People fantasizing about redeeming their own and the nation’s reputations in the Iranian theater should slow down.
People fantasizing about redeeming their own and the nation’s reputations in the Iranian theater should slow down.
M ost of my friends grew up to understand how their emotions work, particularly when it came to matters of the heart. They came to understand the mania that accompanies an early crush or love affair. It’s an emotional rocket fuel that powers people to open themselves up to new experiences, even to new self-conceptions. They start getting their lives in order and planning for a blissful long term. But the downside is that this same emotional fuel powers self-delusion. As my friends aged into their twenties and thirties, they tended to understand how to ride these emotional ups and downs, to be at least a little wary of swells of passion, and to recognize that long-term domestic bliss is built by steady acts of the will, and that violent passions serve as guard of the home only at its outer edges, and in dangerous circumstances.
I wish I could say the same of my peers in the intellectual courts of power when it comes to matters of war, that they came to understand their passions and recognize when they are in fits of mania. Alas, the last few days are just like the days three years ago when Ukraine was driving Russia back from its march on Kyiv, or when the bombs began to fall on Libya. Suddenly, normally sensible people who pay their mortgages, and stay faithful to their vows, are talking about vanquishing evil forever, about a single attack that will not only solve all the geopolitical problems of the Middle East, but also finally and irrevocably prove the naysayers (the “isolationists”) wrong to everyone. And it will be popular too!
People have become much looser about accusing anyone who disagrees with them of loving the mullahs, just as they accused them of loving Saddam, and loving Assad and Putin — as if anyone with practical doubts or questions about a government-led effort could only be motivated by all the Baathist fan literature and propaganda that they must keep under lock and key in their private studies.
How do they not recognize the replay of their own emotional responses? Or grow into maturity when these affairs of geopolitics have led them astray? People fantasizing about redeeming their own and the nation’s reputations in the Iranian theater seem to have forgotten that their credibility is still tied up with Ukraine, which in this analogy is still pregnant with conflict and desperate for global attention.
I was asked the other night in a private forum how I would counsel the president if he was presented with an opportunity to do one bombing mission over Iran’s nuclear site at Fordow to finish the job. Would I advise him to do it? The question is almost unfair. I said, “Yes, depending on many other circumstances.” I accept that preventing an Iranian bomb is in our interest. And if your question essentially permits me a magic button to do so, I’m happy to give it a hypothetical press. What I do not know is how long one bombing run can delay this adverse outcome, nor what other costs are associated with it. But colleagues who assured me that “only isolationists are talking about a regime-change war, not everything is Iraq” are now talking themselves into hopes for regime change, or regime collapse in Iran. The mission creep has already begun in their own minds. When anyone reminds them that bringing order to Iran may be a job four times larger than bringing order to Iraq when it lost its regime, they literally retreat into cartoon fantasy, preferring to contemplate the battle of good and evil in the tidied-up abstract, rather than the very practical problem of providing law and order for 92 million people, many of whom hate you. (Imagine the Iraq surge but four times larger.) Nor do they want to think through the problems of not providing it. (Imagine the postwar Libyan chaos of a territory run by extremists, brigands, and slavers, but this time in a major energy producer.)
I hope that magic button exists, that Donald Trump presses “bombs away” and we get everything we want and nothing we don’t. I sincerely hope the very next act of violence will solve all our problems, that it takes away their bomb practically forever, and that it somehow inspires the Iranians and their regime to make peace with us by Labor Day. I hope it scares Putin into retreat, inspires America’s military-aged men to achieve unprecedented rates of physical and moral fitness before a wave of voluntarism that is so impressive it leads to 1 billion Chinese people simultaneously renouncing communism. In other words, I hope the implicit theory behind this mania, that just one act of American willpower meeting success will generate infinite willpower and success afterward, is true.
But I’m not counting on it, any more than on my ragged, overweight, middle-aged, thrice-divorced friend and father of four who now giddily insists he’s found “the one.” All things being equal, I would rather the calculation about bombing Iran be taken by sober, knowledgeable people who seem alive to risks, downsides, and unintended consequences, just as I secretly hope my friend’s “one” finds a man with a steady job and steadier habits of the heart.