Brief Notes on War with Iran

The spirit of Curt LeMay and the stupidity of Donald Trump.

So, no Nobel Peace Prize, I’m guessing?

It took Donald Trump only four months in office to use the US military against domestic protesters, and only five months to start a war with Iran. Are there any other things we were assured he would never do that we can expect to see? (Yes, in fact, and trying to stay in office for a third term is at the top of the list.)

But it’s foolish to complain that Trump lied—about this war or anything else—or that he’s a hypocrite, or that he’s an ignoramus who is wildly unfit for office and inflicting untold damage on the whole world. Let’s just concern ourselves with the limited parameters of this particular crisis. Which are bad enough.

NUCLEAR FAIRYTALES REDUX REDUX

Remember George W. Bush’s MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner just six weeks into the Iraq war? Trump put that in “hold-my-beer” terrain when he announced the US attack on Iran, saying: “Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”

These predictable claims—echoed by Hegseth, Vance, and others—should be taken with an ocean of salt. Did you expect these cretins to say anything less? The truth, following the general rule for any statement by this administration, is likely exactly the opposite. (For its part, Iran claims the damage was inconsequential, though of course, one cannot trust the mullahs either.) In any case, no one in the West really knows, because it will take days at least to do any kind of proper battle damage assessment, and even then the long term consequences will be unknown until they play out over months and years. So only time will tell.

The fantasy that complex political objectives can be achieved by airpower alone is as old as Billy Mitchell, reaching its apotheosis with retired USAF General Curtis LeMay’s 1965 recommendation that we settle matters in Southeast Asia by bombing the Vietnamese “back into the Stone Age.” We tried, and still lost the war. It did not work with Hanoi and it will not work with Tehran. The rest of the story is just the bloody details that will describe the shape of our failure and foolishness. In that regard, the US strike was the opposite of the Ukrainian drone strike against Russia of last month. Where that was a brilliantly innovative asymmetrical solution by a beleaguered underdog, this was the richest kid on the block using the biggest, bluntest, most expensive high tech weaponry, and with questionable effectiveness.

Even allowing for their questionable efficacy, were the strikes justifiable because Tehran was on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon? Almost certainly not. As I wrote last week, we in the general public aren’t privy to the classified info necessary to make that judgment, though as recently as March the US Intelligence Community assessed exactly the opposite. Even Tulsi Gabbard said so, to Congress…..until just days ago when Donald told her to reverse herself. It’s similarly absurd to ask us to take the word of Netanyahu, as he’s been making that claim about Iran regularly for 30 years. (Bibi played Trump like a fiddle, in my view.)

It’s even more absurd to be asked to take it on Trump’s say-so. Contrary to what he now claims, Trump supported the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, then turned around and ran a presidential campaign shamelessly insisting he did not, and repeatedly ridiculed the US Intelligence Community for spouting politicized intel that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Now that same con man wants us to take his word that Tehran was two weeks away from getting the Bomb and therefore he had to attack it. That would be risible even if Trump were not a proven pathological liar on a world-beating level. Trump and Netanyahu both had personal, domestic reasons for wanting to attack Iran. (And lest we forget, as we have previously discussed, there are Trump’s repeated predictions that Obama would bomb Iran to deflect attention from problems at home. With Donald, every accusation is a confession, isn’t it?)

But all that is actually beside the point. Even as we all agree that nuclear proliferation is, uh, bad, and that having the Bomb in the hands of the medieval theocrats of Tehran would be especially unwelcome, the sheer hypocrisy of the members of the Nuclear Club insisting that they alone have a God-given right to such a weapon speaks for itself.

So here’s my surmise at this early stage: Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities may have been degraded by yesterday’s strikes, but they have almost certainly not been permanently obliterated, and the reason for the attack is spurious at best. Most likely, the strikes dealt short-term damage to Iran’s nuclear program, setting it back a few months or years. But in the long term, they may well have contributed to the near-certainty that Iran will now pursue the Bomb even more aggressively, and will eventually get it. And there is a simple reason for that.

