The United States government seems to be in the process of reconsidering its basic understandings of the Iraq War. After years of accepting that confrontations with Iranian proxies in Iraq were the price of maintaining a continued American military presence in the country, the United States lashed out, assassinating the Iranian general who coordinated most of Iran’s proxy relationships in Iraq. The assassination brought the US and Iran to the brink of war, and in its aftermath the Pentagon drafted (and accidentally sent) a letter to the Iraqi government pledging a full American withdrawal from Iraq.

Scholars have also been reevaluating their understandings of the war, albeit less violently. For the next two Deep Dives, we’ll examine some of the latest research on how to understand the evolution of America’s second-longest war.

In the most recent issue of International Security, Oxford political scientist Andrew Payne describes one new way of understanding the rhythms of America’s war effort in Iraq: American electoral politics. Impending elections, Payne argues, have distinct effects on presidential decision-making in wartime. To start with, elections dictate timelines. If a president has to make a hard decision about wartime strategy —  one that their military advisors deem necessary for the war effort, but that is likely to lead to greater American casualties — they generally prefer to wait to actually make that decision until after the next election. That’s even true when the war is going poorly and the cost of delay is high in military terms.

By digging into archives and speaking to a range of officials involved in the decision, Payne found that the timing of President George W. Bush’s move to adopt the counterinsurgency strategy known as “the surge” clearly aligns with that pattern. Bush announced the surge, which involved sending 20,000 extra troops to Iraq and directing US forces to undertake dangerous civilian protection missions, in January 2007, shortly after the 2006 midterms elections. In his memoir, Bush baldly admits that the timing was political, writing, “I decided a change of strategy [in the war] was needed... with the 2006 midterm elections approaching, the rhetoric on Iraq was hot… I decided to wait until after the elections to announce any policy or personnel changes.”

That delay seems to have been at least as much about avoiding public scrutiny of the surge as about concern for increased US casualties going into the election. Polling in June 2006 showed that just 6% of Americans favored increased deployments to Iraq, and military leaders, including then-coalition commander General George Casey, believed that “looking back on it, I don’t [think] the people would have supported an increase in forces, it had to wait until after the election.”

Election effects weren’t confined to the Bush administration. President Barack Obama was subject to what Payne calls the “dampening effect” of elections. Dampening happens when timelines aren’t fungible and presidents are forced to take war decisions at politically inconvenient times. In those situations, where war decisions will come under more immediate public scrutiny, presidents are likely to stick to their political guns even in the face of contrary military advice. When it came time for President Obama to make a decision about the future of American general purpose forces in Iraq in late 2011, with his 2012 reelection campaign kickoff approaching, he insisted on sticking to his campaign promise of removing all “boots on the ground” despite Pentagon pressure to retain a portion of the deployed force. There was, of course, a fair amount of fishy bookkeeping involved in that decision — significant numbers of American troops remain in Iraq to this day, but they aren’t counted as general purpose forces.

Brian Hioe argued that Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-Wen’s recent reelection demonstrates China’s failure to connect with Taiwanese youth. Rejection of the “One China” policy, under which China claims sovereignty over Taiwan, is one of the core planks in Tsai’s platform and young people form her electoral base. China has tried to reach out to Taiwanese young people with economic incentives in recent years, in hopes of convincing them to support unification but, as the election results show, the effort has been largely unsuccessful.

Cheryl Rofer examined what exactly Trump administration officials mean when they say America needs to “reestablish deterrence” with Iran. The term, Rofer points out, suggests a meaning that bears little relationship to the facts of the current situation. The idea that the assassination of Qasem Soleimani was part of a return to a past in which Iran was too afraid of American power to act against American interests sits uneasily alongside the administration’s other justification for the killing: that the Iranian government, through proxies, has been attacking Americans in Iraq for well over a decade despite the constant threat of war.

Indra Ekmanis detailed a new Government Accountability Office report that finds the Trump administration violated the law when it held up money Congress had appropriated for aid to Ukraine in the summer of 2019. The report’s timing is auspicious for Democrats going into President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, as the first article of impeachment alleges that the president abused his power by withholding that money as a lever to pressure the Ukrainian government to assist him politically.

Always include citations in your takes! (And if you don’t know the citation, check it out here. It’s pretty great.)

Here comes Patrick Porter to remind us that no such smell ever existed.

Area studies scholars: Our work is underappreciated and underfunded, even by the standards of social science. Also area studies scholars: this nonsense.

We’ve all had a lot of fun with the new Space Force uniforms —  yes, they’re putting name tapes  over forest camouflage, despite Space Force’s ostensibly less terrestrial ambitions. But the bigger question is this: When, inevitably, Space Force invades and occupies another planet for nearly two decades on what was supposed to be a short mission and tries to train up that planet’s own Space Force to quash rebellions caused by the initial invasion, will that unforested planet’s Space Force also wear forest camouflage?