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By Feryaz Ocakli and Yelena Biberman
Professors of Political Science, Skidmore College
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When French sociologist Jean Baudrillard made the proactive claim that the Gulf War "did not take place," he was on to something. But about the wrong war. Baudrillard observed that the war was a media spectacle of a radically asymmetrical conflict masquerading as a conventional war. As for the Iraq War, it seems that it did not happen at all. This is the impression one gets from listening not only to the Trump administration but also to Democratic congressional leadership.
President Donald Trump’s erratic and unpredictable foreign policy needs no introduction. Emboldened after the successful kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, the president has been on a rhetorical rampage against all manner of real and imagined adversaries. Canada, Greenland, Mexico and Colombia got a mouthful of threats, while Cuba is in a full-blown crisis under an American economic siege. Iran is under the heaviest threat of them all. The full might of the U.S. navy and air force is on display in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, with a potential war seemingly days, if not hours, away.
The U.S. government’s brazen brinkmanship with Iran is both shocking and entirely predictable. What is less clear is how Congress will respond. Congressmen Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) are bringing a war powers resolution to the House to force every member to pick a side before a war begins. Senators Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are reportedly bringing a similar resolution to the Senate. These votes may enable Congress to finally push back against the presidency’s expanding powers to start wars, and bring a semblance of checks and balances back into American government. But, for the Congress to reclaim its authority to declare war, there must first be some opposition to the next war. And there has to be an opposition party to lead it.
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While American people seem overwhelmingly to oppose war with Iran, the House and Senate Democratic leadership is keeping its options open. On February 24, Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) gave a brief response to the press following a classified briefing by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He said only that the situation was "serious" and that the administration should "make its case to the American people." Schumer offered no opposition to the military buildup, escalation of rhetoric or to the possible conflict. His appeal was only to build public support for the war, not to prevent it.
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Have we not seen this movie before? Was there not a war in the same region some two and a half decades ago that failed to go according to plan? Perhaps there wasn’t. The catastrophe that was the Iraq War might as well have never happened. Despite years of lip service acknowledging how lies and procedural failures led the United States into a disastrous conflict, the current administration and Democratic leadership seem to suffer from complete amnesia when it matters most. If we forget Iraq, what hope is there for sound U.S. foreign policy?
Appeals to history are unlikely to sway the Trump administration. Its leaders apparently experience a complete memory wipe every few months. Steve Witkoff’s claim that Iran is a week away from building “industrial grade” nuclear weapons sits comfortably with President Trump’s claims about having devastated the Iranian nuclear program a few months earlier. But this is also true for Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who are giving significant grace to the administration’s position on Iran while pushing against a vote on the war powers resolution. House members like Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) are even more open in their opposition to the Massie-Khanna proposal to bring the resolution to the floor.
It is baffling that Democratic leadership could fail to oppose the 2026 version of the Iraq War. If public opposition is not enough to stop it, surely the devastation a war would wreak on Iran and the broader Middle East cannot be ignored. One would have to believe the Iraq War never happened to turn a blind eye to today’s escalation.
If the United States invades Iran, it would be a seismic event. But, at the current trajectory, it too may one day become a war that never happened.
Feryaz Ocakli is an associate professor of political science and international affairs at Skidmore College and U.S. Fulbright Scholar. Yelena Biberman is an associate professor of political science at Skidmore College, new voice at the Andrew W. Marshall Foundation, and associate at Harvard University’s Davis Center.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
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