Everyone Is Getting Iran Wrong. Everyone
A sea of protesters in Tehran's Azadi (Freedom) Square in 2009, part of the "Green Revolution"
We’ve had a lot of frustrating news cycles since Trump took office, and they weren’t exactly rare before that, but, at least for this author, this week takes the cake.
That means we must be talking about Iran and Israel.
Let’s start by shooting down some popular narratives on the left and the right before we even begin to analyze what just happened and what it means for the world.
Before I rip apart many popular sentiments emerging from the left, let's start by saying this:
What Donald Trump just did was incredibly dangerous. Full stop.
Yes, the Iranian government is a dangerous adversary, but regardless of the wisdom of attacking Iran (which we'll get to in a minute) we have a system -- a LEGAL and practical system -- for addressing such threats, and this is not it.
There are two key issues at play that outstrip all the others.
Congress declares wars. Beyond this, the President has the ability to conduct limited strikes if actionable intelligence -- new and urgent information -- comes to light. For instance, if Iran were amassing a group of terrorists at a camp and preparing to strike a US base, the President might have grounds to bypass Congress and strike the camp -- a time-sensitive limited scope strike. That's just not what happened here. These nuclear enrichment facilities were known to us. They are not mobile. There is no new or urgent threat. Striking them could unleash a large-scale long-term conflict, something Congress has not agreed to. In short, there is no Constitutional defense for Trump's actions.
There is no plan. Trump appears to have conducted this strike against the wishes of many of his advisors. There was no consideration with how things could escalate. He didn't even wait until the military had proper assets in place to address Iran's response. The "board" is still not currently well set for a prolonged conflict with Iran. If you're a chess player, this is the equivalent of running your Queen into the opponent's pieces without setting up your own pawns and without any consideration of what they will do next. It's a good way to lose the game.
Beyond these points there are many reasons to criticize Trump's strategy, his wider foreign policy (or lack thereof), and Israel's actions. But many of those arguments get in the weeds and distract from the two I've listed above -- this is an illegal and unconstitutional strike, and it is incredibly reckless.
We'll come back to the other problems with this strategy in a moment, but I feel it is crucial to point out many problems in the narrative that has developed on the left in response to this surprise strike.
"World War III"
Broadly speaking, the vast majority of Americans have no idea what's going on in the world, what their own country does and why it does it, or how to fix the world's problems. Americans simply aren't paying attention.
Even the outrage cycle doesn't seem to fix this problem, and strikes in Iran and Yemen are the perfect example. Many on the left immediately attacked Trump for attacks on Yemen, ignoring the fact that these were largely consistent with the last two Democratic administrations and ignoring the fact that issues with Yemen are directly linked to issues with Iran. In other words, Americans may get temporarily outraged about foreign policy, but this doesn't tend to bring them to any greater knowledge or understanding of the issues. In my opinion this is in sharp contrast to, say, immigration or tariffs, domestic issues that many Americans have learned a lot about and put that knowledge into practice.
So let's get this out of the way right away. No, this conflict won't spark "World War III" and making those kinds of claims damages your credibility. It's just silly, and it detracts from the two core problems I've identified above.
For starters, while we may be opening a new chapter in this conflict, the conflict itself is not new. Iran and Israel have been in a fairly active cycle of open hostility for decades, at least since 2006 and really further back than that. The United States and Iran have been at some form of glacial micro war since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and again an argument could be made that we’ve been at war since 1979.
So no, this is not going to spark World War III. In fact it remains to be seen if this is even the start of a new phase of this conflict.
For a long time, Iran has used paramilitary proxies to wage war against not just Israel but also the United States. Israel has conducted "mow the law" strikes -- in other words, a certain amount of Iran's aggressive behavior is tolerated and when Iran or its proxies grow too strong they are knocked down a peg.
