al-Qaeda is a loose network of Salafi-Wahhabist killers who spawned from the armies Jimmy Carter organized to kill communists in Afghanistan. And who are ISIS but the bastard sons of Al-Qaeda, not-so secretly funded by forces outside of the Levant for the purpose of destabilizing the pro-Russian Shia dictatorship of the Assad Dynasty in Syria. Their biggest donors are old Jimmy’s friends in the Persian Gulf
And just who are these friends in the Gulf? A clique of Salafi-Wahhabist billionaires defined by a series of Faustian bargains made with the British Empire and Big Oil after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. They are also the source of nearly every dollar that has ever lined the pockets not just of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but Al-Shebab, Al-Nusra, Boko Haram, and nearly every other organization advocating for distinctly global, aka imperial jihad.
Now, for the million-dollar question. Who is the United States? The US is the empire that arms, funds, and defends those nefarious Gulf States, along with the blatantly genocidal state of Israel, with trillions of dollars in tax-pilfered funds and millions of pounds of military hardware, much of which mysteriously and repeatedly finds its way into the ungrateful hands of Salafi-Wahhabist killers across the globe.
Ladies and gentlemen, the United States of America is the greatest state sponsor of terrorism on the planet, and Iran is our number one target in the Middle East because they are the fucking monsters defined by destroying our fucking monsters.
The Russians have an old saying that the communists were wrong about everything but capitalism. I guess you could probably sum up this latest rant of mine by saying that the Mullahs were wrong about everything but the Great Satan.
They oughta know, Satan always seems to go after the Shiites and the communists first, and there ain’t many communists left.
Matthew Stevenson
Victory disease is defined as “dangerous overconfidence, arrogance, and complacency that arises within a leadership or military force following a string of decisive victories,” and most imperial powers in decline, including now the U.S., suffer from it chronically.
On paper, measured by budget appropriations, the U.S. army is the greatest show on turf—with endless gadgets, cruise missiles, and stealth bombers.
Since World War II, however, the United States has fought to the occasional draw—as happened in Korea—but in most of its splendid little wars it has been defeated.
The United States has lost wars in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Iran (1979), and Afghanistan, and smaller engagements in places like Syria, Libya, and Lebanon.
The 1991 Gulf War did end with the Iraqis out of Kuwait and its malls, but that fighting ended at intermission, with the issues in Iraq and the Middle East still unresolved.
+++
The three most glaring
defeats—Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—are examples of undeclared wars that
involved the combined arms of the army, navy, and air forces, which at war’s
end departed in rooftop helicopters with the American flag stuffed into a garbage
bag or whatever.In Vietnam, the United States tried everything in its “arsenal of democracy” (except maybe nuclear weapons or democracy itself), but got nowhere.
The Vietnam War cost the lives of some 58,000 soldiers, but really the death toll—when you add in the suicides of returning veterans—was in the hundreds of thousands (not counting the deaths of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, As Professor Christian Appy writes in his excellent book, American Reckoning: “We didn’t know who we were till we got here. We thought we were something else.”
The 9/11 Forever Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq largely followed the template of the defeat in Vietnam.
At the wars’ beginnings (maybe as now in Iran?), the United States won the sound-and-light shows—with spectacular D-Day air campaigns that destroyed power grids, airports, and rail networks—only for American forces to become bogged down in unwinnable guerrilla wars. For the moment Iran is following this libretto.
+++
Was it the politicians (with
confused war aims) or the generals (fighting the last war) that cost the United
States victories in so many wars?In Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson’s orders to his generals were beyond the capabilities of the army in the field, roughly 500,000 men.
The senior army commanders approached Vietnam as if each hamlet was Bastogne and as if the war was a rerun of the Battle of the Bulge—not combat-in-the-round against a largely invisible army. In a country larger than California, eight combat divisions don’t cover much ground.
Attrition as a strategy might have worked for Ulysses S. Grant at the Wilderness (on the march to Appomattox) but it was unsuited to Vietnam—a labyrinthine country of mountains, rivers, and jungles—although senior army commanders never adapted.
Now in Iran Trump is saber rattling with 2,500 marines and few minesweepers.
+++
In many ways, Iraq and
Afghanistan were reruns of Vietnam, in that the George W. Bush and Obama
administrations assigned impossible missions to an unprepared army (which
thought that it could go home once the Saddam Hussein monument had come down in
Baghdad).Instead, in both wars, it took more than ten years to figure out that neither the American government or the army was up to its assigned tasks. Nor did it help in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan that the U.S. government justified these wars through a series of lies told to the American people—something those defeats have in common with Trump’s “little excursion” in Iran.
