It is probably safe to say that following the Vietnam fiasco—which ended with the American withdrawal in 1973 (and the fall of Saigon in 1975), the United States has never really, convincingly, won any war. Not, at least, in the sense of unequivocal victory such as those attained in the two world wars, whereby the adversary capitulated, and the declared war aims were achieved, with the hostile regimes overturned.

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None of the Gulf Wars would surely qualify as “victory,” not—again—in the classical sense, if there’s really any. The first Gulf War (August 1990-February 1991) did eject the Iraqi invaders from Kuwait, but left Saddam Hussein in place for another 12 years, until U.S. President George W. Bush, the son and namesake of the first war’s initiator, President George H. W. Bush, took on Saddam and invaded Iraq in 2003 with the pretext of preventing it from developing “weapons of mass destruction.” That was always widely suspected to be a red herring and the facts on the ground demonstrated it. Yet Americans would go on to stay until 2011.

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Much the same can be said about Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks against America on September 11, 2001. After decapitating the Taliban regime which had hosted and sponsored Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network and staying in the country for all of two decades, the U.S. forces withdrew in a hurry from Afghanistan in 2021, following which the Taliban took over again.

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And now we have Iran. In the words of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the country went in at the behest of Israel, whose Prime Minister—Benjamin Netanyahu—has been insisting for forty years that Iran was “only weeks away” from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

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That the Iranian theocratic regime is horrible is beyond question, but the Israeli-American bombing of the country—including civilian targets, unintended or otherwise—was not really seeking regime change. Why would otherwise President Donald Trump trumpet his insistence at “choosing” the next spiritual supreme leader? Much as in the U.S. but without its democratic trappings, in Iran Khamenei Jr. succeeded Ayatollah Khamenei Sr. as the country’s supreme leader, who was apparently killed in an Israeli-American strike—which has done away with any vestiges or pretences about an international order based on law. Both Israel and America have made it clear that lawlessness at the hands of the mighty is now the standard operating procedure. There goes the universal condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—which may also explain why Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is mum about the attacks on its erstwhile ally, Iran.

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While it is probable that few in the current White House are versed in history, it is less likely that the professional diplomats, officials, officers, and experts that underpin the American government ignore the lessons of Vietnam and the last “forever” wars. They probably know—and knew from the very beginning—that there was little chance of “winning” in Iran. This is regardless of how the war is marketed afterwards, with ceremonies involving parades or speeches on aircraft carriers with “Mission Accomplished” signs.

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Why, then, does America goes to war? Probably the answer is war for the sake of war—and the economy. The defence complex has become so enmeshed in the country’s fabric that the economy itself demands conflict to put to work its industrial and technological assets and bill big-ticket (an understatement) items: the Iran war is reportedly costing $1 billion a day, but those dollars—or most of them, at any rate—probably recirculate back into the American economy.

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Then there is, of course, America’s status as a superpower. No superpower worth its name can afford to be one without the most powerful army in the world. Those armies, other than needing wars to prove their mettle, also need them to justify themselves. Big armies need big wars.

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It was all said by a Republican U.S. President in his farewell speech in 1961. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, who served his country—and the world—mostly in the military and helping liberate Europe from the Nazis, warned about what six decades later has become a reality:
 

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations.

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This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

 

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

 

There is no conspiracy theory here. The military-industrial complex is so embedded in the American economy that nobody can even realise how they are cogs in the war machinery.

As for Israel, it has long advocated breaking up hostile countries in the neighbourhood, or those it perceives as a threat—the division of the Middle East countries into small, homogeneous units that cannot pose a threat either to Israel or the United States. As historian Nicholas Doumanis has written, in 1982, Oded Yinon, a former senior official at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, openly advocated it, endorsing the ‘fragmentation or dissolution’ of Arab states. That playbook, which arguably has worked to Israel’s advantage in Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, is now being put to work in Iran. It may keep the ayatollahs, but it’s no coincidence that Israel (and its American allies) are pushing the Kurds to intervene, and Netanyahu is calling on “Baluchis and Azeris” to stand up to the regime. Netanyahu would not shed any tears over a potential—and to date unlikely—fragmentation of Iran, regardless of the catastrophic repercussions such a scenario could have in the broader region.

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That thousands of civilians, including hundreds of children according to Iranian reports, are dying is a matter that the U.S. and Israel are investigating.