I have already argued at length in these pages, and over many years, that any industrialized nation that is sufficiently determined to obtain a nuclear weapon cannot permanently be prevented from doing so by military force alone, only through painstaking diplomacy. That was the conclusion that Robert Oppenheimer came to as early as 1945, and unsuccessfully failed to convey to the national security state, and for which he was crucified. But it remains true today no matter how much the hawks insist it does not. That thinking has never found purchase even in the relatively sane (if interventionist) circles of previous Republican administrations, so it’s unsurprising that it couldn’t penetrate the cocoon of idiocy that envelops Trump World, not even if it were itself taped to the nose of a GBU-57 bunkerbuster. But having seen how a lack of nuclear capability opens it up to attack—e.g., Saddam Hussein and Iraq—while actually possession of that capability protects a country from that scenario—e.g., Kim Jong-un and North Korea—Tehran will now look to step up its efforts to obtain the Bomb, and may well succeed within a decade. You’ll know, because within a few years, Trump or one of his successors will tell us we have to bomb Iran again, even though they told us they got the job done last time around.

Similarly, the US attack may hasten the fall of the current regime in Tehran, which is another thing Trump’s cheerleaders are promising…..or it may shore up that regime by causing the Iranian people to rally around the hardliners at a time when their nation is being attacked by the Great Satan. (The latter, it must be noted, is the usual historical pattern for nations subjected to strategic bombing, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and beyond.)

So let’s hold off on the victory parade for the moment, let alone any emergency meetings of the Nobel committee in Oslo.

HANGING UP HIS BONE SPURS

I’m not too bothered about the unconstitutionality of the Iran strikes, but not because I think they were kosher: only because we have become inured over the past sixty years to US presidents acting unilaterally when it comes to employing force without a declaration war, despite the War Powers Resolution of 1973. If Ford and Carter and Reagan and Bush 41 and Clinton and Bush 43 and Obama did it, you could be damned sure Donald Trump would do it, too, and without so much as a batted eye. It’s still an outrage, but it’s not an outrage unique to Trump. Rather than the issue of legality, what’s more worrying to me is Trump’s utter stupidity, incompetence, and dishonesty in wielding that power, compared to even the worst of those predecessors.

In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, a retired professor at the US Naval War College, writes:

President Donald Trump has done what he swore he would not do: involve the United States in a war in the Middle East. His supporters will tie themselves in knots (as Vice President J.D. Vance did last week) trying to jam the square peg of Trump’s promises into the round hole of his actions. And many of them may avoid calling this “war” at all, even though that’s what Trump himself called it tonight….(but) it is war by any definition of the term, and something Trump had vowed he would avoid.

Nichols goes on to note that Trump’s fans “will want to see it as a quick win,” and they may get their wish. He concedes Trump’s superhuman good luck (“He has survived scandals, major policy failures, and even impeachment, events that would have ended other administrations”) and muses that he might get lucky with this crisis too. But the odds are against it. Will it split his MAGA base along America Firster / Old School Warmonger lines? Maybe. It will depend a lot on how things unfold and how bad this gets. If we do get into a protracted war with Iran—a country almost four times as big as Iraq, with twice the population—it will certainly test the limits of Donald’s lifelong good fortune and the durability of his coalition…..particularly since it will be a war with a clown car of imbeciles, drunks, religious nuts, and others managing our end of it. Though to be fair, Hegseth did a good job not looping Ayatollah Khameini into the warplanning chat on Signal.

It will also now be harder than ever for the US to moralize to Putin about bombing Ukraine, even though the two situations are not remotely alike. Putin, of course, doesn’t care, but America’s perch on the moral high ground will be difficult to maintain in the eyes of the rest of the world. Some—like the Saudis, and even the EU—will secretly hope the strikes do the job, but, as Nichols writes, “if the Iranian regime survives and continues even a limited nuclear program, those same nations may sour on what they will see as an unsuccessful plan hatched in Jerusalem and carried out by Washington.” The odds of that outcome are high.

And what of the domestic impact of this bombing, as regards Trump’s war on democracy here in the US?

Almost certainly, as Robert Kagan recently wrote, Trump’s domestic dictatorial tendencies will be increased exponentially if he has an ongoing shooting war to use as justification to suppress domestic dissent and unilaterally expand his powers. While Trump surely thinks that military action will work against Iran (because he’s a simpleton and a Neanderthal), he also ultimately doesn’t care, because his purposes are very well served no matter what the result.

