The moment President Trump declared that he would not allow the Islamic Republic to keep enriching uranium, loud protests erupted — not merely from the anti-war Left, but also from quite a few of his own supporters. The latter were promptly accused of isolationism, vividly evoking the bipartisan coalition in Congress that successfully resisted American rearmament, even after the 1940 fall of France and the Nazi conquest of most of Europe.
The simple truth, too easily forgotten, is that the isolationists squarely won the debate. Europe might still today suffer under Nazi rule had Japan not destroyed isolationism by attacking Pearl Harbor. Stalin’s army could not have survived the Wehrmacht’s onslaught without the American and British help it received from 1941, including 400,000 trucks.
Now, again, American isolationism is a far more potent force than anyone in Europe is willing to recognise. They include a noisy fringe of antisemites, who are more prominent these days because Iran is the prospective enemy and Israel the ally.
But the movement’s roots do not derive from old hatreds, as was true of interwar isolationism, fanned as it was by Irish Anglophobes and German-Americans who had been harassed in the First World War and who cheered Nazi victories from Warsaw to Paris. This time, rather, isolationism is empowered by a perfectly realistic appraisal of the American wars in Indochina, in Afghanistan after 2001, and in Iraq from 2003.
Each of those wars — which added trillions to the public debt and cost the lives of many Americans — began because of a colossal and inexcusable intelligence failure. Those failures, moreover, are even more shocking because the relevant intelligence did not need to be snatched from enemy headquarters by daring feats of espionage. All the White House had to do, from Vietnam to Iraq, was pick up a standard reference book.
Consider President Kennedy, who sent US forces to Vietnam to deny Chinese control of Indochina. So passionate was JFK about his war that he personally chose the Army’s new jungle handbooks right in the Oval Office. But had he instead read a few pages on Vietnam’s history, he would immediately have learned that the very identity of the Vietnamese people had emerged in opposition to Chinese expansionism, so the best way of keeping China’s influence out of Indochina was to send weapons to Hanoi.
That is exactly what President Truman did in 1948, when he ordered that money, supplies and weapons be rushed to Tito who, communist though he was, had decided to keep Stalin’s Soviet army out of Yugoslavia. But Kennedy chose a different path, and many Americans were killed or maimed to fight against the most anti-Chinese nation on earth.
America lacked intelligence at the start of its Vietnamese adventure — and hardly had more by the end. Why? Because, it seems, to understand foreign countries is just not an American talent, and indeed the hugely expensive “intelligence community” of 16 different agencies barely even tries. The CIA’s officers are the best educated of the lot, but they too resolutely refuse to learn foreign languages, except perhaps bar-room Spanish. One exception are the so-called “language officers”, but they stay at headquarters. Even Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, knew no Arabic at the start of his tenure and refused to learn any thereafter. His deputy also spoke no Arabic, despite the fact that bin Laden used speeches to inspire and direct his followers.
No wonder America’s 21st-century wars were intelligence disasters before anything else. Certainly, America’s entry into Afghanistan after 9/11 was both necessary and unavoidable. Because I had myself designed the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command’s “Mountain Division” Format; had once visited the country unlike almost everyone else in the Pentagon; and also enjoyed a personal friendship with the man himself, I knew exactly what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld planned to do.
First, less than 3,000 US troops would be sent via Uzbekistan to make contact with the anti-government Northern Alliance, still holding out north of Kabul. Once they jointly attacked Taliban forces, and the latter gathered to fight, they would be bombed to pieces by B-52 heavy bombers. After doing that a few times, US troops would travel to known al-Qaeda camps, killing anyone who still remained there. Finally, every US soldier would go home.
Had anyone told Rumsfeld, a practical man who had done well in business, that US forces would remain in Afghanistan for almost two decades, he would doubtless have been horrified. As it was, under Rumsfeld’s successors, the US remained in Afghanistan for expensive but utterly futile attempts at “nation-building”, which included the supply of an ultra-modern constitution complete with a female parliamentary quota larger than the female presence in the House of Commons or the US House of Representatives.
That provided the Taliban with a very strong argument — again one that Pentagon officials could have avoided by reading any book on the country — because very few Afghans, either male or female, believe that women should speak in public, let alone argue politics with men.