For many years Iran-et-al and Israel appear to have been ok with this balance. As I've written about in the past year, however, Netanyahu has disturbed this balance with his near-annihilation of Hezbollah's leadership and his aggressive and deep strikes on Iran's command and control. Still, we have yet to see open war between these two countries -- mostly because Iran appears to be hesitant to start it off. There's no guarantee that these latest episodes will spark that war between Israel and the US, and there's even less of a guarantee that the US will be forced to play an outsized role.
This doesn't make what Trump has done any less dangerous. Iran has been planning an asynchronous, asymmetrical, hybrid war against the US and Israel for 40 years. It's entirely possible our bases will be attack. It's entirely possible that Iran will conduct terrorist attacks against US assets or even civilians. Escalation is absolutely possible, even likely. But the hyperbole about "World War III" makes it easier to dismiss these very-real concerns as left-wing hyperventilation, and that's a shame.
Stop Picking Sides
A conservative podcaster I won't mention here recently asked "how long before the Democrats start waving Iranian flags?" I winced. I'd be shocked if those flags haven't started showing up at anti-war protests already.
The Iranian government are "bad guys." Iran is likely the world's largest supporter of terrorist organizations -- Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, multiple violent terrorist organizations in Iraq and several more in Syria. The regime is incredibly repressive and seeks to export their domestic terrorism abroad. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is responsible for a genocide in Syria, and IRGC proxies killed more US soldiers (and Iraqi soldiers, and Iraqi civilians) than anyone in Al Qaeda ever did. The US-led coalition that keeps the areas around Yemen open for ocean navigation literally holds up the entire planet's economy, and if the US were to allow the Iran-backed Houthi rebels to gain unfettered access to the region's waterways many millions of people would starve to death.
And speaking as someone who knows countless Iranians who have been imprisoned, tortured, or killed by their own government, if you’re singing The praises of the Iranian regime, you’re endorsing a horror.
These are facts, and these facts stand on their own. We must separate the crimes conducted by the Iranian regime and its allies from the crimes conducted by those who oppose them.
This is a trap that liberals have fallen for in the past. The Vietcong were a brutal terrorist group. That didn't justify the continuation of the Vietnam War even when our leaders knew we couldn't win. Saddam Hussein was a ruthless dictator and a regional pariah. This did not make removing him by force a good idea. The Iranian regime is a horror. You don't have to wave an Iranian flag to protest a preemptive attack against Iran.
Stop picking sides in foreign policy issues when you don't understand the underlying problem. If you're a supporter of the IDF or Hamas, Iran, the Houthis, or whatever faction opposes the faction you are angry at, you're making a mistake that will ultimately cost you, and your "side," a lot of political capital.
"No More War" is Part of How We Got Here
"NO MORE WAR!!!" On the surface, who could possibly disagree with this statement except a total monster? War destroys lives and squanders precious resources that could be used to build things instead of destroying them.
It's also simplistic and ultimately meaningless.
Wars happen. Evil forces, terrorists, expansionist would-be empires, or sometimes desperate people, use war to further their cause. Simply ignoring these threats is often more likely to trigger a war than prevent it.
In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich exploited an ill-conceived mission in Somalia to attack Bill Clinton and derail his efforts to strive for stability in Africa and the Middle East. If Clinton had been more aggressive against Al Qaeda in the 90s, could 9/11 have been avoided?
In 2012-2013, many experts, including myself, warned that if the United States did not help Syrian rebels remove dictator Bashar al-Assad then Syria would devolve into a bloodbath. Obama did not listen. In August 2013, the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own people, and by 2014 large parts of the country were overrun by ISIS. The United States deployed troops to Syria and reopened the war in Iraq to fight those terrorists. "No more wars" may have cost a million lives and the scars, the result of the world’s failure to stop the crisis early, run deep.
In 2014, many on the left chanted "no more war" when they opposed arming the new Ukrainian government. Barack Obama warned that arming the Ukrainians would further anger the Russians and lead to an escalation of the conflict. And despite Obama's efforts to deescalate, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. That whole time, experts such as myself warned that entire time that the only way to deter Russia and avoid "more war" was to heavily arm Ukraine.
