03.31.26

Quagmire

When both hawks like John Bolton and doves like Pope Leo oppose your war, your approval numbers hit unprecedented lows (33 percent), eight million people pour into the street to express their hatred of everything you do, and even formerly adoring young Republicans are defecting from your base, you might want to rethink your strategy.

But of course Trump doesn’t listen to critics and there is not and never has been a strategy in Iran. So while repeatedly signaling that the Iran war is about to end, the president also keeps escalating the threats of bombing civilian targets and mustering more troops for a ground invasion.

It is not paranoid to anticipate another forever war in the Middle East. But the forever war that has come to mind for me is the U.S.’s first one, in Vietnam. That war started in 1955 with the misbegotten goal of regime change — based on the Cold War “domino theory,” that communism would spread throughout Asia and the world if it was not stopped in a country of rice-growing peasants 8,200 miles away that most Americans had never heard of. The war on Vietnam finally ended 20 years later with a humiliating U.S. defeat and over 58,000 Americans and 3.8 million Vietnamese dead — not to mention untold environmental damage in that country — at a cost to the American taxpayer of a trillion dollars.

The Vietnam war was called a quagmire, which is what the Iran war might soon become. So this morning I woke up thinking about a song about a quagmire that Pete Seeger began singing in 1967, when the antiwar movement had grown massive, the outcome of the conflict was already foretold, and yet President Lyndon Johnson kept escalating it.

“Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” was adapted from a 1942 song about a Louisiana platoon being ordered to wade deeper and deeper into a river by an idiotic captain until they are stuck up to the necks. The refrain is “The big fool said to push on.”

Here’s Pete singing it on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. CBS, as cowardly then as it is now, censored it the first time it was taped, in September 1967. But Dick and Tom Smothers, who were strong opponents of the war, insisted that it run, and it did, in February 1968 (it was not live, as the video title says).