Responding to a new poll that shows a clear plurality of Americans are hunky dory with the idea of bombing Iran, Doug Mataconis writes:
[N]otwithstanding the American public’s rather obvious war wariness, making the public case for military action against Iran wouldn’t be all that difficult given the three decades of antipathy between the United States and the Islamic Republic that started with the Iranian Hostage Crisis….
[T]he idea of military action against Iran is already so engrained in the American psyche that it’s unlikely that any future President would have to worry about the legacy of the unpopular wars in Iraq or Afghanistan in making their case to the American public for action in Iran.
I’m sure Mataconis is right that the public support is partially because the state of relations between the US and Iran have as of late been, well, not awesome.
But the other reasons I’d imagine are that people have a false idea that bombing a country isn’t the same as going to war and that it can be done without the negative repercussions associated with warfare (and especially boots-on-the-ground invasion). Also, there’s really been no one in the political mainstream in America who has been arguing against bombing Iran. On the one hand we have the Right which has been singing the above tune for years now. But on the other hand it’s not as if the Democrats are strenuously delineating why bombing Iran would be a bad idea. On the contrary, they’re ostensibly fine with the idea, it’s just that many (not most) of them aren’t in quite as much of a rush to do it as are their Republican counterparts.
The only figure of any prominence, really, who has been making the opposite case is (sigh) Ron Paul. In the aggregate, I think his is the kind of support that hurts just as much as it helps with Mr. John Q.