And yet, all the inaction of the Obama administration on Syria, on Ukraine, stem from the same fear — a repeat of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
Never trust anyone who thinks intervention is always the answer, but you shouldn’t trust anyone who says it’s never the answer either. Don’t fall victim to the same kind of “bumper sticker politics” that have defined the Republicans for 40+ years. Real policy is real messy. It’s never black and white. There are “unknown unknowns.” There is no crystal ball.
Unconstitutional, Poorly Executed, and the Wrong Path
And so that brings us to the last point — why this particular strike is unsound policy.
To revisit, the most pressing issues are that this is unconstitutional, because there was no reason to bypass Congress, and incredibly reckless, since this is not part of a wider strategy for which our military has prepared.
But is forced regime change in Iran a bad idea?
To answer this question you have to understand Iranians — the step George W. Bush never took when planning to remove that other bad guy in Iraq.
Iranians are proud, tired of foreign intervention, and skeptical of the motives of the United States. They hate their own government, but even at the height of the Green Revolution in 2009 Iranian activists told me they’d join the regime to fight against a foreign invader. Forcing them to make this choice Is unsound.
Furthermore, the Iranian regime appears to this observer to be shockingly close to collapse. Its impotence in responding to Israel’s war over the last year and a half looks like fear. It was unable to help its key proxy Hezbollah as Israel decimated its ranks, and Iran watched almost helplessly as their ally in Syria was toppled. Periodic protests have not been met by the same kind of repression we saw in 2009 and 2010. The hardliners have their backs against the wall.
But this will help them greatly. The Iranian regime exists as a counter to American and Israeli hegemony. This could make them stronger than ever. Furthermore, they have more incentive to build nuclear weapons than ever before.
These strikes against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure also appear to have done little damage, according to one report only setting them back a few months. They were not “weeks away” from creating nuclear weapons. There was no immediate threat.
There is another issue worth noting -- yet again, Trump appears to be more interested in pleasing strong-men dictators like Netanyahu than in serving America's interests.
Time For Smarter Policy
The Iranian regime remains a threat, a force for evil in the world, and it’s fair to say that they were able to expand their influence because American administrations were so hesitant to hold them accountable.
Would we be in this situation if Obama had bombed IRGC positions in Syria? Would we be in this situation if countless administrations had done a better job holding Israel accountable? We've flip-flopped between mostly-empty threats (Bush's Axis of Evil speech, John McCain's "Bomb Bomb Iran" song) and naive pie-in-the-sky negotiations. We either offer Iran the carrot or the stick, and that's just not how "carrot and the stick" policy works.
Donald "Two Week TACO" Trump has offered more of the same, sometimes at the same time. He sent a conciliatory message to Iran offering them two weeks to negotiate a deal, then bombed them after a few days. Then he sent glowing praise to them over Truth Social, thanking them for attacking a US base but alerting us first, undermining Iran's attempts to save face while simultaneously deescalating. His social media posts have been laughable, pathetic even, and it's virtually guaranteed us that the next administration will still have to deal with this unresolved issue.
We need a smarter Iran policy. It's pretty clear we're not going to get it from Donald Trump, but we HAVE TO get that from the leadership on the left. No more refusing to hold Iran, or Israel for that matter, unaccountable. No more empty threats, and no more sycophantic praise. No more simplistic slogans or cheap shots.
In the short term we need to focus on the core problems I've highlighted above and I'll reiterate now, again, to drive home the point:
These strikes were unconstitutional. There was no urgent threat so there is no Presidential power to conduct these strikes. Congress needs to take back its constitutional mandate.
These strikes were chaotic and reckless, were not part of a coherent strategy, and our military and allies were not prepared for us to make them.
Focus on these now, watch, and begin to develop a coherent strategy for what happens next, a clear alternative to these failed policies. At some point there will be elections, and when there are we're going to need to offer voters an actual choice.
