A Kansas Prayer Meeting at the Breakfast Buffet

I run a motel, which means I own a breakfast lounge, which means I own a television bolted to the wall above the waffle iron. That television has caused me more trouble than any guest who ever skipped out on a bill. For three weeks now it has been the altar for a paper bag salesman from Kansas, a cheerful, well-pressed man in his fifties who sits in the corner booth with his coffee and his biscuits and gravy, and who, whenever the cable news shows a carrier deck or a map of the Persian Gulf, invites everybody within earshot to bow their heads and give thanks for Donald Trump, whose war on Iran has, he says, Made America Great Again.

It is my motel, and a man may pray in it. I am a libertarian, not a Jacobin. If he wants to thank the Almighty for the scrambled eggs, I will take it as a compliment to my cook. But thanking Him for this war is a different matter, and on Friday morning, after he had led the room in a prayer that drowned out the weather report, I sat down across from him and asked him a simple question. I asked him what his diesel surcharge looked like these days.

He went a little quiet. He sells paper bags. Paper bags are made in mills that burn a great deal of energy, and they travel to grocery stores and hardware stores in trucks that burn a great deal of diesel. Diesel has been at record prices since spring. He admitted, after some fiddling with his napkin, that his customers have been grumbling, that two accounts in Missouri had gone back to plastic, and that his own commission checks were “a little soft this year.” Then he told me that this was the price of greatness, and that the Iranians were hurting a lot worse than we were. Which is true. It is also the whole problem, and it is the part he hadn’t thought about.

Let me lay out what has actually happened, because the television above my waffle iron is not much help.

On the last day of February, the United States and Israel opened up on Iran with the biggest air campaign anybody has seen in that part of the world. The bombing was very good at blowing things up. Iran’s air defenses, its missile launchers, a good slice of its senior command, all went up in smoke, and the President announced within a day or so that dozens of Iranian leaders had been killed. If war were a fireworks show, we would have won by the second evening. But a war is supposed to be a means to an end, and the test of a war is whether you come out of it better off than you went in, at a price you can afford. On that test, this one is about as bad as anything I know of, and I have read a fair amount of history at the front desk on slow nights.

The first thing Iran did was the thing everybody in Washington has known for forty years it would do. It shut the Strait of Hormuz. It didn’t need a navy to do it. It needed missiles on the shore, drones, small boats and mines, and it had all of those. Something like a fifth of the world’s oil goes through that strait, plus a big share of the world’s fertilizer. Iran declared the waterway its own and started hitting ships that tried to use it. For most of the spring and summer, traffic through Hormuz was a trickle. As I write, tankers are still hitting mines in there. Three of them caught fire last week.

Nobody should have been surprised. A narrow sea is the easiest thing in the world to close in wartime, and it gets easier every year as missiles and drones get cheaper. We just watched Ukraine, which has practically no navy at all, drive the Russian Black Sea Fleet out of the western Black Sea with drones and shore-based missiles. If a country without warships can do that to Russia, a country with a two-thousand-mile coastline sitting right on top of the strait can make life miserable for anyone who wants to sail through it. The Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters is in Bahrain, which is inside the bottle Iran was trying to cork, and Iran hit it in the first days of the war. The nearest big American base outside the Gulf is Diego Garcia, a coral atoll about 2,500 miles away in the middle of the Indian Ocean. You do not want to run a naval campaign in a crowded strait from a dot in the ocean two and a half thousand miles off.

So here is the arithmetic of a competent war. You arrange things so the other fellow pays and you don’t. You hit him where he is weak and keep him away from where you are weak. Our weak spot was never on the battlefield. Our weak spot was the price of oil, and the economies of our friends, and the patience of the American motorist. Iran could not beat the U.S. Air Force, so it didn’t try. It went after the world economy instead, and it was able to do so because we handed it the opportunity.

My Kansas friend says Iran is hurting worse than we are, and he is right. Since the summer the United States has been blockading Iran’s ports, and Iran’s oil exports have collapsed from around 1.85 million barrels a day to a few hundred thousand. Its currency is in the gutter and there are lines at its gas stations. But the question I put to him was this: hurting worse than whom? Iran is a poor, sanctioned country that has been hurting for forty years and has a government that does not much care how its people feel. We are the country whose voters go to the polls on Tuesday with gasoline over four dollars a gallon and mortgage rates creeping toward seven percent. A theocracy can sit in the dark longer than a democracy can sit in a gas line. Anyone who has ever negotiated with a supplier knows that the side that can walk away from the table has the upper hand, and Iran’s rulers have spent four decades proving they can walk away.

