Some critics of the Trump administration’s Iran war say the problem is how it’s being waged. There was never a correct way to attack Iran, only a deadly disaster in the making.
When Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe went before Congress last week, they were grilled about the war in Iran. The nature of the grilling was revealing, as many Democrats seem focused on impropriety or strategic errors in warmaking rather than the warmaking itself.
Some Democrats pressed Gabbard and Ratcliffe about whether Iran actually posed a meaningful threat to the United States. Gabbard, in particular, was evasive on this point. She’s repeatedly said that it did not, but now she’s committed to staying in Donald Trump’s good graces, no matter the hypocrisy and humiliation involved.
Other Democrats, though, only seemed to be concerned with giving the administration a hard time about how they’re waging the war. Did Trump understand that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz? If not, why not? Did he understand how extensive Iran’s retaliation might be against American assets in the Gulf monarchies? If not, why not? Did Gabbard and Ratcliffe not brief him appropriately, or did Trump just not listen?
At times, the grilling seemed about as high-stakes as mid-level managers being dressed down in a quarterly performance review, where the company’s goals are taken for granted and only management’s competence is in question.
Even John Bolton has gotten in on this critique of how the Trump administration is waging its war of aggression in Iran. Bolton was one of the most notorious warmongers of Trump’s first administration, although like so many who previously served Trump he was discarded and became a bitter anti-Trumper. In a social media post last week, he wrote:
In 2018–19, I made the case for regime change in Iran as often as I could. Voices in Trump’s orbit often cited Iran’s capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz as a reason against regime change. Trump has been fully aware this is a possibility, and yet did not prepare.
It’s true that the administration’s decisions have been baffling in ways that are obvious even to those who accept the basic premises of the intervention. Trump has incessantly berated America’s NATO allies for not using their militaries to clear the strait — but he didn’t even care enough about getting their cooperation to notify them in advance that he was planning to strike Iran. Trump has called for Iranians to rise up to overthrow their government, but he’s savagely bombed Tehran, thus torching any goodwill he could ever expect to get from the secular liberals concentrated in the capital city who would be the most obvious base of support for such an uprising.
He also utterly failed to get buy-in (or manufacture consent) for the intervention among the American public. First, he claimed to have set back the possibility of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon by many years with last summer’s bombing, and then turned around on a dime to claim that the prospect was so immediate and terrifying that he had no choice but to launch a Pearl Harbor–style surprise attack on Iran as diplomatic negotiations were still ongoing. None of it makes any sense.
Even so, no one should let the Boltons of the world get away with disowning the very catastrophe they tirelessly worked to bring about. There was never a “right way” to do this.
This Was Always What Was Going to Happen
First and foremost, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu had no right to launch a war of aggression. Even if we pretend that Iran was days away from developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, the idea that the Islamic Republic, which hasn’t started a war with anyone in its entire existence (although it’s often funded proxy forces elsewhere, like both the United States and Israel routinely do), was going to commit national suicide by initiating a nuclear exchange was always deeply absurd. And you don’t have to love Iran’s theocracy to understand that the United States and Israel have no right to decide who will govern the country from outside.
Even aside from this principled point, though, the war was never going to be anything but a bloody disaster. We’ve seen this movie before, over and over again, in country after country. With all the planning in the world, the only real distinction between Iran and previous “regime-change” targets like Iraq and Afghanistan is that Iran has a far greater capacity to defend itself.
If a civil war is already raging, air support for one side can tip the balance, as with Barack Obama’s intervention in Libya. But there are zero cases in world history where regime change was fully brought about by nothing but a conventional air campaign. The only two ways that “unconditional surrender,” which Trump has sometimes said is all he’ll accept in Iran, has ever been brought about have been with ground troops or atom bombs. There are also zero cases where a bombing campaign brought about a previously nonexistent uprising capable of overthrowing a government. Iran won’t be the first.
If the United States does commit ground troops in Iran — a possibility Trump and officials like “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth have ominously refused to rule out — Iran won’t be the first country in the region where an attempt to impose regime change at gunpoint will go well for the United States. As with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, that’s a recipe for bloodshed and chaos, not the ascension of a US-friendly government with enduring popular legitimacy.
It’s a recipe for young Americans coming home in flag-draped coffins or as deeply traumatized veterans struggling to get the help they need from a society that tends to lose interest in them as soon as the war is over. It’s a recipe for generations of regular people in the targeted country growing up with deep hatred for the attackers who killed or mutilated their loved ones.
This time was never going to be different. Everyone who advocated for this war owns every bit of the catastrophe. And they should never be allowed to forget it.