As tensions between the U.S. and Iran spiked this last June, Maureen Dowd, the imitable New York Times columnist, wrote that “the man” standing between the U.S. and another war in the Middle East wasn’t a part of the Trump Administration’s foreign policy team, but Fox News television host Tucker Carlson.
Disturbed that Mr. Trump’s actions on Iran might touch off a nasty bloodletting, Carlson (as we are reliably told), privately advised the president against hitting Iran. And so a popular (if slightly exaggerated) fable has taken hold: surrounded by a gaggle of his own experts, and with U.S. bombers poised to destroy Iranian military assets, Trump decided to reject their advice, and listen to Carlson. The bombers were recalled, war averted—and the president returned to his Twitter account. Phew.
Dowd, and many of the rest of us, were gobsmacked. While decrying the lights-camera-action society that has brought us to this pass (a talking heads foreign policy is, it seems, the predictable result of a talking heads culture), Dowd ended her column thusly: “Carlson is pointing out something that Trump needs to hear,” she wrote. “The very people — in some cases, literally the same people who lured us into the Iraq quagmire 16 years ago — are demanding a new war, this one with Iran.”
Amazon.com Gift Card i...
Buy New $25.00
(as of 11:14 UTC - Details)
Of course, this wasn’t the first time that America actually chose not to go to war, but the decision is rare enough that pointing out when it has happened before, and why, is worth noting —particularly as it involves Iran.
In October of 1983, a truck filled with explosives leveled the four-story U.S. Marine Barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 American military personnel. The intelligence community laid responsibility for the act at the feet of Tehran’s mullahs, who’d tasked Hezbollah, their proxy in Lebanon, with pushing the U.S. (which had deployed the Marines as part of a multinational peacekeeping mission) out of the region. The incident (the largest non-nuclear explosion since World War Two, as we were told at the time), touched off a legendary internal Reagan Administration dispute over how, and whether, the U.S. should retaliate.
As debates go, this was a take-no-prisoners donnybrook: on the one side was the outwardly soft-spoken and professorial Secretary of State George Shultz (in fact, he was a nasty infighter whose sneering personnel evaluations could end careers), and on the other Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, a craggy and confrontational workaholic beloved by the military’s most senior leaders. Even before the dust had settled in Beirut, Shultz and Weinberger were weighing in with Reagan on what to do about it—-with Shultz arguing for a full military response, while a shrugging and seemingly detached Weinberger dragged his feet.
The Secretary of Defense had opposed the deployment of the Marines to begin with, and had the support of the military. Colin Powell, Weinberger’s senior military assistant, spoke for many of the military’s leaders when he described the Lebanon deployment “goofy from the beginning.”
For Shultz, however, revisiting the deployment decision was a waste of time. In a series of knock-down-drag-outs that pitted him against Weinberger, the Secretary of State argued that “American credibility” (that old standby), was being tested and that, therefore, the deaths of 241 U.S. Marines was cause enough for a military escalation.
Weinberger disagreed: “retaliation against who?” he asked. Slow-rolling the president, he argued that the U.S. needed better intelligence before deciding who to punish. Weinberger was adamant: the U.S. had just left one unwinnable conflict (in Vietnam), and shouldn’t be so quick to start another. He dug in.
