On Iran - Playing with Fire

Last Monday, Ezra Klein interviewed Ben Rhodes, a former Obama national security advisor, about the unfolding war in the Middle East. Rhodes reminds the audience, several times, that wars are generally best avoided. People die in them, typically in large numbers. Wars are disruptive, chaotic events with uncertain future ramifications, but with the certainty that many lives are likely to be shattered in the meantime. That all might seem obvious, but it bears repeating, especially when, as tends to be true in the United States, elite political discourse typically defaults to reasons to justify/rationalize why we’ve decided to start killing people in other parts of the world.

Rhodes is a relative rarity among former national security officials, someone who has meaningfully scrutinized his own assumptions and outlook about the way the United States exercises power abroad. For example, Rhodes now acknowledges that the Obama administration’s decision to join NATO bombing of Libya in 2011, ostensibly initially to preemptively prevent mass killings by the Qaddafi regime in an unfolding civil conflict, was shortsighted. For those too young to remember, part of the debate at the time was whether such bombings could be done without the operation turning into one of regime change, which the Obama administration said it wanted to avoid. But quite often, deployments of force do not serve only the precise purpose those who initiate them insist they want. People plan, God laughs, as they say.

In Libya, the bombing in support of anti-Qaddafi rebels did lead to regime change. Qaddafi, a brutal dictator, was killed, after a 42-year reign. What was left behind was a power vacuum, which sucked Libya into a protracted civil war that, by every fair reckoning, has made life worse for most Libyans in the subsequent fifteen years. It also brought about regional instability that persists to this day.

Libya is a good reminder that, even when there appear to be one or more valid reasons to intervene, in what leaders tell us will be a contained, precise operation, targeting a longstanding, malevolent regime whose yoke it would be humane for the people living under it to be freed from, it does not follow that they or we will be better off as a result of an actual intervention. Iraq, anyone?

Again, this should be obvious, but apparently bears repeating in the wake of the Israeli/US attack on Iran, now more than a week old. The Iranian regime is a brutal one and in a better world, it would be wonderful for the Iranian people not to live under its thumb. But the historical record augurs very poorly for the prospect that Iranians, on the whole, will be better off after this onslaught than they would have been otherwise.

Attacking Iran for the purported purpose of making life better for Iranians was not the primary motivation for the Israeli leadership. Among the central justifications for attacking Iran, proffered consistently by Israeli leaders and, depending on the day of the week, by American ones, is that Iran poses an “imminent” or “existential” threat. But the overwhelming weight of the evidence belies such assertions, even if Iranian leaders have been spouting rhetoric about death to Israel and death to America for decades and the regime has sponsored violent proxies. Indeed, the fact that Iran has been manifestly weakened over the past two years, including by the attack on its nuclear facilities last June, the one that prompted Trump to insist, repeatedly, that Iran’s nuclear capability had been “totally obliterated,” almost certainly contributed to the temptation to launch the current assault. In other words, this was a war of choice, not necessity.

Whatever the justifications for attacking Iran are, they must be weighed against the prospect that events will spin out of control, with potentially deeply dangerous longterm reverberations for both regional and global stability.

The recklessness, shortsightedness and venality of the leaders directing these operations especially matters in a dynamic environment with unforeseeable outcomes. Already, nine days in, the impact on global markets is clearly more significant than they anticipated (itself a gobsmacking reflection of the above-noted recklessness and shortsightedness). No one can predict what will happen in Iran in the coming weeks and months. But it’s certainly possible, if not likely, that the new regime will take a more hardline posture. One lesson Iranian elites cannot help but have learned is that there is no point in negotiating with Trump, who has now ordered them bombed not once, but twice in the midst of an ongoing round of negotiations. And as the great international legal scholar Asli Bali has warned, many other “middle powers” are surely going to draw from this aggression the only reasonable conclusion they can — that they, too, should be pursuing nuclear weapons or other lethal deterrents in the face of an America for which unbridled aggression now appears to be the default option. Ben Rhodes made a related point to Klein about the security calculus of the gulf states and the possibility that they might be increasingly inclined to pursue nuclear weapons, given how unreliable their ostensible protector, the United States, is. People ill-equipped to understand or control it are playing with fire.

There are, of course, the humanitarian repercussions of this assault. Iranians are being killed and maimed in large numbers, at the hands of those who claim they are appalled by the involuntary conditions under which Iranians live. Americans, Israelis and residents of the gulf states are dying , too. For what greater good?

If you believe that Trump is the right man for the job of leading the United States, and you support this endeavor because you support him, I have nothing for you. But if you don’t, there is no too-clever-by-half justification for supporting the current war. If war is the extension of politics by other means, from the perspective of the United States, this war is the extension of Trump’s demented worldview by other means, not to mention his metastasizing megalomania. It will further degrade the United States, morally, economically and geo-strategically. Each passing day will bring mounting death and destruction, with the likelihood of more instability, unpredictability and havoc to come.

These dangers are compounded by the reality that no president is less equipped to comprehend nor account for the consequences of his actions than the current one, nor are the feckless men he’s surrounded himself with.