Reprinted with permission from Trita Parsi’s Substack.
One of the important characteristics of Israel and Donald Trump’s war on Iran was that it never had the support of the American people. When George Bush launched his illegal invasion of Iraq, support stood strong at 72%. As the war turned into a debacle, that support waned. By contrast, the Iran war had the support of only 27% of the American public at the outset. It took four years for support for the Iraq war to fall to the low levels of support the Iran war enjoyed from the beginning.
But an untold story is the apparent opposition – though the exact numbers remain unknown—within the ranks of the US military. I am not talking about frustration, as evidenced by complaints about living standards on the USS Abraham Lincoln, but actual opposition.
One anecdotal piece of evidence is quite telling. A US service member based in the Persian Gulf sent me a picture of what soldiers had written in the dust covering the flaps of an aircraft. I tweeted it a few days ago. It quickly went viral.
The common theme running through the scribbles is a belief that the war does not serve US interests, coupled with the assertion that it was started on behalf of Israel.
For instance:
“Peace deal #64 incoming… ALL THIS FOR THE HOLY LAND”
“Be a good goy and do what Israel tells you to”
“Operation Epstein Fury”
As I wrote on X, I have no frame of reference to compare these expressions with the sentiments of US soldiers in previous conflicts. But I have heard them often enough from men and women in uniform to believe they represent a sizable portion of active-duty service members in the Middle East.
Moreover, while similar sentiments may have existed in previous conflicts, there clearly wasn’t the willingness then to express them so openly or so bluntly.
As one service member told me: “What people in the media don’t understand when they compare past conflicts to this one, is this operation has no morale behind it. That makes a world of difference to service members deployed to undesirable locations indefinitely.”
There is a lot to unpack in that quote.
“This operation has no morale behind it.”
“Deployed to undesirable locations indefinitely.”
This is precisely why you don’t start wars of choice – wars that do not serve the national interest. Because the first people to recognize their unjustness will be the servicemen and women on the frontlines.
And when their morale collapses, defeat is only a matter of time.
Put differently: When a war has no morale behind it, winning simply means ending it. There is no other form of “winning” in such an unjust war.
Trita Parsi is the Executive VP of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an award-winning author. Washingtonian Magazine has named him one of the 25 most influential voices on foreign policy. Noam Chomsky calls him “one of the most distinguished scholars on Iran”
