In June 1940, Hitler had defeated the British and French armies and gazed across the Channel at the last surviving European democracy. Rather than launching a land invasion, he sent the Luftwaffe to finish the job. Month after month they hammered English cities and ports, killed tens of thousand of English citizens. But England never surrendered. Regime change from the air did not work.
When the shoe was on the other foot, the American 8th Air Force sought to crush German war production with a series of costly raids on Schweinfurt. As American losses mounted, German production actually increased. It was only when American tanks breached the Siegfried line and Russian troops stormed into Berlin that the Third Reich fell.
When I was young, we sent half a million soldiers into a civil war in Vietnam to save democracy from communism. We paid little attention to the previous war to free the country from French domination and the loyalties that war enhanced for our communist opponents. Try as we might, bombing and winning almost every fight, we still lost the war.
After 9/11, we took our righteous anger to war against Saddam Hussein and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Again, we misjudged the situation on the ground and tried to implant our vision of democracy and respect for women’s rights in a culture that would have none of it.
Now President Donald Trump has begun another war based on a jumble of the same misconceptions that have plagued our military strategies in the past. The only example of an air campaign that effectively brought an opponent to its knees was the use of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Short of inflicting another nuclear holocaust over Tehran, bombing will not drive the Iranian people to democracy. If anything, killing civilians from the air will only make them hate us more, if that’s even possible.
What is the end game for Trump and Pete Hegseth? Are we going to put boots on the ground to seize control of the country? Are we going to deploy nuclear weapons if that doesn’t work? Do we expect the Iranian government to simply surrender and turn its back on 50 years of militant anti-Americanism?
And should that government fall, what comes next? Are we back to endless attempts at nation building, the very thing that the MAGA movement has denounced in the past?
None of these questions have been answered for the American people who will pay for this adventure in dollars and blood. Our Congress sits on its hands while their Constitutional power to declare war is ignored.
I am deeply saddened that, yet another generation of Americans will be called to serve in a cause that has so little justification and no clear goal.
We have learned nothing.
David Parrella lives in Buckland.