Politics
Iran war makes things personal for veteran candidates
When the U.S.-Israel war with Iran began a month ago, the tragic potential reverberations of past conflicts echoed quickly for Virginia state Del. Dan Helmer, who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and is now running for Congress as a Democrat.
“In 2002, a president lied to the American people and sent my friends to die in a war of choice,” he told Blue Light News in an interview, noting that next month marks the 22nd anniversary of his first friend’s death in combat. “And once again, President [Donald] Trump has circumvented the democratic process to launch a war of choice without strategic insight in Iran. … The consequences of reckless military intervention are pretty clear. And the challenges in enacting regime change to get a predictable outcome have defined my experience in the military.”
Michael Bouchard sees things differently. The Michigan Republican House candidate and Bronze Star recipient served in the Army and National Guard, including a counter-ISIS deployment in Iraq for most of 2025 — which encompassed the last Israel-Iran war. Bouchard thinks the current conflict is a necessary, limited mission against a regional menace that has endangered and targeted U.S. service members for decades.
“I’ve seen peace through strength save my friends’ lives, and that’s what this is,” he said. “No one wants to go to war less than somebody who’s been to it. But we can’t just put our heads in the sand and hope things don’t happen.”
Dozens of military veterans running for Congress across the country, both Democrats and Republicans, have now adapted their campaign messaging to befit a nation at war. In a rapidly changing landscape — with ceasefire talks, military escalation and global energy crisis all on the table on any given day — candidates from each party have starkly opposed perspectives on the conflict. But for many of them, the costs and the imperatives of war feel deeply personal.
New York Assemblymember Robert Smullen, who spent 24 years in the Marine Corps and is campaigning in an Upstate GOP House primary, has done multiple Strait of Hormuz transits and studied the enrichment process as a White House fellow at the Energy Department. Montana Democrat Matt Rains, who flew Black Hawks in South Korea and Iraq, is also a rancher watching crucial diesel costs rise. Zach Dembo, a former Navy JAG officer running as a Democrat in Kentucky, has been on two of the aircraft carriers now deployed to the Middle East.
All of that intimate knowledge leads them to some pretty different conclusions.
What they agree on: More than half a dozen Democratic and Republican veteran candidates who spoke with Blue Light News said they oppose the autocratic Iranian government and wouldn’t be sorry to see it go.
Beyond that — and respect for the troops — there’s little consensus across the partisan divide.
Democrats are fuming that Trump didn’t make the case for war and get buy-in from the American public, Congress and foreign allies. They argue that the U.S. approach has lacked clear plans and strategic goals. And they deeply fear that what they see as Trump’s recklessness will lead to another forever war, needlessly sacrificing soldiers’ lives without achieving any big-picture goals.
“I don’t see an endgame here, and it makes me really worried,” Dembo said.
“This idea that you can just briefly drop bombs on a nation … and they’ll just like raise the white flag and beg for us to come put a new government in there, I mean, is asinine,” Rains said.
Many Democrats also see the war as a costly distraction from Americans’ economic struggles. “The amount of money we are spending on this war and on this conflict right now, when we have so many issues here at home that are not being addressed … that’s where the real disconnect is,” said Jessica Killin, an Army veteran running in Colorado.
GOP veterans say they oppose endless wars, too. But that’s not how they see this one. Hewing closely to Trump’s messaging, Republicans told Blue Light News that Iran has been the real belligerent for 47 years. They agree with their Democratic counterparts that the U.S. needs to have a clear plan and not let the conflict drag out for too long — but they have much greater trust in Trump to achieve those goals, principally stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
“I understand veterans’ issues. I understand the cost of what they’ve given, their families have given,” said Oregon Republican Monique DeSpain, an Air Force veteran and JAG who’s worked with veterans for 30 years. “That’s why I feel strongly [about] swift removal of any threats to our country … Congress needs to understand national security: The cost of delay and inaction is irreversible.”
It remains to be seen how voters during wartime will receive these and other veterans running for Congress, many of them in crowded primaries or swing districts. Those who spoke with Blue Light News said they think they’re uniquely positioned to speak with authority: Democrats pitching their national security expertise to lay bare the war’s flaws, and Republicans reassuring skittish voters about why the U.S. strikes can succeed and bolster American security.
“I’ve been in their shoes, and I actually know what they’re doing and what they’re facing, because I dealt with the same thing after September 11th,” Smullen said of the troops currently being deployed. “It’s a mission that needs to be done. It’s about time that we did it.”
