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What does the anti-war side in the US want in the Iran conflict? I'm woefully ignorant on this point of view, so I'm wondering if I can get some steelmans here.
The special military operation has not necessarily turned in the US's favor. And I understand why a majority of people were against getting into this absolute mess in the first place. But now that this mess has happened, it doesn't seem so easy to just pack up and go home. Assuming that the US passed a war powers vote, or otherwise just decided just to drop everything and go home, what next? It's a total capitulation, and to me it seems braindead obvious that Iran isn't going to stop harassing and extorting nearby shipping. I mean, what have they got to lose, meanwhile the more they extort the more money they get. So it seems like the only way that the shipment of oil can return to a normal state is if Iran is backed into a corner and is forced to stop what they are doing.
So I don't really understand the point of view of the anti-war side, such as the Democrat establishment
If their vote actually succeeded wouldn't this be pretty much the worst possible outcome? Iran commits piracy and extortion and the rest of the word twiddles their thumbs and just lets Iran do it? I can see a few hypotheses, but none of them seem to be a principled anti-war stance:
I'm sure I'm missing something here. What are the strongest ideas that make the anti-war side's case in terms of what should be done about the situation?
What does the pro-war side want?
Trump doesn't need to, and shouldn't, share operational and tactical level plans, but in a democracy the side who leads the country into war is traditionally expected to say what the political goals are, and why it thinks they are achievable (which in practice means sharing the big-picture strategy).
I would say Trump has not done so, but it would be fairer to say that he does share goals and strategies, but different ones every speech (and sometimes two different ones in the same speech). Given a choice between "allow Trump to do his thing" and "make him stop", the only argument currently being made in public for allowing Trump to do his thing is that his approach to complex negotiations (as documented in e.g. The Art of the Deal) depends on the enemy having no idea what he wants, and we should trust him on that basis. That argument is not persuasive to people who, based on decades of publicly-documented experience across four careers, consider Trump untrustworthy. (And The Art of the Deal also advocates routine dishonesty in negotiations - one thing Trump is honest about is being a liar).
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Admit defeat and move on. May or may not have been a good idea to start the war but now that the war is too expensive to maintain (it would cost like 2 months of social security a year to maintain). War is costly and trying to win an unlimited objective war is a mistake, just end the war now that the ability to successfully coup the government is over and you don't have the milops needed.
If the US packs up goes home Iran will not forget but the cost benefit analysis does not favor continuing
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The situation is unwinnable and the lesson from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan is get out fast. The war should never have happened and it was a giant mistake to let Israel suck the US in.
Wars are easy to start but difficult to end. There are only a few paths forward:
Land invasion. Trying to clear the straight y occupying sizeable area of Iran. This is not going to be easy. It took Israel 40 days and dozens of dead and wounded to take a town 10 km from Israel. The US will have a nasty logistics situation with soldiers having to be resupplied by air. Medical evacuation will be difficult and heavy equipment is hard to amass for an airborne invasion.
Naval blockade. This would effectively be what the US had against the Houthis with both sides blockading each other for a year in Yemen. Not only will this blockade be a black hole for the US navy sucking in most of its resources it would also mean potentially years of fertilizer, oil, and gas shortages.
More bombing. Not only a horrific humanitarian crisis to bomb a country to submission but air wars are inefficient. North Vietnam and Laos were bombed relentlessly and they held out. Yemen was bombed for years and held out. To make matters worse the US has burned roughly half their missiles in the first phase of the war. US munitions stockpiles are too depleted for this to be a viable strategy. To make matters worse Iran could bomb oil infrastructure in neighbouring countries causing a long term shortage.
Realize that the war was fiasco and that the US lost this war. If you start a fight and lose you can't set the terms at the end of it. The US is not energy independent. The US needs to import millions of barrels a day to keep its refineries open. Oil prices in the US will be roughly the same in the US as in the rest of the world. Americans consume twice as much oil per capita as Germans. This war will also cause global food shortages as a sizeable chunk of fertilizers come from the region.
For the average American screwing over the global economy for Israel isn't worth it.
This is often repeated, but not necessarily true. Even in the context of Middle-East, you had six day war of 1967 that was predominantly about air attack and that resulted in Israel victory. First Gulf War can also be recognized as such - it was a military operation conceived and brought to action within 6 month of Iraq occupying Kuwait, so between August 1990 - January 1991. The air campaign was so decisive that it took only 100 hours for land forces to bring Iraq and its fourth largest army in the world at the time to their knees. First Gulf War was considered as unmitigated success, even most optimists did not conceive of so few casualties and such a smooth ride. General Schwarzkopf projected 5,000 casualties, Pentagon expected up to 30k. The actual number was 292 dead (145 of those were nonhostile deaths mostly vehicle accidents, plane crashes and even 30 heart attacks) and 776 wounded (467 wounded in action).
