Small Potatoes, Big Bombs

JD Vance has me confused.

I may be sceptical, but if this isn't a war, what exactly is America in? A "spirited disagreement", a neighbourly tiff, or just a punch-up behind the pub? All of the above, with a few extra cruise missiles on the side?

Right now, there are a gazillion warships and a couple of depleted aircraft carriers parked in the Gulf, cheerfully unloading an extraordinary amount of ordnance, while jets are bombing the living daylights out of Iran. Yet the Vice President is standing at a podium, telling anyone who'll listen that this isn't a war.

It's the diplomatic equivalent of standing in the rain while insisting it's actually quite dry.

I dug into the archives and found this gem. "I will not send you to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end," Donald Trump told a crowd in Pennsylvania in 2024. Bold words from a man who now appears to be personally supervising one.

I'm guessing the Commander-in-Chief would rather not be the guy who dragged America into yet another forever war in the Middle East. To avoid any backlash, he and his flunkies have settled on a tidy workaround: simply refuse to say the W word. Problem solved. If you don't name it, it isn't real. It's the same strategy that works brilliantly for toddlers hiding vegetables under the table.

So if it isn't a war, what is it? Small potatoes, apparently. That's the president's own word for it, and we'll get to that. But first, the potatoes have a body count.

This very morning, at a press briefing, the Vice President offered his considered military assessment: "I wouldn't call it a war. It's more of a skirmish with Iran and might be over by the November midterms. At this point, there is no active shooting."

A skirmish with an expiry date tied to the electoral calendar. How convenient. It's almost as if this war, sorry, "skirmish," has been scheduled around the mid-term campaign strategy rather than, you know, the actual fighting.

Mind you, let's not kid ourselves. There is some fighting. Well, quite a lot of it, actually, to the point that the military is apparently running low on ammunition, as Pete forgot to fill in the order form. No soldiers popping off rifles from the safety of the flotilla in the Strait, granted, but there's been a suspicious number of fighter jets dropping a suspicious number of bombs on a suspicious selection of targets.

A few days ago, a missile landed not on a military installation but on a private home outside one of Iran's lesser-known towns. The house was hosting a family wedding. At least four people died, including a four-year-old.

Back in March, someone aboard a carrier reportedly punched in the wrong code and sent a precision-guided missile into an elementary school. A few hundred children did not come home.

In order to keep the nation informed: Trump's Truth Social feed has been a rolling festival of unhinged posts promising to obliterate an entire country. So: not a war, but he intends to reduce a country to extinction. Small potatoes, deluxe size.

And yet, here's the plot twist: the administration is also adamant that no actual crimes are being committed. Blowing up a wedding is presumably just an unfortunate scheduling clash. Blowing up a school is presumably a facilities mix-up.

I'm no lawyer, but I believe the legal term for "deliberately or negligently killing civilians with a guided missile" is, in fact, a war crime — where the emphasis falls awkwardly on the word this administration refuses to use.

The Vice President's other contribution to the discourse was to suggest we shouldn't trust our own eyes and ears about the civilian death toll. The New York Times reported that the missile which flattened the wedding party was one of the very same American-made munitions currently being marketed as "precision-guided."

Vance responded by voicing scepticism about whether the strike had even happened as reported, a curious position for a Vice President to take on his own government's airstrikes, but there we are. Denial, it seems, is trending.

Then there's Trump, who treats the teleprompter as a suggestion and keeps blurting out the forbidden W-word anyway. Take this snippet, for instance: "The war is going to end immediately after the election." A baffling timeline that seems to assume the Ayatollah has the U.S. midterm election calendar pinned to his fridge.

When he's not busy co-designing self-congratulatory memes with Natalie Harp, he occasionally glances up long enough to clarify: "I agree with Vance that it's not a full-fledged war. I call it a military conflict because it's ( and here’s the line that gets me ) small potatoes for us."

Small potatoes! Moody's Analytics puts the cost of this particular potato at roughly $1,200 per household so far. That's before you even get to the small matter of thousands of deaths. By any measure, the humble potato has become a very expensive vegetable.

Now, a brief word from the Constitution, which, inconveniently for everyone involved, reserves the power to declare war to Congress, not to whichever man happens to be feeling frisky in the Oval Office on a particular morning.

Truman tried a version of this dodge during the Korean fiasco, calling it a "police action" and bypassing Congress entirely. Trump has gone one step further. He hasn't merely bypassed Congress; he couldn't even be arsed to text them first.

His own explanation was refreshingly candid: "I won't use the word 'war' because they say that if you use the word 'war,' that's maybe not a good thing to do." Nothing to see here, just a Commander-in-Chief avoiding a word on the advice of unnamed people for unspecified reasons. Meanwhile, the potatoes keep falling.

Anyone else getting a distinctly late-1930s flashback?

GOP polling is in the toilet, gas prices are soaring, and the potatoes are getting pricier by the week. The Houthis chose this moment to shut down the Red Sea and blow up a Saudi oil pipeline for good measure, not, I'd suggest, the posture of a superpower fully in control of the situation.

Now that the administration is bogged down in a seemingly unwinnable war, the promises are coming thick and fast. Energy prices will plummet "right after the election," always right after the election, the most flexible deadline in modern politics. Grocery prices will plummet, and every adult in the country will receive $5,000 if the Republicans win the midterms. A bribe dressed up as a dividend, dressed up as a plan.

Call it whatever he likes. A skirmish, a conflict, a spot of bother, a bag of potatoes. From here, it looks like a very expensive tantrum dressed up in the language of restraint.

A little like hubris with a press briefing.