Like this content? Consider signing up for Blue Light News’s Playbook PM newsletter.
Daniel Lurie is already imagining the scene at Levi’s Stadium on July 1.
The San Francisco Democrat — who, according to at least one recent poll, is the most popular mayor in America — was circulating around his city ahead of Levi’s Stadium hosting Turkey vs. Paraguay tonight, when he began to wrap his head around his good fortune.
The venue is scheduled to host the Round of 32 match featuring the Group D winner on July 1, and that’s very likely to be the U.S. team.
“It’ll be incredible,” Lurie, a no-nonsense technocrat, told Blue Light News. “It’ll be a thrilling moment for San Francisco, and for our region.”
He beamed in to a FaceTime interview from Southern Station, having already been at two watch parties that capture the new San Francisco he’s trying to build: the East Cut neighborhood, and then Fieldwork Brewing at China Basin.
And Lurie knows ball: Not only has he attended five World Cups, he is also an investor in 49ers Enterprises, which purchased Leeds in 2023.
He drew a parallel to his English club’s own turnaround this season: newly promoted and expected to go straight back down, Leeds instead finished safely mid-table. Lurie is trying to engineer a similar revival in San Francisco, using major events like the World Cup and February’s Super Bowl to project competence and attract visitors and families.
In San Francisco, such a turnaround means restoring a sense of competence to city government — and managing large events like the Super Bowl and the World Cup are key to that effort.
“We are managing for results here in San Francisco, and what’s critical about those results is keeping people safe, making sure that people want to be here in San Francisco, that they have a great time, and that they want to come back,” Lurie said.
His turnaround effort will be vastly aided by Open AI’s expected IPO, which will expand his tax base but also pose challenges.
“We got Anthropic. We got Open AI. We have a company that’s four years old in Cursor that just got acquired by Elon Musk’s company for $60 billion and hardly anyone’s talking about that,” Lurie said. “I think we want these companies here. We want them paying their taxes here, and we want them being engaged in the community. We want them involved in civic life, we want their employees involved and engaged in their neighborhoods, but we also want an economy, and we want an economy that works for everyone — that lifts up the entire community, and isn’t just for the select few.”
Lurie said he is laser-focused on affordability.
“We are every day focused on building more housing, building more affordable housing, making child care more affordable,” Lurie said. “We are the first city in the country to provide access and opportunity to free early childhood education, [age] zero to five, for any family of four making $210,000 a year or less.”
The aim? Draw more families within the city’s confines.
“We’re gonna hopefully keep more working families here in our city, and we want them to believe that they can build a life here long term, so people don’t get priced out — so we have a lot of work to do.”
Lurie largely avoids the national spotlight — the rare exception coming when he netted a jumper on “The Pat McAfee Show” early this year — and feverish culture war issues in favor of a get-shit-done approach to governing.
“Our number one industry is tourism,” Lurie said. “And when people visit our city or when they take their kids to school each day, they don’t care if their mayor is a Democrat or a Republican.”
As of Friday evening, as he prepared to watch Turkey vs. Paraguay, Lurie couldn’t fully allow himself to contemplate what it would mean for Levi’s Stadium to play host to a U.S. squad that’s rocking and rolling over opponents.
“We cannot jinx it,” Lurie said. “But it’s looking very much like we will host USA in the first knockout round. My hope: I’ll be there to root on USA.”
Brazil has won a record five World Cups, but the most important match it has ever played may have been an exhibition match against Haiti that was meaningless in sporting terms but has had a long influence on each country’s politics.
On Aug. 18, 2004, Brazil’s players drove through the streets of Port-au-Prince in armored personnel carriers, World Cup champions greeted like liberators. Two months earlier, Brazil’s military had arrived to lead a multinational peacekeeping force established by the United Nations following a bloody coup d’état.
“We’ve only seen such joy in the eyes, the exuberance of the eyes, when we paraded in Brazil after winning the World Cup,” coach Carlos Alberto Parreira said afterwards. “I will never forget this moment.”
The team was accompanied to the U.N.-hosted friendly match that followed — “They play, peace wins,” went the slogan — by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then in his first term as Brazil’s president. More than two decades later, Lula is back in office, now cemented as the most accomplished leader the world’s left has seen in the 21st century. His approach to foreign policy, say observers, was shaped partially on the soccer pitch that day in Port-au-Prince.
