Saturday, March 7, 2026
If Daniel McCarthy were a conservative who understood history and human nature, he wouldn't issue embarrassing pronunciamentos like these
Win or lose, Donald Trump has begun the last war the United States is ever likely to fight in the Middle East. ...
That's what we thought in 1991 about the victorious George H. W. Bush. And then somehow we lost our minds and elected blow-job Bill with his Sunday-go-to-meeting Bible under his arm, big enough to choke a mule.
The state of mind – and the state of the world – that made possible the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, has passed, never to return. ...
There wasn't a single state of mind from 1991 to 2003.
We didn't choose 9/11. It chose us and changed our minds. And the lunatics in Tehran are crazier and far more dangerous than Osama ever was.
Hell, we didn't even choose the Gulf War. Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and set it on fire as it withdrew in January 1991.
We didn't choose this Iran War, either. Iran chose it for us when its proxies invaded our ally Israel in October 2023.
The state of mind and the state of the world . . . hasn't changed at all, except that Trump's a little slow on the uptake.
The passions that involve us in foreign conflicts in the future will be those of a younger cohort. ...
Yes, it isn't just about a state of mind, is it? Things happen which we can't control. You can't predict "no more wars" anywhere, even though you can pretend for a long time, for example from the summer of 1939 to late 1941, and then something forces your hand.
... if the Iran war goes badly – as badly as the Iraq War did for Bush – Trump’s new style of interventionism will be repudiated by voters as thoroughly as Trump’s own election repudiated the neoconservatives.
Bush 41 was popular because he won the Gulf War and suddenly wasn't because of the economy. And Bush 43 was re-elected convincingly in 2004, hello. If America didn't support his Iraq War, it had a funny way of showing it. There is no comparison with Trump.
Trump's economy already sucks and unsurprisingly right out of the box polling indicates Americans are against his attack on Iran. We're blowing up $1 billion a day over there and can't afford a lousy hamburger at home. We don't have to wait for Iran to go badly for the voters to repudiate Trump.
The only thing Dan is probably right about is this, unfortunately:
. . . what comes next will be an even more radical phase in domestic politics. ...
Here.
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