War Is a Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone

Washington risks Americans’ lives in wars of choice, then uses their deaths to justify more war.

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 planning" against Iran.) The fact that many Iraqis wanted to eject U.S. forces—and that arming those Iraqis gave outsiders an opportunity to hurt Americans—should have been a sign that U.S. intervention had failed. Instead, Graham took it as a justification to continue and expand the war.

That sleight of hand has a long lineage. When the American public lost faith in stopping communism in Vietnam by force, the Nixon administration tried to make the war about freeing American prisoners from communist captivity. The administration even played a cynical accounting trick to inflate the public's hopes about the number of Americans they could bring home, by folding the military's "killed in action/body not recovered" list into the "prisoners of war/missing in action" category.

Of course, the longer the war continued, the more Americans would disappear into the Vietnamese jungle, which would in turn give then-President Richard Nixon more reasons to continue the war.

Another relic of the Vietnam War seems to have made its way into Biden's strategy in the Middle East. Biden administration officials told Axios last week that they agree with Israel's "de-escalation through escalation" strategy. Nixon had used a similar justification when he announced an invasion of neutral Cambodia to ferret out alleged communist hideouts there.

"We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam and winning the just peace we all desire," Nixon told the nation in April 1970. "We will not be humiliated. We will not be defeated. We will not allow American men by the thousands to be killed by an enemy from privileged sanctuaries," he added.

The public reaction to Nixon's attempt at de-escalation through escalation was so harsh that Congress passed the War Powers Act to limit future military interventions. Nor did the plan work. The war continued for five more years until April 1975, when the U.S.-backed regimes in both Vietnam and Cambodia collapsed and Americans were forced to leave Southeast Asia.

The end of the U.S. wars was painful for Americans who had sacrificed so much for the cause. And it did not end the violence. The new Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia turned its guns on its own people and its former allies in Vietnam. But the U.S. withdrawal showed how absurd the rationale for the war was: Southeast Asia was no longer a threat to Americans once Americans left Southeast Asia alone.

Over the next few decades, Vietnamese communists learned that they enjoyed American capitalism more than they had thought. Today, Americans are free to come and go in Vietnam as guests. But first, we had to stop being invaders.

U.S. policy is delaying that outcome in the Middle East as much as possible. As long as they can, politicians will try to keep the cycle of blowback and vengeance alive. We will stay in the Middle East to avenge the Americans who died to keep America in the Middle East.