+++
The only person to declare war on
Iran was Donald Trump, who approached the campaign as if playing with ships in
one of Jeffrey Epstein’s hot tubs.Trump went to war in Iran without a clear reason, without a declaration from Congress, without any allies (except for Israel’s remittance men using war to stay out of jail), without troops at the ready (those marines sailing toward Kharg Island had to be sent from Okinawa), and without knowing how victory would be defined.
Even worse—from the perspective of Napoleon who often spoke of deluded generals “painting pictures”—Trump’s war plans in Iran are an invention of the president’s addled brain.
+++
Knowing nothing about geography,
history, or religion, Trump chose to imagine war in the Middle East as a
variation on new TV game show, in which the key is to get other people’s money
to backstop your paper empire.For Trump attacking Iran was always just “a deal”: to get rid of Ayatollah Khamenei; to curry favor with Jewish voters in the mid-term elections; to make voters forget about his Epstein rape allegations; to weasel more money out of the Saudis and the Gulf States for his son’s private-equity schemes; and to play soldier in the bunkers at Mar-a-Lago. Hence, the casus belli changes with each Fox talk show beamed into his echo chamber.
In less than two months, the war to liberate Iran’s street demonstrators became a war to deny Iran the use of enriched uranium, which became a war to destroy Iran’s power grids and then a battle to control the Strait of Hormuz—war as a Netflix serial not unlike Succession.
+++
Few, if any, Americans knew why
we were “in Vietnam,” just as the only geopolitical justification for the Iraq
War was W’s utterance about Saddam Hussein: “We’re taking that fucker out.”Likewise, few Americans—even those supporting the blitz—have a clue why the United States is at war with Iran (unless, of course, Trump wants “to impress Jody Foster”).
Even on his good days, which are few and far between, Trump sounds more like Peter Sellers’ Chauncey Gardiner (“I like to watch…”) than either the Austrian Foreign Metternich or the British Viscount Castlereagh.
Through endless nights, Trump drones on about Iranian oil “paying for the war” or going into business with the ayatollah to collect tolls in the Strait of Hormuz. Then he reverts to the mean and calls all Iranians “scumbags” or “crazy bastards,” debased language that suggests more than a little desperation in the demented and wandering Trump.
How can he figure out the Middle East if he needs posted signs to find his way around the White House?
Daniel Warner
A-4E Skyhawks attacking Phuong
Dinh bridge in 1967. Photo: LCdr. Jerry Breast, US Navy.
Comparisons are always risky.
Even identical twins are not exactly alike. But some phrases echo across
decades with unsettling familiarity. For those of a certain generation, hearing
Donald Trump threaten Iran—“We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Age
where they belong”—brought back memories of General Curtis LeMay’s infamous
remark: “We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age,” attributed to U.S.
air war strategy in North Vietnam.Is the U.S. war against Iran Vietnam 2.0? Or is it another example of America’s persistent reliance on military force to solve political problems?
The Vietnam War remains one of the clearest examples of the limits of overwhelming military force. The scale of its human and environmental consequences still shapes how later conflicts are judged. While it is too early to compare the two wars in depth, Vietnam remains precedent-setting as a demonstration of a failed military intervention. Approximately 3,000,000 Vietnamese were killed, including civilians and military personnel. Long-term collateral damage is estimated at about 150,000–400,000 birth defects linked to exposure to Agent Orange.
The Vietnam War cost more than 58,000 American lives.
Despite its military superiority, the U.S. failed to achieve its primary political objective. Southeast Asia did not become a communist sphere of influence even after the U.S. dropped more bombs on Vietnam than all of World War II combined.
In the current U.S. war with Iran, estimates of Iranian deaths vary. Conservative numbers place the death toll at roughly 3,400 to 7,600 killed inside Iran. The composition of those deaths matters. Reports suggest a significant proportion are civilians, including children, alongside military personnel and paramilitary forces.
Total confirmed U.S. service members killed: 14.
Is comparing more than three million deaths, hundreds of thousands of birth defects and generational environmental damage in Vietnam with several thousand deaths after only weeks of bombing in Iran simply comparing apples and oranges?
Yes and no.
On one side, the differences are obvious. The Vietnam War was a prolonged conflict. Most analyses place the main period of combat between 1965 and 1973, although U.S. involvement in Vietnam stretched over close to two decades. The Iran War has just begun, although U.S. involvement in Iran goes back to at least the 1953 overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The duration of actual combat, number of deaths, and environmental damage are clearly not comparable.
