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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?
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.
Not to say this isn't a fiasco, but re 4, the US is, on net, energy independent and exports more oil products then it imports. The US refineries are more capable then most and so the US imports a lot of sour crude and exports a lot of light crude as that is a more efficient use of refining capabilities, but that sour oil also predominately comes from Canada (who's oil is largely captive on American pipeline infrastructure), Mexico etc. and likely Venezuela in the future. If the US closed the export of oil you'd likely start to see a larger price divergence between the regional oil markets (more akin to Natural Gas where the US price is substantially lower). Not that this would win the US any friends, but it's something I could see Trump trying. There are a few geographic places in the US that import oil from abroad (often the middle east) like CA and HI, but that's largely down to the Jones Act making it too expensive to ship from other parts of the US.
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