Demonstrators gather in front of the White House last week to protest against the war with Iran.AMID FARAHI/AFP/Getty Images
The current combat in Iran has the least early support of any American military action in modern time. Had the current administration taken a cue from history, the numbers quite possibly might be different.
Here is an extract of a speech Donald Trump didn’t deliver before he ordered an assault on Iran.
“One of the reasons for the deep division about Vietnam is that many Americans have lost confidence in what their government has told them about our policy. The American people cannot and should not be asked to support a policy which involves the overriding issues of war and peace unless they know the truth about that policy.”
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A speech like this one, delivered by Richard Nixon from the White House in 1969, very likely would have rallied Americans to the President’s side and given him far more than the support of only two out of five Americans in the conflict’s opening days.
“The numbers are astonishing,” said C. William Walldorf Jr., a Wake Forest University political scientist and author of the 2019 book To Shape Our World for Good: Master Narratives and Forceful Regime Change in United States Foreign Policy. “They’re bad because nobody knows what this war is about. And people don’t see its connection to any existential danger to the United States. All Trump had to do is explain what the threat was and he’d be in far better shape.”
But Mr. Trump did not do so, and as a result he is commander in chief of a citizenry full of reluctant warriors.
There is no mystery why the American entry into the Second World War in 1941 and the beginning of the war in Afghanistan in 2001 received more than 90 per cent public support; in both cases, the country had been attacked: first at Pearl Harbor and then during the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
By contrast, only 25 per cent of Americans consider Iran an immediate threat, according to the YouGov survey. That figure may change if Iran initiates retaliatory terrorist incidents on American soil, and if threats such as the drone threat identified for California this week turn into actual attacks. Even so, Mr. Trump’s support may not grow if the public blames such attacks on the President’s decision to engage hostilities against Iran in the first place.
Rising oil prices and recharged inflation also could erode support for both the President generally and his conduct of the war specifically. Likewise, if further revelations prove that, as Iran charges and as a preliminary military investigation tentatively concluded, American forces were responsible for the Tomahawk missile that hit Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school and killed at least 175, most of them children. UNICEF has reported that more than 1,100 children have been reported killed or wounded since the conflict began on Feb 28.
Even the smaller engagements of American forces in, for example, Panama in 1989 (80-per-cent support), Kosovo in 1999 (58 per cent) and the 2011 intervention in Libya (47 per cent), prompted greater support than the Iran conflict. More than three-quarters of Americans supported the larger conflicts in Korea (1950), the first Iraq war (1991) and the second Iraq war (2003).
The most recent YouGov survey found that U.S. President Donald Trump has a 40-per-cent approval rating. His approval rating on Iran is 39 per cent.Nathan Howard/Reuters
In all these cases, presidents presented discrete public rationales for engaging American forces in battle.
As American troops began their invasion of Iraq in 2003, George W. Bush addressed the country, saying, “The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.”
The weak support for Operation Epic Fury may underline an important characteristic of contemporary American political culture.
The most recent YouGov survey found that Mr. Trump has a 40-per-cent approval rating. His approval rating on Iran is 39 per cent. The result is a remarkable correlation between the President’s support and the support for the war.
“That 40 per cent represents his level generally, but the number falls for specific issues even among Republicans and Independents,” said David Brady, a Stanford University political scientist. “The rating is at that level because there haven’t been any serious consequences yet.”
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Mr. Trump is a populist somewhat in the model of Louisiana’s Huey Long (1893-1935), who defied convention because, as he put it, “All I care is what the boys at the forks of the creek think of me.” It may be that Mr. Trump’s principal goal is to court the core of MAGA supporters who, polls show, are remaining in his corner, though his departure from his movement’s America-First theme may erode support among his base. The danger is particularly acute in the Farm Belt, for nearly a century a redoubt of isolationism, and a region where oil prices affect the costs of operating farm equipment.
“The question now is whether a partisan split on the Iran conflict – only 5 per cent of Democrats support it, while 83 per cent of Republicans do – is specific to this war.”
“We used to live in a world – the first Gulf War, even the Iraq War – when most people responded to the president and to the amazing technology on display in these conflicts,” said Douglas Rivers, founder and chief scientist of YouGov. “Now the reaction breaks down by party, with almost no support for the war from Democrats, who overwhelmingly oppose Trump.”