When the United States went to war with Iraq for the first time in 1990, there weren’t many protest songs. At most, some of the songs that were supportive of the troops expressed ambivalence about the mission. The supergroup pop hit “Voices That Care,” a sort of “We Are the World” of the Persian Gulf War era, featured Will Smith rapping: “Right or wrong / We’re all praying you remain strong / That’s why we’re all here and singing along.”
One surprising exception was the singer-songwriter James Taylor, who in 1991 released an uncharacteristic rockabilly tune titled “Slap Leather.” The man may have seen fire and rain, but on the day he wrote this song, he was seeing red:
Get all worked up and we can go to war / We’d find something worth a killin’ for / Tie a yellow ribbon around your eyes / Big mac, falafel and a side of fries, yeah / Big Mac falafel / Stormin’ Norman / I just love a parade.
Taylor later told an interviewer that George H.W. Bush had irritated him with comments to the effect that the successful expulsion of Iraqi troops from Kuwait had cured “Vietnam syndrome,” a popular term for the reluctance to use military force after the debacle of the Vietnam War.
This all comes to mind following President Donald Trump’s toppling of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, which in turn came months after the bombing of nuclear sites in Iran. Trump campaigned as someone who understood the Iraq War was a mistake—which, believe it or not, was not quite the consensus Republican position even as late as 2015—and pledged to avoid similar military adventures. Trump more or less governed this way in his first term, with some significant exceptions. Trump 2.0 has so far looked a little different, though he has also engaged in a lot of high-stakes diplomacy.
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