Don’t support our troops — save them

On Feb. 28, President Donald Trump launched a war with Iran. Following the attack, vocal support for our troops has been alive and well — and rightly so. 

But we need to do more than voice support if we want to avoid the deaths of countless servicemen and women: We need to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. 

History shows us we are going down a path that requires boots on the ground.

In the 20th century, Air Force bombing campaigns proved to be ineffective tools of U.S. foreign policy, requiring the U.S. to send ground troops into combat.

Bombing campaigns failed to stop communist governments in Vietnam, Cambodia, and North Korea – not that we didn’t try.

In “Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938,” authors Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley wrote that “by 1970, more bombs had been dropped on Vietnam than on all targets in the whole of human history.”

Contrary to expectations, bombings hardened the enemy and turned local people against us.

In the book, Ambrose and Brinkley reflect on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s failed bombing campaign in Vietnam and his withdrawal from the 1968 presidential race. 

They wrote that Johnson “had learned the painful lessons that the power to destroy is not the power to control, and that he had reached and passed the limits to his own power.”

We’ve seen similar limits with the Trump administration.

Last year, President Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities with bunker busters bombs, presumably destroying the country’s nuclear weapons program.

If that mission was effective, then why are we waging a new offensive? If it was a strong-arm tactic designed to force Iran to renegotiate its nuclear ambitions, then why did the negotiations end?

Most importantly — what comes next?

Airstrikes didn’t work then; they won’t work now. History has proven that. The next steps will be boots on the ground. History has proven that too.

An invasion of Iran would be a quagmire.

Iran is three times the size of Iraq, with a population twice as large, at about 92 million people. Like Afghanistan, Iran is mountainous.

An invasion of Iran would be worse than the 9-year war in Iraq and the 20-year war in Afghanistan combined. 

If we want to protect our troops, we need to do more than voice support for them. We need to avoid getting entangled in another forever war in the Middle East.