Nonetheless, the United States’ confrontation with Iran does show disturbing similarities to Vietnam. Both wars blurred international humanitarian law distinctions between civilians and combatants; both were not formally declared by Congress; both relied heavily on executive authority.
But what is most similar to both the Vietnam and Iran wars is the overwhelming reliance on military force. “Bombing them back into the Stone Age” echoes across more than 50 years.
Has the lesson of Vietnam been learned? What explains America’s continued reliance on force?
For over fifty years, the United States has used its overwhelming military capabilities in conflicts with foreign countries. President Eisenhower famously warned of the “military-industrial complex,” but he might also have warned about the repeated use of the complex’s weapons in conflicts whose political objectives were never met. What were the results of millions of Vietnamese deaths and generational destruction as well as 58,000 American casualties? The dominoes never fell across Southeast Asia.
Vietnam did not end America’s reliance on military intervention. Later conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq raise similar questions about the limits of military power. In Afghanistan, the United States’ 2001 invasion quickly removed the Taliban from power. But what followed was more than two decades of insurgency, fragile governance, and continued dependence on foreign military and financial support. Despite massive investment in reconstruction and security forces, the Afghan state collapsed, and the Taliban returned to power after the U.S.’s sudden withdrawal in 2021.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq showed a comparable pattern. While U.S. forces rapidly toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime, the dismantling of the Iraqi state created a power vacuum that fueled sectarian violence and insurgency. The collapse of political institutions and security structures contributed to years of instability and enabled the rise of groups such as ISIS. Although Iraq eventually established elections and new political institutions, the country continues to struggle with political fragmentation, corruption, and periodic violence.
In both Afghanistan and Iraq, initial American military success gave way to long-term instability. Defeating an enemy militarily did not translate into sustainable political order. What leads us to believe that the situation in Iran will be better?
Military force alone has rarely been sufficient to win “hearts and minds.” The post–World War II cases of Japan and Germany are often cited as counterexamples, but they are not directly comparable because their reconstruction involved extensive political, economic, and social efforts that went far beyond mere military intervention.
The question, therefore, may not be whether the Iran War will become another Vietnam, but whether the United States has fully absorbed the lessons of its previous interventions. From Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, American military power has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to dominate battlefields and overwhelm weaker regimes. What it has not achieved is the creation of stable and legitimate political orders in deeply complex societies. There has been plenty of regime destruction, but little nation-building.
Referring to the Iran conflict, a recent Editorial Board article in the New York Times argued that “the world saw how a country that spends one-hundredth of what the United States does on its military can seek to outlast it in a conflict. It is a reminder of the urgent need to reform America’s military.” The deeper problem is not the structure or capability of the military itself. The more fundamental lesson from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan is the recurring tendency to treat military force as the central instrument of foreign policy in situations whose outcomes ultimately depend on political legitimacy and social stability.
Both Trump and LeMay refer to bombing “back” to the Stone Age as if that is where their adversaries belong. But the Stone Age may ultimately describe not where those being bombed belong, but the mindset of those doing the bombing. Just because the United States believes it has the biggest hammer doesn’t mean the world is full of nails. That is a perfect example of Stone Age thinking.
Kenn Maurice
Members of the Tehran Jewish
community navigating the site where the Rafi’-Nia synagogue was destroyed, as
depicted and recorded by Mehr News Agency.
Controversy was stirred recently
due to a photograph used by a leftwing Italian newspaper depicting an illegal
Jewish settler mocking an Indigenous Palestinian woman in the occupied West
Bank. Israel supporters have lambasted the magazine for alleged antisemitism.
But nothing was said about the man’s ethnic or religious heritage or identity.
It merely used the image with the title “L’Abuso” or “Abuse.” And it is not AI
or CGI. It is a real photograph.The issue these pro-Israel figures are trying to drum up is the horrendous use of caricatures to dehumanize Jewish people. These images portrayed Jews in the most heinous ways and were intended to provoke a visceral hatred toward their community. They were effective in Germany and across Europe in the early part of the 20th century and helped pave the way to the Holocaust.
But to equate those horrible caricatures with actual photographs of violent and supremacist settlers is quite a leap. And it is also an attempt to divert attention from the current campaign of ethnic cleansing being carried out in the West Bank, Gaza and southern Lebanon.