There were also other precedents, such as bombing of Serbia which resulted in peace from Milosevic or operations in Libya, which resulted in its narrow goal of removing Gaddafi regime from power. There is also Operation Inherent Resolve that resulted in defeat of ISIS without boots on the ground just by using local forces and strategically helping them with air strikes, economic blockades, intelligence operations etc.
First gulf war replaced Saddam with Saddam. It caused horrific civilian suffering and in today's world it would mean having thousands of drones and missiles hit other countries oil infrastructure. For what? What is the point of this war? Why can China be the biggest trading partner with these countries without the constant wars? In 1967 there was a major ground component. The Israelis took sinai.
Both these cases took a year and both of these countries are less than 1/15 the population size of Iran. Again, what is the point of bombing 93 million people into a mega humanitarian crisis that is going to pull the rest of the middle east with it down.
Isis was defeated by tens of thousands of Iranian, Syrian and Hezbollah soldiers on the ground. Major help from the Russian air force absolutely helped. But ISIS was not bombed away.
In the end Trump will be more screwed as selling that he won a war in the middle east by killing large numbers of people will never impress the voters as much as pancaking the economy.
Sure, of course current war in Iran is different from any other war. That is the nature of analogy and examples. I specifically responded to claim, that air wars are inefficient. And I just pointed out that it is a myth, air wars can be and historically were very efficient.
I don't know why not, it already happened for instance with the Gulf War. USA caused massive number of casualties - tens of thousands of killed and over hundred thousand injured Iraqis. And still it caused massive spike of patriotism and pride about how USA is technologically and militarily light years ahead of everybody. In fact it was the point of large number of articles about how Gulf War was the first real time televised war, where people saw fireworks from tomahawks and gun cameras from bombers. It did not cause any major pushback, it was received with cynical glee, something like current videos of Ukrainian drones destroying Russian tanks.
And it was even without the actual objective of Gulf War being something super important or moral - most people did not know where Kuwait was or why it was necessary to go to war for it. They just vaguely knew that USA flexed her muscles in oil region and won easily or something like that.
When has a country of this size been bombed to submission in purely an air war? Also what is the point of this? A monstrous humanitarian crisis for what? Besides, if Iran collapses there is a big risk they bomb their neighbours oil infrastructure and that there are surviving groups that fire drones at ships for years.
In other words, Trump has failed at that strategy as his war is not going well. 39% of Americans support the war, 54% oppose it. Those numbers will get worse as the oil crisis gets worse. Saddam didn't block Saudi oil.
Also the propaganda isn't as strong this time as this isn't a televised war, it is a war on social media.
Come on, are you going to play this game of "your analogy is not perfect copy of my situation so it is not valid"? If such a thing hypothetically existed then what, will you update your example request to a country of this size but which is also mountainous, speaks Farsi and it happened during last ten years? Okay, it never happened, you are correct and you win this battle of analogies.
Plus again: just hold your horses, I was literally reacting to a claim that
I put it as a quote in my original post. I did not claim that air war in "country the size of Iran" is always efficient or this specific air campaign is efficient. I posit that the claim about inefficient air war is a myth. That is all.
Lets, say it works as well as Serbia worked despite Serbia having 1/16th the population and was fighting a ground war. It still took one year. Doing it with air power alone against a bigger country is a far more ambitious objective. Are people willing to accept a year-long oil crisis plus months more to ramp production up again?
The fallacy at the heart of the war was the idea that the US could send some missiles and achieve what the US failed to achieve against Yemen in 11 years within two weeks. The air war option could easily fail and even in an optimistic scenario it is a slow and expensive option.
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Yes but wars like 1967 and the US invasions of Iraq had lots of backing and land grabbing on the ground to go along with the heavy air campaign.
I don't see how the US can put enough men and tanks etc into Iran to provide that necessary compliment to bombing.
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Does a politically-viable path to victory exist? If, not--if this is going to be how it ends anyway-- isn't it better to get it over with as soon as possible, rather than after years of fighting that don't actually accomplish anything? The decapitation campaign has clearly failed to break the Iranians. What's next? Boots on the ground? Bombing civilian infrastructure? Nukes?
That would be my thought - if there is no path to victory, at least not at an acceptable cost, then the best thing to do is cut your losses as soon as possible. If I were a Democrat I'd then bank on blaming the whole thing on Trump. That has the benefit of being true, though hardcore Trump supporters will no doubt argue he was stabbed in the back by congress.
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