Michael Baumgartner Supports the Iran War

I was the United States Forces–Iraq Liaison Officer to the Political Section of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Pretty much every conversation started and ended with “Iran.”

 

IEDs and EFPs. Mortar and rocket attacks. Training Shia militias. Oil smuggling. Black markets. The Iranian-backed MEK cult camped out in Iraq. Americans getting nabbed by Iranian-backed forces while wandering in the Kurdish region.

You name the topic—it all led back to Iran.

 

So if Iran is so bad, one might ask, why is war a bad idea?

 

The answer is simple: because we cannot win.

 

Iran’s regime is horrible and oppressive, and many of its people want it gone. But they hate Americans more than they hate their own government.

 

Dropping bombs to “get even” with Iran might feel good, but we wouldn’t be teaching them a lesson. We would be galvanizing their resolve against us and giving the regime an excuse to become even more oppressive at home, while expanding its military actions against us, Israel, and its neighbors.

 

They don’t need nukes to do that. They don’t need massive factories to build drones and bombs. You could kill every general they have, sink their navy, destroy every plane—and they would still have hundreds of thousands of insurgency experts capable of carrying out effective small-scale attacks.

 

The Bush administration fired General Shinseki after his testimony before Congress. They said he was too cautious—that we would win in Iraq and be greeted with flowers. (See video)

 

When I arrived in Iraq six years later, there were no flowers.

 

Now take his assessment and replace “Iraq” with “Iran”—and remember, Iran would be far worse.

 

It doesn’t take a genius to see that Iran is three times the size of Iraq, has twice the population, and likely around two million formal and informal fighters. You don’t need to speak Farsi or have a PhD to understand that Iran is a proud country with thousands of years of history behind it.

 

I’m not excusing Iran’s government. They are bad actors on the world stage and oppressors at home. International pressure and military containment are absolutely necessary. But joint U.S.–Israeli attacks would only confirm to many Iranians what their government has always claimed—that there is a massive American-Israeli conspiracy against them.

 

And yet, somehow, Michael Baumgartner didn’t get the memo.

He sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and has access to intelligence from 18 agencies. He’s been to Iraq and Afghanistan. He should know better. If he doesn’t, that’s bad.

 

If he does—and is still willing to send American troops into harm’s way to please Mike Johnson and advance his standing among House Republicans—that’s inexcusable.