One of my few vivid memories of the yearbook from my senior year in college is of a photo of a handmade sign saying “Nuke Iran Until It Glows in the Dark.” The sign did, in fact, accurately depict the intensity of feeling in the country in 1979.
Trump and Bolton will be relying on those memories to build bipartisan support for the upcoming war. Will it work? I don’t think so. Forty years is a long time; images of Carter and the hostage crisis will take a back seat to perceptions about Trump’s divisiveness and the Iraq War in the eyes of most Americans. In the absence of a truly compelling Iranian provocation, the blue team isn’t going to accept the legitimacy of the war, and there is going to be big trouble at home.