The No-Explanation War - The New Yorker

If you never have to explain yourself, you can’t really ever be wrong. In recent decades, few things have been as famously wrong as the political theatre surrounding the Iraq War: Colin Powell showing his satellite images in front of the U.N. Security Council and repeating the phrase “weapons of mass destruction,” Donald Rumsfeld’s word puzzles about known unknowns and the absence of evidence not being the evidence of absence, George W. Bush’s triumphant “Mission Accomplished” episode aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. These displays worked in the moment; support for the Iraq War was much higher among the public than some might remember now, and the media mostly filed in the back of the Administration’s dance line. They have since become synonymous not only with a loss of faith in the government’s duty to put American lives over profit but, perhaps more enduringly, with the end of the country’s trust in the media.

The Trump Administration, in contrast, has, in its own approach to war, simply skipped the explaining phase. This makes sense in a perverse way. You can consider the past half century of American military adventures as a continuum where the lessons of Vietnam—the first televised war, which delivered intimate footage of American draftees fighting in the jungle—instructed Desert Storm (a brief conflict, represented on TV largely by faraway shots of Patriot missiles), which, in turn, influenced the spectacle around Afghanistan and Iraq (wars of regime change, accompanied by images of liberation). It follows that, for our latest incursion into the Middle East, the Administration in charge would do away with the alleged moral imperatives and grand imagery of the previous wars and move straight to the bombs. The sight of a high-ranking official making his case in front of the U.N. Security Council now feels quaint and almost comical. Patriotism, apparently, is something you talk about during the Olympics and maybe during halftime at the Super Bowl but something you need not invoke when putting troops in the line of fire.

To date, the only explanations offered by the Administration have been confusing more than anything else. “We didn’t start this war,” the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, said at a press conference on Monday, pointing out that President Trump, Marco Rubio, Jared Kushner, and the special envoy Steve Witkoff—evidently, the Iran negotiating team—had “bent over backwards for real diplomacy.” He also said that Iran had a “conventional gun to our head,” reiterating that America had no choice but to go on the offensive.

But he also struck a tone of nihilistic defiance. “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars,” Hegseth said. “We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.” In other words, all the old patriotic and moral justifications for our forever wars no longer applied. We just do it because we want to “win,” even if we can’t really tell you what we’re winning. On Wednesday, Hegseth fired up the cliché factory again, saying, “Death and destruction from the sky all day long. We’re playing for keeps.” If you don’t like that, well, then, Hegseth and the Trump Administration are telling you that they don’t care.

Last year, when writing about how the public would remember the war in Gaza, I asked what happens “when every image becomes a site of contestation; when the rare sights we all see together, whether joyous or devastating, quickly fray into thousands, even millions, of threads, each with their own grip on reality”? In the two years that I’ve been writing this column, I’ve asked some variation of this question on several occasions, because I still don’t really know whether the internet as we now experience it—constantly, on our phones—has made it impossible for any narrative to stick with the public, and whether this, in turn, makes it impossible to tell any story that might inspire abiding dissent.

Like so many brooding young men of my generation, I was quite taken, when I was in high school, by the novels of Milan Kundera. At the time, my interest was divided between trying to understand totalitarianism and horniness, but one passage in particular from “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” stuck with me and seems relevant today: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” These days, we forget because there’s too much to try to remember, and because we can’t tell what’s worth holding on to and what’s online trash. On Tuesday night, the U.S. Southern Command announced that it had launched joint operations with Ecuador against “Designated Terrorist Organizations.” Meanwhile, the list of elected officials who have made conflicting or meaningless statements about Iran keeps growing, and now includes Chuck Schumer, who said, “No one wants an endless war but we certainly don’t want a nuclear Iran,” a statement so noncommittal, gnarled, and koan-y that it sounds like it was written by history’s most frustrating Buddhist monk. (On Wednesday, Schumer, making the case for a war-powers resolution, said, “Americans overwhelmingly oppose war with Iran. And Senate Republicans have a duty to stand up for Americans by forcing Donald Trump to reverse course.”) We are aware that stuff is happening that we should care about, but the fog of bullshit surrounding this stuff is so thick that we can barely make out its shape or heft. Less than six weeks have passed since Alex Pretti was shot dead by C.B.P. agents in Minneapolis, and yet that, too, already feels like yesterday’s problem.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t remember anything. Whatever resistance does form against our new war in the Middle East won’t come out of deep knowledge of the conflict or even disagreements over its justifications—when none are offered, how can we argue against them?—but, rather, out of the collective memory of Afghanistan and Iraq. The Trump Administration is making a bet that this remembering will be obscured by all the news and trash we take in every day. And, as long as American boots do not hit the ground in Iran—which would take the war from our phones into the family living rooms of the servicepeople who are deployed—Trump might well get away with it.

If we do forget the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq, it won’t be on account of a revisionist history about those wars, one that has swayed us with jingoistic propaganda about a caring military or some paean about spreading democracy. Instead, Trump will have won by simply refusing to tell a story at all, outside of Hegseth’s absurd football-coach talk. Hegseth, in a way, is right: nobody believes in those stories anymore, so why would he bother spinning them? Just say, essentially, nothing, and hope that, eventually, we’ll all go back to our phones.♦

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