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vietnam war
Is Anyone Comforted When Trump Compares Iran War to Vietnam or Iraq?
The perspective of Vietnam and Iraq has taught Trump nothing. But the American people have learned from those experiences, and are not swallowing Trump’s lies.
May 05, 2026
As Trump’s War shambles on with no end in sight, President Trump asks us to put his “little excursion” “in perspective.” Compared to Vietnam and Iraq, Trump says, the Iran conflict has lasted “not very long at all.”
Does anyone find comfort in comparing the Iran disaster with two of America’s previous catastrophic wars?
Once, US forces had been in Vietnam for only two months. Then our involvement became unlimited and the war did not end until millions were dead, over ten years later.
The Iraq war was just a few days shy of two months old when Bush proclaimed: “Mission Accomplished!” Years of chaos, mass death and wasted trillions of dollars followed.
But neither the Vietnam war nor the Iraq war revealed its calamitous stupidity as swiftly as Trump’s war. Two months in, the American people and our standard of living, along with the entire world economy, have taken body blows.
Gasoline costs half again as much. Diesel has risen even more. Aviation gas has doubled. Food prices will soon follow because of shortages of key fertilizer ingredients – on top of Trump’s tariffs and the shortage of farm workers because of deportations.
Trump insists, however, that all will soon be well. Gas prices will “drop like a rock” after the war ends, says the president.
Can there be anyone left in America who believes Donald Trump’s promises on prices? This is the man who vowed in 2024 that if he were elected, “prices will come down and they’ll come down fast, with everything.” “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down.”
The same man who last year kept saying prices were down when everyone knew from their own experience that prices were up.
Can there be anyone left in America who believes Donald Trump’s promises on prices?
Two problems with his latest promise: First, Trump has no plan to end the war other than demanding Iran “cry uncle” and “give up.” But the Iranians are not convinced they lost, and few owners of $100 million dollar oil tankers, carrying up to $200 million worth of petroleum, are prepared to rely on Trump’s assurances of safety.
Second, the previous level of oil exports from the Persian Gulf will not resume when hostilities do end, and prices will not promptly drop. As economists say, oil prices “go up like a rocket and fall like a feather.”
World-wide oil inventories will have to be refilled, and oil industry experts point out that “high demand caused by replenishing the lost oil stock will keep prices elevated.”
Persian Gulf oil production suspended during the conflict will not immediately resume when it does end. Qatar, for example, provided 20% of the world’s supply of liquid natural gas. Their export facility was damaged by Iranian missiles, and will take three to five years to be fully brought back. Refineries throughout the region have been damaged and oil wells that have been shut down will take months to ramp back up
When will gas prices go back to pre-Trump War levels? Likely not any time this year. It will require two years to recover lost energy output, says the head of the International Energy Agency. And the rise in energy costs will ripple through the rest of the economy, pumping up inflation.
How did we get here?
Donald Trump and his government of feckless amateurs believed the US military would easily compel Iran’s unconditional surrender, as easily as American soldiers kidnapped the president of Venezuela. Since Trump surrounds himself with pretenders who know they must tell him only what he wants to hear, he launched his war without weighing the actual risks.
“President Trump and his aides were caught unprepared,” The Atlantic magazine reported, “when Iran . . . retaliated by targeting shipping in the Persian Gulf region and specifically through the Strait of Hormuz. . . The Trump administration acknowledged in classified briefings, CNN reported last night, that it did not make provisions for a closure” of Hormuz.
Iran struck back after being attacked? Who could have guessed?
Iran had been a major source of military drones to Russia, and Ukrainian and Russian drones had transformed the war in Ukraine. Hormuz was a known point of leverage. Still it did not occur to Trump or to War Secretary Pete “Lethality” Hegseth that American naval and air power might not suppress Iran’s drones and mines, giving Iran a choke hold on the Strait of Hormuz.
The perspective of Vietnam and Iraq has taught Trump nothing. But the American people have learned from those experiences, and are not swallowing Trump’s lies. Sixty-one percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Iran conflict and sixty-one percent believe he made the wrong decision in deciding to use military force in Iran.
Can public opinion and political reality force Trump to reverse course? Trump’s need to call his debacle a success make that difficult, and Trump may yet turn to committing war crimes in a desperate effort to make Iran capitulate.
If members of his own party will not join in attempts to restrain an increasingly frantic, erratic and likely impaired president, America’s military may be forced to confront their duty to defy Donald Trump’s illegal and immoral orders.
