The No-Explanation War

"If you never have to explain yourself, you can't really ever be wrong. In recent decades, few things have been as famously wrong as the political theatre surrounding the Iraq War: Colin Powell showing his satellite images in front of the U.N. Security Council and repeating the phrase "weapons of mass destruction," Donald Rumsfeld's word puzzles about known unknowns and the absence of evidence not being the evidence of absence, George W. Bush's triumphant "Mission Accomplished" episode aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln."

"The Trump Administration, in contrast, has, in its own approach to war, simply skipped the explaining phase. This makes sense in a perverse way. You can consider the past half century of American military adventures as a continuum where the lessons of Vietnam—the first televised war, which delivered intimate footage of American draftees fighting in the jungle—instructed Desert Storm, which, in turn, influenced the spectacle around Afghanistan and Iraq."

The Trump Administration has abandoned the practice of publicly justifying military interventions, a stark departure from previous administrations. Historically, U.S. military actions required elaborate explanations and media presentations—from Colin Powell's U.N. testimony on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to Bush's "Mission Accomplished" declaration. These justifications initially succeeded in garnering public support, though they later became symbols of governmental dishonesty and eroded public trust in both government and media. The current administration skips this explanatory phase entirely, moving directly to military action. This approach reflects an evolution in how American military conflicts are presented, from Vietnam's intimate televised coverage to the controlled imagery of Desert Storm and the regime-change narratives of Afghanistan and Iraq. By eliminating the need to explain itself, the administration avoids the vulnerability to contradiction that plagued previous wars.

Read at The New Yorker