(Composite / Photos: GettyImages)
TWO WEEKS AFTER THE START of the war in Iran, the picture is coming into focus. Why would a president who promised countless times not to start new wars, particularly “forever wars” in the Middle East, have leapt into this conflict? As always in the age of Trump, it’s necessary to separate the president’s motives and mindset from the old ways we used to decide questions of war and peace, tariffs, sanctions, immigration, taxes, and other matters. Before venturing into Trump’s mind, let’s consider the shape of the discussion.
People who imagine that we are still operating in a normal world are making arguments in favor of military action as if we were engaged in a national debate. Where is the acknowledgment, they demand, of what a vicious regime the mullahs in Iran run? The Islamic Republic has been at war with us since 1979, they stress, and if you doubt their murderous intent, you’re forgetting the 444 days our diplomats were held hostage, the attack on our Beirut embassy and on Marines stationed at the Beirut airport, the Khobar Towers bombing, and countless IEDs and other attacks by Iranian proxies during the Iraq War, to say nothing of their unofficial national slogan “Death to America/Death to Israel.” This is the regime that supports and funds the most depraved death cults in the Israel/Palestine conflict—Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas. And it has been doggedly pursuing nuclear weapons for years while vowing to wipe Israel off the map. Israel is a “one bomb country,” declared a former Iranian president. If not for Iran’s monomaniacal determination to destroy Israel, a path to peace would have been far more imaginable.
Iran’s internal repression is nearly as brutal as its external support for terrorism, with women in particular bearing the brunt. The marriage age for girls was reduced to 9 shortly after the Islamic Republic was founded, and women have been subjugated by religious police ever since. But it isn’t only women who’ve felt the boot on their necks. A well-educated, advanced nation has been immiserated. Tehran is running out of clean drinking water. The population loathes the regime, as we’ve witnessed many times, but most recently in January when they thronged the streets in their tens of thousands—only to be gunned down en masse.
If we had a normal administration and a normal decision-making process, those factors would have been considered. There would have been a national conversation about how imminent a threat Iran posed to us and to their neighbors. We would have weighed the risks of war against the opportunity to strike a fatal blow to a terrible regime. We would have decided upon clear aims, and evaluated the chances of success or failure. The fact of Iran being a nasty piece of work and a threat is not dispositive on the matter of going to war. A poorly planned or executed war can make things worse.
NOW WE TURN TO THE JUVENILE, facts-optional world of Trump, where the president commits the United States to war without planning, without consultation with allies, without congressional authorization, and without a clue about how badly things could go.
After Iraq and Afghanistan, we learned that combatants can sometimes suffer from moral injury—if they are obliged to shoot at enemies who might be children, for example, or if they participated in or witnessed illegal acts like Abu Ghraib. Today, all of us are obliged to endure a kind of moral injury when we see our government’s response to the news that the United States accidentally bombed a girls’ school in Minab, killing 170 people, mostly children. Rather than the normal approach, which would have involved an apology from the secretary of defense and an offer of restitution to the families, we watched the president of the United States deny the facts and shift the blame (at the same time). It’s his nature to be callous to human suffering and contemptuous of truth. We’ve known that for years. But it disgraces us in the eyes of the world when he represents us on an international stage and about matters so tragic.
Without a normal National Security Council, Department of State, Department of Defense, intelligence community, congressional committees, or public input, we piece together that the president made this decision for psychological rather than strategic reasons. Thrilled by U.S. firepower in last summer’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and giddy from the perceived success of removing Nicolás Maduro, Trump came to believe that the military was a magic wand that he could wave according to his whim. Of course he was aware of his vows to keep us out of wars, but wars are boots on the ground, not beautiful strikes from the skies. Disregarding warnings from wiser heads about the risks to the Strait of Hormuz, Trump dove in.
My best understanding of his motive harks back to the hostage crisis of 1979. Trump lives in the past more than most people, and due to his exceptional sensitivity to humiliation, I think he carries the shame of that episode in his heart. In a 1980 interview that is believed to be his first public statement on foreign policy, he said, “That they hold our hostages is just absolutely and totally ridiculous. That this country sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold our hostages, to my way of thinking, is a horror, and I don’t think they’d do it with other countries.” He added that he would have taken military action, and that if we had, “I think right now we’d be an oil-rich nation, and I believe that we should have done it, and I’m very disappointed that we didn’t do it.”
In 2020, after the strike that took out Qassem Soleimani, Trump warned Iran not to retaliate and returned to the hostages theme: “Let this serve as a warning that . . . we have targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken many years ago).”
In addition to wounded pride, we must add vainglory. The Lindsey Graham/Benjamin Netanyahu tag team played upon Trump’s lust for glory by convincing him that while Iran had been a thorn in our side for half a century and previous presidents had vowed not to permit it to become a nuclear power, no other president had the cojones to do the job.
Trump obviously thought he could achieve regime change with an air campaign alone. He invited the Iranian people in the early hours of the attacks to take back their country. Perhaps both he and Netanyahu misread the lesson of January. They saw the thousands of protesters and hoped that a large dose of air power would be all the miserable people needed to seize the state from the mullahs. But the real lesson of January was that the regime would do anything, including massacring thousands of its own citizens, to maintain its grip on power. The brutality worked. Only the regime has guns. The demonstrations subsided.
Will Selber reminds us of Clausewitz’s maxim that war is a contest of wills. “Not a contest of bombs. Not a contest of slick Pentagon graphics or dramatic night-vision footage on cable news. A contest of wills. The side that demonstrates greater resolve over time wins.” Iran has inflicted pain on its people for decades and it is more than happy to intensify it now. They can bear shortages, blackouts, misery, and death because they have no choice. The regime knows that the people will have their revenge if this government is deposed, so they have every incentive to hold on no matter what. All the mullahs have to do to “win” this conflict is survive. Meanwhile, an American public that was never consulted and certainly not convinced to undertake a risky war will be intolerant of even higher inflation or a recession. The advantage in a contest of wills goes to the mullahs.
The Iranian regime is one of the worst on the planet, and we must still hope for the sake of the Iranian people and the world that it does not survive. But this war is being conducted to heal psychic wounds and to boost the ego of our dangerous commander in chief, who is now obliged to plead for help opening the Strait of Hormuz from (former?) allies and enemies alike. If the Iranian regime survives, even in a weakened condition, it may be more dangerous than ever, having shown the world that it can withstand simultaneous assault from the “big and little Satans.”
