A Love Tap, A Long War

There is a particular kind of dishonesty that begins to bloom whenever a republic finds itself at war and would rather not say so. It does not announce itself. It comes dressed in idiom — in the casual phrase, in the smiling shrug, in the assurance that whatever just happened in the dark waters between two nations was hardly anything at all. President Donald Trump, on Thursday, after three United States Navy destroyers — the USS Truxtun, the USS Rafael Peralta, and the USS Mason — exchanged fire with Iranian missiles, drones, and small boats in the Strait of Hormuz, called what we did a “love tap.” The phrase has a way of staying with you. It is the phrase of a man who has decided that honesty is too expensive to spend on his own people.

There are roughly fifteen thousand American servicemembers, today, in and around that strait, escorting tankers, intercepting cruise missiles, walking patiently past Iranian sea mines on the orders of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who told reporters at the Pentagon on the fifth of May that the United States had established “a powerful red, white and blue dome over the strait.” It is a phrase that suggests something fixed and finished, whereas the truth is that the dome is made of men. The men sleep in shifts. The men have families. Some of the men will not come home, and when they do not come home it will not be because we lost a war but because we declined to admit we were in one. A ceasefire that requires fifteen thousand of our people under live fire is not a ceasefire; it is a euphemism in uniform.

The conservative tradition — the older, sturdier strain of it, before slogan replaced argument — has always been suspicious of foreign adventures advertised as cheap. We were promised that the air campaign that began on the twenty-eighth of February would end quickly. It has not ended. We were told the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader would settle the question. It did not. We were told a blockade is not a war. It is. There is no honest definition of war that excludes the deliberate strangulation of a nation’s economy by your navy, while your destroyers trade missiles with theirs in waters one-fifth of the world’s oil must cross.

And here, in the gap between what we are doing and what we are willing to call it, is where the moral injury to a republic happens. Not in the strikes themselves, necessarily, and not even in the strategic question of whether Tehran ought to be made to bend. Reasonable men can disagree about that. The injury is in the language. It is in the assumption that the American citizen — and especially the American soldier — can be paid in euphemisms. “Love tap.” “Dome.” “Project Freedom” — which is the kind of phrase that makes a careful man suspicious of every project so named.

What is owed the citizen is the plain word. The plain word is war, and the plain question is whether we have decided, soberly and as a self-governing people, that this one is worth its cost. We have not decided. We have been told. There is a difference, and the difference is the whole moral substance of the republic.

If we are going to send our sons into a strait, let us at least look them in the face and say so.