Orange Exceptionalism is a Brain Injury

The world began roughly four minutes ago. Nothing has ever happened before. Now, let’s begin describing the world:

“There's a reason why past presidents didn’t go to war with Iran: they refused to risk American lives to open Pandora’s Box.” The famous American reluctance to go to war in the Middle East, ladies and gentlemen, because of the potential for unintended consequences. That’s why you can’t name a single American president before Trump who ever dared to risk military intervention there. “We came, we saw, he died.” I forget who said that. Curious. Anyway, Trump is the first president in history to ever “open Pandora’s box,” and there’s almost no war in our history because of it.

Even if we accept the pathetic idiot Van Hollen’s narrower framing and just examine the claim that no president has ever gone to war with Iran before, it’s obviously so false that any actual human wouldn’t dare to try the maneuver. At the very least, the US sank about half of the Iranian Navy several decades ago, in Operation Praying Mantis: “…on April 18, 1988, the U.S. Navy destroyed two Iranian oil platforms, sunk one frigate and a missile boat, crippled a second frigate, destroyed at least three armed speedboats, and drove off Iranian F-4 Phantom jets with missile fire.”

To pretend, in 2026, that no one has ever previously dared to risk a military confrontation between the United States and Iran is pathological bullshit. Famous 2008 op-ed headline in the New York Times, describing many years of low-intensity naval conflict:

Note that this op-ed piece described “a two-decade-old military strategy by Iran intended to counter the United States presence in the Persian Gulf.” Sample paragraph:

In the 1980s the Navy had to counter a broad effort by Revolutionary Guard forces, then at war with Iraq, to set mines and otherwise hamper and damage American-flagged oil carriers in the gulf. The conflict heated up in the summer of 1987, when an American-flagged tanker hit an Iranian mine. That fall, Army helicopters fired on and Seals boarded an Iranian ship laying mines in international waters. The Seals confirmed the presence of mines, detained the crew and scuttled the ship.

1. Hostage crisis, Beirut bombing, decades of proxy warfare, constant naval confrontation

2. What is Trump doing, we don’t want to risk conflict with Iran!

I said over the weekend that I’m withholding judgment on the war with Iran, and that’s still true. I’m open to arguments that it’s a bad idea, and I’m open to arguments that it’s necessary. My default is that I’m enormously skeptical of American military intervention in the Middle East, after a long series of bad outcomes. But the profoundly stupid discourse in which Donald Trump is entering a conflict that no one has ever dared to risk before is just pathetic. We keep having “debates” on entirely fake premises.