Victories Need to Be Visible

A little over three weeks into the war against Iran, we still don’t know what victory looks like. That’s a problem, because victories need to be clearly visible to the ordinary citizen. That’s important not only to Republicans’ political popularity but as a matter of the democratic legitimacy of our foreign policy. That concern is heightened when wars are waged entirely on the basis of an executive decision without Congress.

I’m not that concerned that the war is taking weeks rather than days or hours, or that it is hard to tell from open sources exactly what we’ve accomplished yet. Sure, it’s frustrating in an era of instant gratification that we don’t yet have a resolution wrapped up neatly in a bow. But what matters, ultimately, is not how things look day-to-day but where we wind up, how long it takes to get there, and what it costs us along the way. Progress reports can be deceiving, especially in wars that don’t involve a clear territorial front that we can see advancing across a map. We’ve had predictions of doom and quagmire before in wars that went fairly swiftly. We’ve had dark hours in the early months of big wars such as the Civil War and the Second World War. And then there have been wars such as Afghanistan, where we were winning by any measure at every point for 20 years, and yet still lost because we hadn’t committed to victory conditions that we could make stick.

But at the same time, this isn’t a one-night raid of the sort we conducted in Venezuela, where the public doesn’t even know it’s happening until it’s over. This is war in all but name, and even the name is increasingly hard to deny. Wars have real costs: They get people killed, they cost money, they damage and destroy equipment, they expend munitions, they exact diplomatic costs, they interrupt trade and travel, and on and on. They are deadly serious business. They should be waged to victory — or not started at all.

But what is victory? This is the question that has bothered me since we first started discussing a second strike on Iran months after Operation Midnight Hammer last June. Ending the Iranian regime once and for all and thereby removing a key piece on the board for China and Russia is worth doing, and my conditional support for the war assumes that this is how it’s supposed to end. But we didn’t quite go that far in Venezuela, and it’s not at all clear that we are taking the necessary steps to get there now.

We have yet to get a clear, formal statement from the president about our war aims. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have any; various senior figures have listed a number of things we intend to accomplish, such as destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, its capacity to threaten the Strait of Hormuz, and any prospect of it restarting a nuclear program (the latter of which was supposed to be resolved by Midnight Hammer).

But those are unsatisfactory goals. First, wars for disarmament tend to be short-term solutions. Arms grow back. If you disarm an enemy, but he remains your enemy, he will find a way to rearm himself with something that can hurt you. Germany didn’t stay disarmed forever after the First World War. Russia didn’t keep the Black Sea demilitarized forever after the Crimean War. Eventually, the will to keep policing the other side’s capabilities dissipates. It’s hard to take the level of vigilance and willingness to act that exists in wartime and sustain it in perpetuity. If you want a real forever war, try keeping troops and aircraft and ships on the scene for monitoring compliance with weapons inspections, a no-fly zone, economic sanctions, and other methods of keeping a sovereign nation in the penalty box without an end in sight. The crumbling of the cordon around Saddam Hussein eleven years after the Gulf War illustrated that.

There’s also a systemic problem that runs deeper into the heart of democratic decision-making: How do we know it worked? Some victories are undeniable, and the citizenry at large can see them. This is true both of total victories and of particular war aims. The Nazi regime was gone. Japan was occupied. Slavery and secession were ended. American independence was secured. Manuel Noriega was captured. Iraq was driven out of Kuwait. South Korea was kept independent of the North. California was ceded to us, and so were Cuba and the Philippines.

But reduction in missile capabilities? Degrading of force structures? Extension of timelines to develop weapons of mass destruction? The average American can’t see these things. We are compelled to rely on intelligence assessments, which come up the pipe from all manner of raw, classified inputs. They’re digested by people the public can’t see and doesn’t know whether or not to trust, and they’re evaluated by various among our 17 intelligence agencies and the political brokers who deliver them to the president and other leaders whose word is apt to be mistrusted by at least half of the population. Much as I respect the professional competence of our intelligence gatherers and analysts, they work in an imprecise business, they are often factious and fractious even inside and among the various agencies, there are multiple points in the process at which political agendas can be injected from different sides, their work process is not transparent, and the sheer number of agents and agencies exacerbates the dynamic that always exists with experts and data: You can cherry-pick the ones you want and find somebody to say almost anything.

Intelligence work has great usefulness, but this is why wars must be started, ended, and justified by reference to bigger things than debated questions of capability. The people, who in America are sovereign, simply have no way to intelligently exercise their sovereignty when they can’t see how the sausage is made.

This is actually a point Donald Trump has shrewdly grasped in the past, even if he didn’t put it in those terms. Republicans who fought for small government and supply-side economic policy for years often faced the difficulty of explaining exactly what they got done. This has often been the case in budget battles, where “spending cuts” have frequently meant restraining the rate of growth of a program or budget compared with what it could have been if the other party got its way. But in evaluating budget deals, you need not only detailed familiarity with the eye-watering minutiae of the budget — you also need to know what was on the table and possible behind closed doors. Put another way, you needed to trust what Beltway insiders told you was a win or a loss. And if you didn’t trust them, there was always somebody else offering the opposite explanation. Trump is by no means a small-government guy anyway, but more to the point, one thing Trump has typically grasped by his “Donnie from Queens at the end of the bar” instincts has been that victories need to be visible and visceral, so everybody can see what trophies you brought home. This is a man whose business career, after all, was organized around putting his name in giant gold letters on the side of enormous buildings. He’s not selling subtlety.

So, in explaining to the public what we’ve accomplished to justify the costs of this war, don’t tell me what’s on a piece of paper, or how many silos or centrifuges we left standing. Show me something I can see. If you can’t do that, you’re not going to get far with the American people.