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61% of Americans See Trump's Iran War as 'Mistake', Far Outpacing Disapproval of Vietnam and Iraq: Poll
"In Iraq, it took more than three years to reach that high. In Vietnam, it took six years."
May 01, 2026
More than 6 in 10 Americans now say President Donald Trump's war in Iran was a "mistake," according to a poll out Friday from the Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos.
Within two months, the war—which has inflicted thousands of civilian deaths and caused gas prices to spike worldwide with little tangible gain—has reached levels of unpopularity that previous wars now seen as historic boondoggles took years to reach.
The Post has asked the "mistake" for other major wars. But CNN senior political reporter Aaron Blake explained: "In Iraq, it took more than three years to reach that high. In Vietnam, it took six years."
Despite a massive protest movement, voters overwhelmingly supported President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq, with 81% believing it was the "right thing" in April 2003 and just 16% believing it was a mistake.
But the occupation turned into a long, deadly, and costly disaster, and the administration's pretexts for the war were revealed to be lies. Public opinion steadily eroded to the point where 64% viewed it as a mistake by January 2007.
Vietnam never had the overwhelming support of Iraq, but 60% of Americans still supported President Lyndon Johnson's decision to begin direct US military involvement in 1965, while just 24% said it was a mistake.
While the protest movement against the war is as present in Americans' memories today as the conflict itself, public opinion was still split until 1968 and only reached a high of 61% in May 1971, after more than 50,000 US soldiers had been killed in battle.
Trump's war in Iran is unique in history in that it never enjoyed even a moment of consensus support. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll just days after the opening salvo of what the Trump administration dubbed "Operation Epic Fury," just 27% said they approved of the strikes, which killed 555 Iranians, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several other top Iranian officials.
At this point, 43% of Americans already said they disapproved of the strikes, far eclipsing Iraq and Vietnam. But 30% still said they had not yet made up their minds.
In the coming months, they would. It was revealed that an airstrike on a school, which killed at least 155 people, including 120 children, was a double-tap attack by the United States. Iran retaliated by blocking oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, which sent US gas prices hurtling above $4 per gallon. And Trump took on an increasingly erratic and at times outright genocidal posture toward Iran that made any peaceful resolution appear increasingly impossible, even with the current fragile ceasefire.
Friday's poll shows that while the war still maintains a core base of support—36% of Americans who say it was the right decision, nearly all of them Republicans—it is dwarfed by the 61% who say it was a mistake.
Majorities of respondents across all demographics show that they believe the war has increased the risks of "terrorism against Americans" (61%), "the US economy going into a recession" (60%), and "weakening relationships with US allies." (56%)
Looking beneath the surface shows an even more worrying sign for Trump: The war has almost no constituency outside of his biggest fans. Self-identified Democrats (91%) overwhelmingly say the war was a mistake. But 71% of independents—many of whom were undecided at the war's outset—now disapprove too, with just 24% in support.
Even within the GOP, there is a decisive split: 86% of those who self-identify as "MAGA Republicans" are still baying for blood. But "non-MAGA Republicans" have grown uncertain—50% still say war was the right decision, while 49% say it was a mistake.
They were particularly rattled by Trump's threat last month that "a whole civilization will die tonight" if Iran did not negotiate a deal to his liking. The threat of genocide was too much even for the majority of Republicans, 53% of whom said they viewed it negatively.
What remains to be seen is whether even Trump's most faithful backers will turn against the war as it drags on. If Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's appearance in Congress on Thursday is any guide, the country may soon find out.
On Thursday, when Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) pressed Hegseth about why he has "not sought the support of the American people" and added that "3 out of 5 Americans are against this war today," he appeared in abject denial about the war's unpopularity.
"I believe we do have the support of the American people," he said. "I would remind you and this group that we're two months in to an effort, and many congressional Democrats want to declare defeat two months in."
He specifically invoked lengthy past conflicts, repeatedly emphasizing that this one had only lasted "two months," as if to urge patience with a war Trump had previously said was intended to last only "four to five weeks."
"Iraq took how many years? Afghanistan took how many years? And they were nebulous missions that people went along with," he said.
"This is different," he said of a war that has—depending on the day—been described as one aimed at regime change in Iran, defending protesters, destroying its nuclear program, eliminating its ballistic missile supply, taking its oil, defending Israel, and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, among other objectives.
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A War Nobody Voted For — And a Congress That Let It Happen
This is not a story about Trump breaking the law. It’s a story about Congress watching him do it and choosing, repeatedly, to look away.