Israel has emboldened and supported violent settlers in the occupied West Bank for decades. They are protected and assisted by the Israel Defense Forces and enjoy unprecedented impunity in Israeli courts. Their campaign of ethnic cleansing has only expanded exponentially since Israel’s Western-supported genocide in Gaza.
In the end, people will see what they want to see. And that is generally guided by their biases, principles and prejudices. But the facts continue to exist regardless of our particular or peculiar proclivities.
Real antisemitism is abhorrent and should always be unequivocally opposed and condemned. But Zionism is not Judaism. One is a political ideology based upon racist supremacy which has culminated in genocide. The other is an ancient ethnic and religious category and identity. To equate the two is actually one of the worst forms of antisemitism.
In addition to this, Israel is a genocidal apartheid state. It is ethnically cleansing vast swaths of the region so that one ethno-religious group has dominance over all others.
What I find the most telling about all of this is that the ones braying on about this photograph have been notoriously silent about Israel bombing a synagogue in Tehran. A synagogue older than the state of Israel itself. Apparently, a photograph is more horrifying to these people than an act of violence committed against an ancient Jewish community in Iran.
Nicky Reid
Image by Chloe Christine.
As a badly battered Middle East
hangs off the edge of a cliff by a string with a temporary ceasefire between
the United States and Iran, peace or anything remotely resembling it looks even
less likely for Southern Lebanon than it does for the rest of that treacherous
map drawn by dead British arseholes. Even if Israel were the kind of creature
that could be trusted to respect a ceasefire with anyone, much of the damage is
already done.Long before the latest peacetime artillery pogrom, the IDF had already spent the better part of a month attempting to empty out every square inch of the region south of the Litani River with the same kind of scorched earth campaign they used to cleanse Gaza before obliterating every bridge crossing said Litani River. 600,000 people have been herded north to join another 600,000 Lebanese citizens in being internally displaced by Zionist terrorism.
Israel has made their intentions for this slice of the Levant sickeningly clear. They have already publicly abandoned their mythic crusade to disarm Hezbollah in favor of focusing exclusively on the blatantly illegal goal of simply annexing another chunk of the Holy Land and declaring it a “buffer zone.” They aren’t the least bit shy about just what they are attempting to “buffer” either.
Israel has released official statements reassuring the region’s Christian and Druze populations that they will be allowed to return home to Israeli-occupied rubble, but have also harshly warned these populations against so much as even sheltering any member of that region’s Shiite majority, who have very pointedly not been welcomed to return.
There is a word for this, and it starts with a ‘G,’ but even the most progressive First World observers don’t seem to want to use it. This seems particularly strange considering how many westerners have finally broken the taboo of accusing Israel of committing genocide in Palestine, but the word feels pretty damn appropriate here too.
Israel has openly declared war on Lebanon’s population of Shia Muslims, successfully removing many of them from the region of that nation that has long been their stronghold and instructing them in no uncertain terms never to come back, but still most westerners continue to avoid using the G-word here and I do believe that the reason why tells us a great deal about the violent current of First World depravity informing the larger regional war that has grown to engulf the entirety of the Middle East.
In a word, it all comes down to Shiaphobia.
Shia Muslims have long found themselves the victims of rampant and frequently brutal discrimination across the Muslim world, going all the way back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad. A minority among an already besieged faithful, Shiites provoked the wrath of the Umayyads with their critique of what they saw as the unjust power of the Caliphs and have never been forgiven for this rebellious trespass against theological conformity.
All other theocratic differences aside, it appears to be this population’s willingness to confront the corruption of the majority that has defined their plight above all else, a plight which has not only seen eleven of the twelve Shia Imams murdered at the hands of a variety of despotic autocrats, but has also led to the construction and proliferation of entire extremist Sunni sects like the Wahabi and the Salafi who are largely defined by their advocacy for genocide against all infidels, with the Shia serving the role of the original transgressors.
We have seen this play out in one horror show after another across the Muslim world, whether it be the systematic displacement of over 50% of Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Shia Hazara community or the glorified Sunni apartheid state of Bahrain, which has long shackled that oil-rich nation’s slim Shia majority with the status of second-class citizens.
More often than not, it has been Western imperialists fueling the bigotry, too, targeting Shia communities for their inability to capitulate and conform to our pseudo-Islamic Wahhabi quislings and generally using them as convenient scapegoats to keep the Sunni majority distracted while we rob them blind, too.