Like Kagan, James B. Greenberg, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Arizona, writing on Substack, notes how Trump will exploit the war as “justification for emergency powers: expanded surveillance, media suppression, repressive policing. Legal norms aren’t abolished outright; they’re suspended, selectively enforced, or theatrically bypassed,” as “the rule of law becomes conditional and civic life is subordinated to the demands of ‘national security’.” At the far end of this? “Elections can be delayed. Protest can be criminalized. The extraordinary becomes normalized.”

Greenberg therefore describes the attack on Iran as “a political theater in which Trump can cloak his vulnerabilities in the symbols of strength” as he is granted “the role of wartime president—commander, protector, strongman.”

Legal scrutiny recedes. Indictments look like interference. The opposition becomes “disloyal,” the media “unpatriotic.” Dissent is cast as danger.

Trump’s war isn’t only fought abroad. It’s narrated at home—as a continuation of the domestic culture war by other means. Iran, already demonized as a theocratic, defiant, and alien adversary, now becomes the perfect enemy: religiously distinct, non-Western, and “irrational.” It satisfies both geopolitical and symbolic functions.

And this logic spills inward. Foreign enemies are mirrored by domestic ones. Muslims abroad, migrants at the border, political opponents at home—all folded into a singular, civilization-defining narrative. The line between foreign and domestic threat collapses.

So there’s that.

TRIED PEGGY SUE

So where does all that leave us?

The best case scenario is that the United States’s active combat involvement in the war between Israel and Iran is limited to these strikes. That does not mean this is over by any means. Iran will retaliate against us—there is no question about that. It might take years to do so, and it might take many forms, from mere economic leverage, to missile strikes on US bases abroad or ships at sea, to terrorist attacks on US soil and/or US citizens and soft targets worldwide, to cyberwarfare, or any combination of the above. A few hundred Americans killed in the downing of a US airliner, or in a missile attack on a US base, or in a bomb set off at a public event, will certainly change how the American people look at the events of June 21. Even short of that, if Iran decides to close (or just mine) the Straits of Hormuz, the whole global economy will rattle, though it has selfish reasons for not doing so, such as not angering its friends in China. The Times of Israel, citing CBS News, reports that in hopes of forestalling such retaliation, the White House has signaled to Tehran through backchannels that the US strikes “were limited to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program and that Washington is not seeking regime change.” We shall see how much good that does.

But in one form or another retaliation will come. Even if the United States avoids becoming embroiled in long-term combat operations against Iran, just the military action we have already taken will almost certainly lead to a major terrorist attack or series of attacks in the next decade, much as the Gulf war brought on 9/11 ten full years later. The Persians are very patient—far more so than we are. Iran has had plenty of time to prepare for a possible US attack—years—and may well have devious counterattacks in mind that we cannot even conceive. (And if it’s far enough down the road, Trump and his defenders will blame whoever is in power in the US at the time…..unless it’s still them). For that matter, such counterattacks were probably already in the works just on the basis of our logistical and intelligence support for Israel prior to the strikes of June 21, contrary to government denials from both Washington and Tel Aviv.

Fear of reprisal in and of itself is not grounds for making strategic decisions, of course—that is foolish and cowardly. But it is worth remembering as we make our calculations. That is what warfare is, even though as Americans we are very accustomed to dishing out and then being wildly offended when anyone gives it back to us. It would be a lot easier to stomach those sacrifices if the initial action made sense, and was not the impulsive, ignorant, lashing out of a narcissistic man-child and his team of drunk right wing TV hosts, Russian assets, and craven opportunists.

The oldest line in the military book is that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. (Per the 19th-century Prussian field marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder. Don’t mix him up with Junior.) Trump’s only plan was to pretend he’s a tough guy, distract from his domestic woes Wag the Dog style, and expand his authoritarian power. But now we will see what Iran has to say about all that, as our dear leader pursues a mulish path that arrogant fools like him have followed for eighty years. Though few before him have been in his league.

********

Photo: B-2 “Stealth” bomber of the type used against Iran. Credit: US Air Force/Gary Ell.

Thanks to Thomas Anthony Farmer for pointing me to James Greenberg’s Substack.