And that was just one of several disastrous intelligence failures. When US generals demanded billions of dollars for an “Afghan” army, I argued vehemently against this stupid waste of money, reminding them that the British Indian Army’s loyal and effective troops served in regiments whose manpower was drawn entirely from a single ethno-religious community. Otherwise, I warned, soldiers were more likely to fight each other rather than the Taliban: because no “Afghan” identity truly existed.
“That was just one of several disastrous intelligence failures.”
Unfortunately, the US-funded Afghan Army, which claimed 180,000 men at its peak, threw together ethnic strangers without a common language, including historic enemies like Tajiks and Pashtuns. This artificial army unsurprisingly surrendered to the Taliban without a fight in August 2021, even as 714 US, Nato and fellow Afghan soldiers were killed by the very Afghan troops who were meant to be their allies.
Every other part of the Afghan state — from the schools to the courts — were just as flawed. All that remains of the $2.3 trillion the US spent on Afghanistan are the Dubai bank accounts of those Afghans clever and corrupt enough to steal the money that would have been wasted in any case. That is ultimately what over 2,400 Americans died for in Afghanistan.
The intelligence failure was even worse in Iraq. Not long before the 2003 invasion, I was called to give my views to the Senate foreign relations committee, chaired by the future President Biden, accompanied by a witness for the Bush administration. In my testimony, still online, I argued that although Saddam Hussein presided over a brutal dictatorship, he was saving lives every day: by keeping the Barzani and Talabani Kurds from killing each other; by keeping the Kurds as a whole from killing their Turkmen neighbours; by keeping Kurds and Turkmen from killing their Sunni Arab neighbours and vice versa; and by keeping Sunnis from killing Shi’as and vice versa — though I did omit the high probability that Shi’a religious dynasties would kill each other.
During my testimony, the administration witness accused me of racism, because I had clearly implied that Iraqis were incapable of democracy, the right of every human. He went on to say that I was doubly wrong because the Iraqis were the best educated of all Arab populations, and included no fewer than 100,000 engineers. When I suggested that a Baghdad University degree could be had for $50 dollars, frame included, I only made matters worse.
Yet once again, the exchange shows the utter failure of US intelligence. Had the CIA director circulated a simple political study of Iraq, everyone on Capitol Hill would have understood why the emergence of a functioning democracy could not happen spontaneously just by removing Saddam Hussein, and would instead require decades of tranquility and political education.
The CIA even failed to present the simple argument that destroying Saddam Hussein’s forces would allow the bitterly anti-American Iran of the ayatollahs to extend its influence into Iraq — unless the US Army became a permanent Mesopotamian constabulary to contain Iran’s influence.
One soldier who served in Iraq, and therefore learned from personal experience how Americans were sent to fight and die for no reason, is Vice President Vance, who has placed several like-minded officials in key positions. At any rate, these varied disasters neatly explain the rising isolationism right across American political life, even if Trump’s intention is merely to add a few heavy bomber sorties to Israel’s war, thereby denuclearising Iran for years to come.
Perhaps these new isolationists do not believe Trump. Or else they do, but fear what the Pentagon and the intelligence community will do with his one-night strike plans. Perhaps they fear that after the bombing, there will be more fighting, and even calls for “nation-building” to repair the damage. After all, their fathers were sent to Vietnam because of Washington’s pathetic ignorance, and they themselves served in George Bush’s quagmires.
Most people understand that Israelis are allies fighting for their lives, and are not Vietnamese, Afghans or Iraqis, out to get what they can from rich, naive Americans. More people also know that the Israelis would never want Americans to fight for them, except for a few bomber crews for a single night.
But after years of lies, of foolish optimism by eager, ignorant generals, these new isolationists are determined not to be deceived again. It will therefore take a firm decision by Trump to bring the Iran war to an end, with the destruction of the Fordow centrifuge deep underground — the one thing the Israelis cannot do for themselves without risking the lives of hundreds of commandos very far from home. Either way, Trump himself should emphatically rule out any attempt at regime change, let alone nation-building. You do not need the CIA to tell you that trying will end in ruin.