“It showed he was trying something different as a diplomatic tool,” said Mauricio Savarese, an Associated press political reporter in São Paulo who has researched the legacy of the 2004 game. “That match at the time was a symbol of Brazil’s soft power. You really showed how Brazil could win hearts and minds with a policy that was not exactly bowing to the United States or to the China or to Russia, but independent.”
The match, designed to build goodwill between a shell-shocked population and its benevolent occupiers, began after players from the two national teams unfurled a pre-match banner that read “Social Justice is the True Name of Peace.” The peacekeeping mission represented an early commitment to “continental solidarity,” as Lula defined it in a speech the following year to up-and-coming diplomats where he cited the Haiti mission as an example of “non-indifference.”
Lula was feeling his way toward a foreign policy centered around South-South Cooperation and the BRICS alliance of emerging markets. Lula has used that role as de-facto leader of the democratic developing world to, with mixed results, position Brazil as a leader on climate change — it hosted last year’s COP30 in the Amazon city of Belém — and a mediator when thorny international conflicts arise. It has a position of official neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine war, so as to serve a potential role as mediator, as it did when partnering with Turkey in 2010 to broker a nuclear-fuel swap with Iran.
That same year, an earthquake hit Haiti, killing over 100,000 people while injuring and displacing millions more. It also destroyed the headquarters of the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, even as Brazil led a post-disaster humanitarian relief effort. The experience further deepened ties between the two countries, as Brazil introduced a humanitarian-visa program for the first time to welcome Haitians fleeing the devastation; it has since been extended to Syrian war refugees, as well. One historically Italian neighborhood in São Paulo is now known as Little Haiti.
The broader peacekeeping mission began to resemble a military quagmire in humanitarian garb: Brazilian troops were blamed for human-rights violations and a cholera epidemic, while doing little to improve the overall security situation. For Lula and his protegée Dilma Rousseff, the Haiti project became a political liability, in both Haiti and Brazil.
As the two nations prepare to face off against one another in Philadelphia on Friday, Lula is not expected to be in attendance. Instead his travel schedule this week was built around the G7 summit in France, in which Brazil participated as one of five “partner countries” — a reflection of its increased global standing over the past few decades. If Lula shows up at one of Brazil’s matches later in the World Cup, it will likely be with a domestic audience in mind rather than a foreign one: he is in the midst of a reelection campaign for his fourth term, against a son of his longtime antagonist Jair Bolsonaro.
“I doubt that anyone is going to vote for him just because he’s recognized abroad as a key leader,” said Savarese, Brazilian political journalist who wrote the book “Dilma’s Downfall.” “But of course that helps with some moderates, which are a very thin part of Brazil’s electorate, and they’re going to be decisive in October’s election, that is also one of the things that tips the balance in his favor, as is being seen as this pragmatic leader who can also be respected even when he’s speaking about issues that clearly don’t affect as much in Brazil’s daily life.”
That day in Haiti, not yet a global figure, Lula confronted one limit on his power. He reportedly asked his team not to score too many goals, in the interests of goodwill. The players did not oblige, winning 6-0, including an astonishing solo effort from Ronaldinho.
Blue Light News has been crunching the numbers to see how all 48 of this year’s World Cup participants rank in several other off-field categories, which we’ll share more of over the weekend.
In today’s item, we look at whether GDP per capita has any connection to soccer performance. As you can see, the chart does show some positive correlation — note, for example, wealthy tournament contenders such as France, the Netherlands and Germany all in the upper right corner.
But it’s not a perfect indicator. By this metric, Qatar is the wealthiest country in the tournament — and it lost 6-0 to Canada on Thursday …
-
Politics1 year agoFormer ‘Squad’ members launching ‘Bowman and Bush’ YouTube show
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoLuigi Mangione acknowledges public support in first official statement since arrest
-
Politics1 year agoFormer Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron launches Senate bid
-
Uncategorized2 years ago
Bob Good to step down as Freedom Caucus chair this week
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoPete Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon goes from bad to worse
-
The Josh Fourrier Show2 years agoDOOMSDAY: Trump won, now what?
-
Politics1 year agoBlue Light News’s Editorial Director Ryan Hutchins speaks at Blue Light News’s 2025 Governors Summit
-
The Dictatorship9 months agoMike Johnson sums up the GOP’s arrogant position on military occupation with two words