By TERENCE SMITH
Having covered four wars on three continents over two decades, I have never seen such an ill-planned, thoughtless, unrealistic conflict comparable to the current U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran.
I wrote about two Israeli-Arab wars, the decade-long travesty in Vietnam and the short-but-bloody 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus in my 2021 memoir, “Four Wars, Five Presidents, A Reporter’s Journey from Jerusalem to Saigon to the White House.” None of the four wars resulted in a lasting, genine peace, but none was as chaotic and capricious as the ongoing fracas in the Persian Gulf.
Nor did any of the five Presidents I covered ever describe the conflicts as “an excursion,” or publicly offer such confused and contradictory goals and outcomes as President Trump has put forward in the last four weeks. He clearly does not know what he is doing.
The 1967 Six Day War between Israel and her Arab neighbors lasted less than a week and ended in a ceasefire that was a prelude to the 1973 Yom Kippur War that lasted 19 days and set the stage for eventual peace agreements between Israel and Egypt and Jordan that continue to this day.
The agony that was the U.S. role in Vietnam lasted a decade. It was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the country and its history —the so-called domino theory, the notion that if communists took over South Vietnam, the rest of Indochina would fall like dominos on a board. Nothing of the kind happened, of course, and today Washington and Hanoi are at peace.
The Turkish invasion of Cyprus, by contrast, led to the occupation of 40 per cent of that beautiful island, an occupation that continues to this day.
Wars are not pretty, of course, nor simple, but the U.S. and Israel find themselves in a dilemma of their own making in the ongoing battle with Iran. Both President Trump and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu had their own political reasons to launch this war when they did, but neither has been able to provide a coherent rationale and justification for this fast-spreading conflict.
Nor is there any clear path to a conclusion. Iran has, predictably, rejected President Trump’s 15-point proposed peace plan and issued its own set of unrealistic demands before it will end the fighting. Meanwhile, thousands more U.S. troops are on their way to the Persian Gulf, the bombing and missile exchanges continue, Lebanon is being pummeled, people are being killed on both sides and the stakes keep getting higher.
The only clear lesson Trump seems to have learned so far is that Iran is no Venezuela, and that this “excursion” will not be as easy or brief as he hoped and predicted.