Then there are our friends, who are not acting very friendly. The Gulf states, which host our bases and buy our weapons, were not asked whether they wanted a war fought out of their backyards. They got Iranian missiles on their airfields and their oil plants as a reward for letting us use them. A British base on Cyprus was hit, and so were a French facility in Abu Dhabi and an Italian position in Kuwait. One prominent billionaire in the Emirates went on social media to ask the President who gave him the authority to drag the region into a war. That is not the voice of a client state cheering on its protector. It is the voice of a customer who has decided the security service he was paying for has started burning down the building. The Gulf governments are now talking openly about buying fewer American weapons and finding other partners, and Europe has been only too happy to listen. In Asia, the countries that import oil through Hormuz, which is most of them, have spent eight months paying more for fuel and fertilizer because of a decision made in Washington without consulting any of them. A great power that keeps its allies safe is an asset. A great power that runs up their energy bills is a problem to be managed, and that is how a lot of the world has started to see us.

What did we expect to get out of it? This is where my Kansas friend and I really parted company. He said we were going to “fix Iran.” Iran has about ninety million people. In 1945 we occupied a defeated Germany that had fewer people than that, after six years of total war had broken its army and flattened its cities, and we needed well over a million American soldiers there at the end of the war just to hold our share of it. Nobody in Washington has proposed sending a million men to Iran, and nobody would get a single one of them through Congress if they tried. So we bombed a country we had no intention of occupying, in order to change a government we had no means of changing. That is not a strategy. It is a temper tantrum with a very large budget.

And the lesson the rest of the world will draw from it is the worst lesson of all. Iran was bombed because it did not have a nuclear weapon. North Korea does have one, and nobody is bombing North Korea. Every government on earth that worries it might someday be on Washington’s list has just been given the best possible argument for building a bomb as fast as it can. If the purpose of the war was to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, it is hard to imagine a more effective way of encouraging it.

Here is the part that ought to bother an American conservative most, and I say this as a man who has voted for more Republicans than I would care to admit. This war was never declared by Congress. The Constitution gives the power to declare war to Congress, not to the President, and the reason the men who wrote it did so is that they had watched kings drag their countries into wars for glory and pay for them by debasing the currency. That is exactly what we are doing. The Pentagon’s own figure for the cost of the war is now over forty-seven billion dollars, most of it for replacing munitions we fired off in the first few months, and that number doesn’t include the damage to our bases. The Congressional Budget Office reckons it will keep costing two or three billion a month for as long as it goes on. None of that was voted for, and none of it is being paid for out of taxes. It goes on the national credit card, and the Federal Reserve, which is now staring at war-driven inflation, will see to it that we pay for it the old-fashioned way, through the shrinking value of every dollar in the till.

Regular readers know I would put us back on gold tomorrow if I could. This is one of the reasons. Under a gold standard a government that wants a war has to come to the people and ask for the money, in taxes or in bonds that somebody has to want to buy. It has to make its case. Wars get shorter and rarer when the people who pay for them can see the bill. Paper money lets a President start a war on a Saturday and send the invoice to your grandchildren. My guest from Kansas thinks Donald Trump has made America great. What he has actually done is spend money he didn’t have, on a war he didn’t ask permission for, against an enemy he didn’t understand, and hand the bill to the paper bag business.

I want to be fair to the man in the corner booth. He is not a fool in his own line of work. He knows his customers, he knows his margins, and he knows which grocers in Wichita will try to stiff him on a delivery. If one of his competitors cut his prices to the bone to steal an account, and lost so much money doing it that he had to sell his truck, my friend would see right away that the fellow had won the battle and lost the business. He just can’t see that the same thing applies when it is his own country doing it. That is the trouble with war fever. It takes sensible people who would never let a salesman talk them into a bad deal and turns them into the easiest marks on earth.

The President says he is thinking about another round of strikes once the midterms are out of the way. I take that to mean that even he knows this war is not winning votes. I’ll be watching the results on Tuesday night on the television above the waffle iron. I expect my friend from Kansas will be watching too, and I have already told the cook to keep the coffee coming. Whatever happens, I don’t intend to bow my head.

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