The Dictatorship
Why Trump’s reported attempts to minimize Iran war casualties won’t work
The resumption of hostilities between the United States and Iran has caused an uptick in U.S. casualties. Last week, CENTCOM confirmed the deaths of three more U.S. service members killed in actionand the total number of troops killed during the war currently stands at 18. Meanwhile nearly 100 troops have been injured over the past two weeks as Iran escalates attacks on U.S. bases across the Middle East.
President Donald Trump continues to try to cast the war as an operation of total U.S. domination against a defanged regime, but Iran is striking back, with American lives at stake, making justifications for continuing the unpopular war even harder for Trump. And with the president signaling an openness to escalating the conflict even further in the coming weeks, the human toll is likely to increase. (Iranian casualties are far worse, with at least 1,700 Iranian civilians killed, according to estimates from the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.)
It will be nearly impossible for the Trump administration to ward off the reality that casualties make wars less popular.
Already lacking in meaningful transparency, the Trump administration appears to be growing more cagey about releasing information about casualties. But efforts to delay or obscure the information are unlikely to prevent the inevitable — the war will become even more widely despised as more people die.
CNN reported on Monday that the Pentagon has been “slow to disclose injuries to U.S. troops during the ongoing war with Iran, avoiding publicly confirming the fallout from Iranian attacks and mostly reserving totals to a military website that lags events by several days or even weeks.” And its mode of communication about casualties has shifted: “While earlier in the war U.S. Central Command, the military headquarters overseeing the war effort, would provide periodic updates on injuries, it has not been regularly disclosing non-fatal attacks in recent months,” BLN reported. (The Pentagon’s top spokesman, Sean Parnell, told BLN that reporting delays are necessary, saying, “Providing real-time information on non-fatal casualties to the media is the same as providing that information directly to our adversaries, which could put even more service members at risk with access to that quick information.”)
The New York Times pointed out that the Pentagon declined to divulge Iranian strikes on U.S. bases in Jordan last week, which in turn may have misled the public about why the U.S. was conducting airstrikes against Iranian military sites. And that happened amid a broader reticence to brief the public about the direction of the war: “The last major Pentagon briefing on the war was in early May.” (Parnell responded to the Times article in a statementsaying that “claims of concealment are fabrications.”)
Given the Trump administration’s dishonesty about the warthe president has long ago forfeited any right to be given the benefit of the doubt. But regardless of whether the Trump administration’s changes in its communication style has been motivated by operational security or making it harder for the public to see how much blood has been shed on its orders, the news is trickling out: The troops are being killed and injured.
Ultimately, it will be nearly impossible for the Trump administration to ward off the reality that casualties make wars less popular. In the 1970s the political scientist John Mueller found that support for the Vietnam and Korean wars “declined as a logarithmic function of American casualties.” Various scholars have since pointed out that there are nuances to how the public is affected by casualties, such as a sensitivity to a notable increase in the rate of casualties rather than just the absolute number of casualties themselves.
But there’s one particularly damning piece of scholarship out there for the Trump administration: a 2006 study by political scientists from Duke University and the Loyola University Chicago, which found that the public’s tolerance for the human costs of war is heavily shaped by the public’s “beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of the war” as well as “beliefs about the war’s likely success.”
That doesn’t bode well for Trump.
A recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that 68% of Americans said the Iran war was not “worth fighting,” and just 28% said it was. (BLN pointed out that the “negative 40-point split is worse than for either the Iraq or Afghanistan wars in Washington Post-ABC News polling.”) And in Aprila Post-ABC poll found that 61% of Americans believed the Iran war was a “mistake.” As high oil prices pinch Americans’ wallets and the Trump administration continually fails to bring Iran to heel, it’s hard to imagine that those numbers will look better for Trump.
The war with Iran has so far produced a fraction of the U.S. casualties of major U.S. wars of the past, and it is unlikely to reach comparable numbers unless Trump deploys ground troops. But widespread skepticism that this war is worthwhile or effective likely makes the administration more vulnerable to public anger over whatever casualties do emerge. It’s one thing for troops to die for a just cause or even a controversial cause, it’s another to die for no obvious reason at all.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.