Apr 20, 2026
There’s a line in the U.S. Constitution so simple it shouldn’t require interpretation. Article I, Section 8: Congress has the power to declare war. Not the President. Congress. The Founders were explicit about this. James Madison called it “the most sacred of all” constitutional provisions — the one safeguard against a single person dragging a republic into bloodshed.
On February 28, 2026, at approxiomately 1:15 am ET, the United States began bombing Iran. No declaration of war. No congressional vote. No single national security incident was cited as the basis for the attack—Trump instead recounted 47 years of U.S.–Iran tensions, beginning with the 1979 hostage crisis, as justification. The bombs fell anyway.
What happened next is the part that should disturb you more than the war itself.
Congress had a choice. It had the tool — the War Powers Resolution of 1973, passed over Nixon’s veto precisely to prevent this kind of unilateral military adventurism. The law is unambiguous: the president may not enter U.S. troops into hostilities without express congressional authorization, regardless of a conflict’s scale or duration. The 60-day clock started ticking the moment the first bomb dropped. Congress could have acted.
It didn’t. When Senators Kaine and Paul introduced a War Powers Resolution on March 1, the Senate voted it down 53–47. Then they voted it down again. And again. By mid-April, the Senate had rejected Democratic efforts to force an end to U.S. military involvement in Iran four separate times, voting largely along party lines.
Four votes. Four failures. This is not a story about Trump breaking the law. It’s a story about Congress watching him do it and choosing, repeatedly, to look away.
The War Powers Resolution was supposed to be the fix for exactly this situation. Widely considered a measure for preventing “future Vietnams,” it was nonetheless generally resisted or ignored by subsequent presidents, many of whom regarded it as an unconstitutional usurpation of their executive authority.
Every president since Nixon has treated it as optional; Clinton in Kosovo, Obama in Libya, and now Trump in Iran. The pattern is so consistent it barely registers as news anymore. But what has changed, and what makes Operation Epic Fury different, is the scale.
This is markedly different in scope, scale, and objective from the more limited US attack on Iran of June 2025 which targeted senior leadership, military infrastructure, and nuclear capabilities. This is a war by any honest definition. The administration just refuses to call it one.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News: “This is not a war against Iran,” the same view held by most modern presidents and their lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel. If you call it something else—a “police action,” a “limited engagement,” or a “kinetic military operation”—you never have to ask permission. Truman did it in Korea. Nixon did it in Cambodia. The euphemisms change; the evasion doesn’t.
But here’s the thing about this particular evasion. Congress isn’t powerless here it’s passive. The appropriations power alone gives lawmakers the ability to cut off funding for any military operation they find objectionable.
The annual National Defense Authorization Act process, combined with supplemental appropriations, provides multiple leverage points. Republican leadership isn’t using any of them. They’re not even seriously trying. Speaker Johnson called the War Powers Resolution vote “a terrible, dangerous idea” that would “empower our enemies.” That’s not a constitutional argument. That’s cover.
And the Democrats? They’ve forced the votes, yes. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) has been relentless. But Kaine himself acknowledged that the renewed effort was unlikely to go anywhere, but said it’s important for members of Congress to go on record. "Going on record." That’s what it’s come to—symbolic gestures in the face of a $200 billion war that nobody voted for.
The costs are real. The war has already cost at least $12 billion, and the Pentagon has asked the White House to approve a $200 billion supplemental request to Congress to fund the conflict. The Strait of Hormuz closed. Global oil markets lurched. Economic shocks have rippled outward, with the costs falling on ordinary Americans while those who profit from endless war count their returns. Children were killed at a school in Minab. The 60-day deadline has come and gone.
The War Powers Resolution was built for this moment. It was written by legislators who had watched Vietnam consume a generation because no one in Congress had the spine to call a war a war. “After Nixon, it’s gone on from one president to the next , they believe they can use military force against one country after another,” says Louis Fisher, who served for 35 years as senior specialist in separation of powers at the Congressional Research Service.
Fifty years later, the lesson has not been learned. The resolution that was supposed to restore congressional war powers has instead become a ritual. A series of doomed votes that let lawmakers signal opposition without actually exercising it.
There is one question that cuts through all of it. Sen. Kaine asked it directly on the Senate floor: “If you don’t have the guts to vote yes or no on a war vote, how dare you send our sons and daughters into war where they risk their lives?”
No one answered him. That silence is the real story.
The 1973 War Powers Resolution wasn’t just a law. It was a promise that the United States would never again stumble into a catastrophic military conflict without the consent of the people’s elected representatives. Operation Epic Fury has broken that promise to the American people once again. Congress has the power to keep it. Right now, it is choosing not to.
That choice has a cost. Someone should start paying it.
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