In many ways, for better or worse, Iran’s consistently defiant Islamic Republic is the natural result of the systemic plight of the Shia. After centuries of being raped and pillaged by one corrupt caliphate after another, the Twelvers formed a caliphate of their own, defined not only by their spiritual resistance to the West and its proxies but their willingness to put their money where their mouth is and support Shia and occasionally even Sunni resistance to colonial subjugation anywhere and everywhere it surfaces.
Sadly, this has also led Tehran to play the part of the foreign interloper, intervening even where they aren’t wanted by a Shia community far too vast and diverse to ever be properly represented by any kind of centralized authority. On more than one occasion, we have seen the Mullahs falling victim to that old Nietzschean trope and resembling the very same kind of corrupt caliphs they once defined themselves by disobeying.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has undoubtably become a corrupt and venal hierarchy of bloodthirsty fundamentalist imposters who have become totally disconnected from Islam’s roots as a force for social justice that had originally put them to the left of their Abrahamic cousins, but they must not be confused with the merciless beasts that even liberal westerners have convinced themselves that they are and they certainly must not be tarred by the downright absurd farce that they are somehow “the greatest state sponsors of terrorism on the planet.”
This simple act of historical sanity seems to be an obnoxiously challenging feat for the West to even attempt to grasp but after having our asses handed to us on a tarnished brass platter by the Islamic Republic, even after we assassinated the first two or three layers of their government, I feel like any form of peace is compulsory upon grasping it.
I guess, at the end of the day, you probably have to ask yourself a few hard questions before you can swallow the truth.
First, who is Hezbollah? Hezbollah is a militia formed by Lebanese Shia clerics during Israel’s brutal invasion of their already war-torn nation in the 1980s. They were trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard but formed well before this to defend a marginalized community subjected to near-routine massacres and pogroms during the Lebanese Civil War.
Now, who are the Houthis? The Houthi rebels, otherwise known as Ansar Allah, were actually a relatively moderate theological movement advocating for the revival of the Zaydi school of Shia Islam endemic to the mountains of Northern Yemen until their criticism of an American-backed dictator got their founder murdered and the Zaydi were forced to rely on the rifle to affect change. The Revolutionary Guard doesn’t actually appear at all during their rise until well after the Houthis established themselves as a force to be reckoned with.
But just who exactly are the Revolutionary Guard anyway, aside from a branch of the Iranian military connected to the so-called terrorists above? Well, they are the force responsible for organizing the Shia militias that crippled Al-Qaeda in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of post-Saddam Iraq. They are also the force that united a vast and diverse coalition known as the Axis of Resistance, more responsible than any conventional army for breaking the back of the genocidally Shiaphobic Islamic State.
Contrary to Western mythology, Iran’s Islamic Republic has found itself serving the role of the greatest state sponsor of grassroots antiterrorism on the planet. Now, with that being said, there is a very fine line between terrorism and antiterrorism, what with Nietzschean monsters being what they are, but let us at least get the score right and let us do so with a few more uncomfortable questions too.
First, who exactly is Al-Qaeda? Al-Qaeda is a loose network of Salafi-Wahhabist killers who spawned from the armies Jimmy Carter organized to kill communists in Afghanistan. And who are ISIS but the bastard sons of Al-Qaeda, not-so secretly funded by forces outside of the Levant for the purpose of destabilizing the pro-Russian Shia dictatorship of the Assad Dynasty in Syria. Their biggest donors are old Jimmy’s friends in the Persian Gulf
And just who are these friends in the Gulf? A clique of Salafi-Wahhabist billionaires defined by a series of Faustian bargains made with the British Empire and Big Oil after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. They are also the source of nearly every dollar that has ever lined the pockets not just of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but Al-Shebab, Al-Nusra, Boko Haram, and nearly every other organization advocating for distinctly global, aka imperial jihad.
Now, for the million-dollar question. Who is the United States? The US is the empire that arms, funds, and defends those nefarious Gulf States, along with the blatantly genocidal state of Israel, with trillions of dollars in tax-pilfered funds and millions of pounds of military hardware, much of which mysteriously and repeatedly finds its way into the ungrateful hands of Salafi-Wahhabist killers across the globe.
Ladies and gentlemen, the United States of America is the greatest state sponsor of terrorism on the planet, and Iran is our number one target in the Middle East because they are the fucking monsters defined by destroying our fucking monsters.
The Russians have an old saying that the communists were wrong about everything but capitalism. I guess you could probably sum up this latest rant of mine by saying that the Mullahs were wrong about everything but the Great Satan.
They oughta know, Satan always seems to go after the Shiites and the communists first, and there ain’t many communists left.
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