According to President Trump, there may be no Iran as you drink your morning coffee.

Trump set a deadline of 8 p.m. EST Tuesday for Iran to strike a deal and open the Strait of Hormuz.

“I mean complete demolition by 12 o’clock,” Trump said Monday. He doubled down on that threat on Tuesday morning, saying, “A whole civilization will die (Tuesday night) never to be brought back again.”

Unless he did the unthinkable and used nuclear weapons to achieve that outcome, I doubt very much the Iran War is over.

An earlier generation of Americans was told we would whip North Vietnam and the Viet Cong and be home in time for supper. The projection was off by about 14 years as it turned out.

Some people remember.

If Trump had even a layman’s grasp of history, he would know that nations, once attacked, fight back as hard and as long as possible. For every Grenada there is an Afghanistan. We could have stayed another 20 years in Vietnam without achieving the wholesale, indiscriminate slaughter Trump proposes in Iran.

As we celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday this summer, we will turn our attention to our nation’s history.

I don’t know how honest of an accounting will be, especially in places like Mississippi, where the governor insists that we focus on the good things in our history and skip over the bad so no white people’s feelings are hurt.

When I was a kid, the biggest jerk in the whole neighborhood had parents who would never admit their child had ever done anything wrong. A lot of Americans are like those parents.

But there are some truths that we need to face up to on the path to becoming a more perfect union.

One of those truths is that America is not the peace-loving nation we imagine it to be. It never really has been.

Depending on how you define it, the time the United States has been at peace is surprisingly small. While the U.S. has only formally declared war 11 times, it has been involved in some form of military action — from major world wars to “police actions,” interventions, and border skirmishes — for the vast majority of its existence. Most historians agree there have been fewer than 20 individual calendar years where the U.S. was not involved in any military operation. We have been in more or less a constant state of war against somebody somewhere since World War II.

For 245 of our 250 years, we have had a standing military. A standing military is a lot like a leaf-blower: Once you get one, you find yourself using it all the time, even when the need for it is dubious.

There have been times when war was certainly justified. But in other conflicts the motives have not been entirely pure. We toppled governments in the Middle East and Latin America not for the benefit of their citizens, but for our own strategic and commercial advantages

So when Trump talks incessantly about taking the oil of countries he has attacked, it should not be surprising. He is only admitting to motives previous presidents labored to conceal.

Most of these wars didn’t benefit our citizens in any meaningful way.

What did the wars in Korea or Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan achieve?

Now, it’s Iran. Trump said that the war will not end until Iran has no nuclear weapons and it opens the Strait of Hormuz.

Those are odd terms, considering that both conditions already existed before Trump started the war.

What will we have to show for the war that we didn’t already have before it started?

With so little return on investment, you would think ordinary Americans would be opposed to war on general principle.

But there’s some historical evidence that we worship our military regardless of circumstances.

A week after the May 4, 1970 shooting deaths of four unarmed Kent State students by National Guardsmen, a Gallup poll found that 58% of those polled blamed the students, not the guardsmen, for the tragedy.

Likewise a Gallup poll conducted in April 1971 – shortly after Lt William Calley was convicted for ordering the slaying of hundreds of unarmed civilians at My Lai — showed 79% of respondents disapproved of the court-martial.

There is a good possibility that we will be at war on America’s 250th birthday.

Some things never change…whether we admit it or not.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

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