War Is a Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone
Many people in Washington seem to see the unfolding war in Lebanon as revenge for past U.S. troop deaths. After the Israeli air force killed a group of commanders of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah—along with several children—everyone from Biden administration official Brett McGurk to Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) thanked Israel for dishing out justice. As it turns out, slain Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil had helped kill dozens of U.S. Marines, CIA officers, and other American personnel in 1983.
Most of those Americans had been sent to Lebanon as part of the Multinational Force, a U.S.-led peacekeeping effort in the wake of an Israeli invasion. Back then, many Americans didn’t believe that U.S. forces should be there in the first place. According to a Pentagon report from the time, U.S. intelligence had predicted that U.S. forces would likely face “entrapment in Lebanese internal conflicts.” None other than then-Sen. Joe Biden questioned whether the Reagan administration had the authority to get involved in the Lebanese war.
President Joe Biden is now backing Israel’s war effort to the hilt, and is massing U.S. forces in the Middle East. Ostensibly, they’re there to evacuate Americans, but the Biden administration has signaled that it will directly fight Hezbollah if Israel comes under “severe duress.” Biden had predicted the ugly consequences of a past war of choice. Now his administration has embraced those consequences as a potential reason for launching another war of choice.
Lebanon isn’t the only place where Washington’s wars are a self-licking ice cream cone. From Vietnam to Iraq, hawkish politicians have sent Americans to fight in faraway countries, then used the blowback as an excuse to fight even harder. You don’t think that they’re an enemy of America? Then why are they shooting at Americans in their country?
After former President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani in 2020, a bipartisan majority in Congress passed a war powers resolution to prevent further escalation against Iran. The hawkish minority, however, argued that Americans deserved revenge for Iran’s meddling in the Iraq War, led by Soleimani.
“He was a legitimate target of war because he’s been pushing war against the United States for decades,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) said. “We’ve had at least five or six hundred soldiers killed in Iraq from IEDs developed in Iran that were used inside Iraq. They were very, very lethal to American forces.”
Graham himself helped start that war in the first place. He voted to authorize military force against Iraq in 2002, and has fought back hard against attempts to get U.S. troops out of the country as late as last year. (Graham has also long called for “military plan
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