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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?
Some arguments in favor of the US either ending the war or losing the war are the following:
The war encourages the "imperial Presidency", a dangerous concentration of power in the top of the executive branch. This may have negative effects on checks and balances in the US. Which is not to say that the imperial Presidency is anything new in US history, of course. Trump's version is just the latest in a long line of them. Nonetheless, Trump's extremely broad ability to make sweeping foreign policy decisions feeds into a "populist strongman" image that is appealing to many people but may be bad for the country in the long run. For example, victory in the war could encourage Presidents in general to seek the optics of easy foreign policy wins in order to make up for domestic policies that do not actually do much for the average American.
The war encourages the growth of an unhealthy fusion between American, Israeli, and Gulf Arab elites, a fusion that I think likely involves shady corruption and motives of personal enrichment and might even include intelligence agencies working together to bypass their theoretical legal restraints. Israel at least is a democracy. The close cooperation with the Gulf Arab elites is of course not new, but Trump's policy is likely to bring them even closer to the US-Israel fold than they were already, and since Trump probably doesn't really care much about democracy, he is unlikely to pressure them to reform their political systems. It is geopolitically understandable why during the Cold War the US supported any brutal dictator it could find who was willing to fight communists, although this policy partly led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths - however, such close ties between the US and authoritarian governments are, to say the least, unlikely to help the political health of the US.
The US seems to lack the political will to do whatever it takes to overthrow Iran's government, something that might in fact require a ground invasion. As a result, continuation of the war causes the Iranian people to suffer without actually giving them a better government. This also affects future US foreign policy: in the future, people who are being encouraged by the US to rise up against their governments may have second thoughts based on what is currently happening in Iran.
It is possible that the overwhelming military success in the war could cause US foreign policy decision makers to become overconfident in confrontations with China, which could potentially increase the chance of a mutually devastating war between the two countries.
The unilateral and gangster-esque way in which the US and Israel have been conducting their various military operations (kidnapping, surprise assassinations, threats to send another country into the Stone Age, etc.) allows the two countries to achieve short-term wins but at a high reputational cost. Given how Iran acts, I'm certainly not going to argue that such conduct is one-sided. I'm pretty sure that the Iranians would like to assassinate Netanyahu and Trump and bomb US and Israeli civilian infrastructure on a large scale the second they could do so, it's just that they don't have the capability to do it. And Israel's massive military response to 10/7 is understandable. However, people expect ruthless conduct from Iran, whereas the US has spent decades attempting, often successfully, to depict itself as the champion and linchpin of a "rules-based international order". So such conduct from the US deflates American soft power to some extent and complicates relationships with normally friendly countries, for example in Europe. It also reduces the US' ability to make moral arguments against, for example, Russian foreign policy. If history is any guide, it is also likely that long-enough continuation of such unrestrained power flexing will encourage the growth of counterbalancing anti-US blocks.
I was writing up my own post, but this is basically a more articulate version of what I was going to say. The one thing I would add is that continuing the war against Iran degrades morale and readiness in the US military against dramatically more important threats (specifically, the China-Taiwan issue).
My impression is that morale is sky-high. Military folk love to play with their toys and they're getting to play with essentially zero risk right now. The US Navy is doing all sorts of things it hasn't had the change to do since WWII, like sinking ships with submarines and launching broadside attacks with cannons. As much as I disapprove morally, these are legitimately fun things to do.
btw, where do you get military morale or keep an ear on the ground? I don't quite trust the various military subreddits.
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