Dem
47
GOP
53
During the Civil War, one of the jobs that officers had after a battle was over was to write a report on what had happened with their company/regiment/brigade/division/corps, including casualty figures, and then to submit it to the higher-ups. These reports were, along with a bunch of other official documents, compiled after the war into a 128-volume work generally known as The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion.
At some point during, or maybe slightly after, the compilation process, someone decided to figure out exactly how many soldiers had died in the war. So, they went through all the casualty reports, added them up, and came up with a total: 620,000. That was the number that many generations of historians learned, and then passed on to the next generation.
The problem here, which nobody seemed to notice for over 100 years, is that a post-battle report is not going to provide the most accurate accounting of battle dead, because the disposition of many soldiers is not going to be clear in the immediate aftermath—it's hard to know exactly which men are injured, which are dead, which deserted, etc. Further, and significantly, it behooves a commander to downplay the number of soldiers he led to their deaths. So, as it turns out, most of the post-battle reports gave death totals that were too low. Using other methods of tackling the question, historians today think the total number of dead soldiers was probably between 700,000 and 750,000.
The point is that when a government depends on civilian support for a war—and that has certainly been the case for every American war since 1861, if not earlier—it behooves that government to downplay how bloody the war has been, as much as is possible, for as long as is possible. It happened during the Civil War, and it's happened in every war since. The Trump administration is currently in the midst of a very unpopular war and is also the most dishonest presidential administration in American history. So, the new reporting from The New York Times, that the Pentagon has been withholding information on how bloody the Iran War has really been, comes as no surprise whatsoever.
Over the weekend, at least two additional service members were killed. A third is missing, and unidentified remains have been found in the area where that person was stationed. So, depending on whether one reaches the obvious conclusion, there are now 17 dead and 1 missing, or 18 dead. Well, that the public knows about, at least. There have been at least 420 service members injured, with 100 of those coming since Donald Trump abandoned the Memorandum of Understanding and resumed full-fledged assaults on Iran.
Politically, dead soldiers are about the worst thing possible for a president. Americans hate it when soldiers die, particularly if it's not clear what purpose, if any, those deaths served. So, dying and injured soldiers tend to increase the pressure for a war to end. At the same time, if Trump cuts bait and leaves, then people will ask: "Why did those soldiers have to die, if you were going to give up, anyhow?" So, dead soldiers simultaneously tend to deepen an administration's commitment to a war, and tend to lead to escalation.
Trump, as the world's largest walking id, is governed almost entirely by how he feels in the moment. The dead soldiers make him feel rage, and so that is what is reflected in his "strategy." Shortly after the news of soldiers' deaths #16 and #17 became public, Trump got on his social-media-platform-for-warlords to make this announcement:
Every time Iran kills an American Soldier they will pay for that killing many times over! This directive has been passed on to Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Caine, and every Leader in the Military. President DONALD J. TRUMP
Trump must not have read the part of the Bible—officially, his favorite book!—about turning the other cheek. Or any other part of the Bible, for that matter. He must also have missed Gandhi's (reported) observation that "An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind."
Certainly, Gandhi (or the person whose words he's getting credit for) was on to something. Escalating a war, and playing a deadly game of tit-for-tat, rarely works. And on those occasions where it does work—think Sherman's March to the Sea, or the process of forcing Japan's surrender during World War II—it means taking off all the shackles and going all-in, including making war on the civilian population. Trump clearly isn't willing to do that—in particular, he's not willing to deploy ground troops. And so, he has no hope of imposing total defeat on Iran and causing their complete submission (as with the defeated South and the defeated Japanese). That means that the President's current bombing campaign (10 days and counting) and his threats of retaliation will serve only to make it that much harder to reach a negotiated peace.
There's one other factor that, if the reporting is accurate, is going to make peace difficult. According to an off-the-record Iranian official, lead negotiators Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are much less interested in actual peace than they are in using inside information about the conflict for financial gain (largely through insider trading). In general, it's hard to put too much credence in the words of someone who is anonymous and who has motivation to sow the seeds of dissent. In this case, however, it tracks (and see tomorrow's posting as well). If members of the Trump team, very probably including Trump himself if the claim is true, see the Iran War as the latest gravy train, then they definitely aren't going to try very hard to end the conflict. If this is true, and Trump and his family's desire to profit from dead American soldiers trumps everything, he is playing with fire. If the war is ongoing when early voting starts, the Democrats are certainly going to win the House and the odds of them winning the Senate, too, will go up. That means one or more impeachments and a difficult last two years for Trump. But maybe the lure of money is irresistible to him. (Z)