Talking about Bombing Iran and what should we learn.
This is a long read but IMV very informative.
Emergency Triad: There are three important questions that can be answered, right now. Not one of them is about “should.”
Over the last 48 hours most discussion has focused on whether or not America
should have attacked Iran.
This is the wrong question because,
- That decision is ultimately a judgment call, with no objective answer.
- The net outcome of the U.S. attack cannot be known on a near time horizon.
At some point we will know enough to make a reasonable judgment weighing the cost/benefit of this strike. That point is weeks—or months, or maybe even years—in the future.¹
Instead, we should be focusing on three knowable questions that can be answered—objectively—right now.
1. Does Iran still possess a nuclear program?
On June 21, President Trump
said that the U.S. military had struck the nuclear facilities at Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan. He claimed that, “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
On June 22, SecDef Pete Hegseth
agreed with the president’s claim: “Many presidents have dreamed of delivering the final blow to Iran’s nuclear program, and none could, until President Trump.”
Immediately after Hegseth spoke, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, contradicted both the president and SecDef.
“Final battle damage will take some time, but initial battle damage assessments indicate that all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction, Gen. Caine said.
A reporter then asked Gen. Caine: “[Y]ou said the battle damage assessment is still ongoing, but do you believe that some nuclear capability in Iran remains?
Caine’s response: “I think BDA is still pending, and it would be way too early for me to comment on what may or may not still be there.”
So the president and secretary of Defense say that Iran’s facilities were “completely and totally obliterated” and that Iran’s nuclear program has been “dealt the final blow.”
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs says that it is much too early to give any sort of accurate assessment of the damage done.
Either the general, or the president and his Sec Def, are lying to the American public.
Which is it?
2. What are the American government’s war aims?²
President Trump said on June 21 that “if peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets in Iran.”
On the morning of June 22, Vice President JD Vance
said, “Were not at war with Iran, we’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.” Also on the morning of June 22, SecDef Hegseth said that, “This mission was not and has not been about regime change.”
Nine hours later President Trump tweeted,
Let’s take this one step at a time
.
What is the “peace” that Trump is demanding from Iran? Iran is not currently engaged in state-level hostilities against America, so it can’t be the case that he wants the Iranians to stop shooting at us—because they aren’t.³
Perhaps when Trump says “peace” he means that Iran must satisfy some American conditions for the abandonment of their nuclear program. If so, this is a reasonable aim.
Except that Trump has already stated that Iran no longer has a nuclear program. It has been “completely and totally obliterated” and dealt “the final blow.” So—in Trump’s telling—they have nothing to give up.
So what are Trump’s conditions for “peace,” then? What new “targets” is he contemplating? Is the U.S. aim regime change? Or not? Or is the administration agnostic on whether or not the Iranian regime remains?
In war, you do not walk into a room unless you know how to walk out of it. The Trump administration’s position could have been something like:
This strike was designed to hobble the Iranian nuclear program and reset the clock on their ability to make progress toward a weapon. That mission was accomplished.
This would have been a well-defined and important mission. Instead, we have a hodgepodge of war aims that change by the hour alongside an inability even to understand the results of what just happened.
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3. What is the state of American intelligence?
In March, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard,
testified that, “The [intelligence community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.”
The Trump administration has subsequently claimed that Iran was, in fact, sprinting toward a nuclear weapon. When asked about his DNI’s assessment, Trump
replied, “She’s wrong.” And: “I don’t care what she says.”
This is an urgent national security matter:
- Why does Trump believe his DNI was wrong?
- Did Gabbard misrepresent American intelligence findings to the president? Or was the American intelligence itself incorrect?
- Did Trump receive intel from another source that he believed disproved what his own DNI had showed him?
- Why is Gabbard still the DNI? By the president’s own account, she gave him faulty intelligence on a matter of that led to American involvement in a shooting war.
- Can American intelligence be trusted at all right now?
- Is Trump relying on American intelligence to make his decisions surrounding this crisis? Or is he relying primarily on intelligence from other sources?
Either Operation Midnight Hammer was a mistake, OR it represents the greatest failure of American intelligence since Iraq (but in the other direction).
Which is it? And if it’s the latter, what is the administration doing to fix our intel operations?
A month from now the attack on Iran might be seen as a masterstroke.
Maybe we set the Iranian nuclear program back several years. Maybe we dealt it a fatal blow, even. Maybe Iran remains reasonably stable; or the regime topples and is replaced in an orderly manner by a regime more hospitable to U.S. interests. Maybe Iran will have been exposed as a paper tiger unable to retaliate in meaningful ways.
And if that’s where we land: Great. The world will be a better place if the evil Iranian regime is not on the path to being a nuclear power and disarming them carried no great cost.
There are other, less rosy scenarios. But we don’t need to imagine them at this moment. The die is cast. We will get what we get. But even if we get that best-case result, the manner in which the administration has conducted itself is dangerous.
Either the president, or the senior-most officer in the U.S. military, lied to the American public.
We have shifted our war aims repeatedly, and demonstrated that this administration is unable to hold to a consistent, coherent goal.
The president says that our intelligence community made a grave error—and yet he is not cleaning house and rebuilding it. The DNI is a woman who has failed the most important test of her career and lost the confidence of the president. Yet she remains in her post.
I don’t want to confuse process and results. The best process does not always yield a good result. And sometimes a bad process gets lucky and delivers a great result. We are consigned to hoping for the latter.
Good luck, America.
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1
I don’t mean this in the
Chinese proverb sense. With Trump’s assassination of Qassem Soleimani, we knew within a couple of weeks that it was a net benefit.
With Bill Clinton’s air strikes on Iraq in 1988, we did not know for several years that the operation was a strategic failure.
The time horizon on outcomes varies widely when it comes to military action.
2
Gen. Mark Hertling has a lot more about this on the homepage—
read the whole thing.
3
Iran is instead waging a decades-long grey-zone war against America through sponsorship of terrorist organizations, cyberattacks, political warfare, attempted assassinations, and the occasional hostage-taking. All of that is very bad and represents sufficient reason for America to take a hard-line against Iran.
But none of it has anything to do with the targets the U.S. military hit on June 21.