There’s no avoiding blunt reality.
There’s no avoiding blunt reality.
O n our podcast yesterday, Rich Lowry and I discussed whether it is time for President Trump to resume the intensive bombing campaign against Iran. After all, if anything, Iran is tightening, rather than easing, its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, its negotiating position is intransigent (surprise!), and if U.S. intelligence leaks to the New York Times are accurate, “Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it retains” along the strait, as well as 70 percent of both its mobile missile launchers and pre-war missile stockpile.
I’ll separately address why I’m skeptical about the Times report — more the tenor of it than what American spy agencies may be blabbing about damage assessments. For now, I am going to continue pounding the dead horse I’ve been beating for nearly three months. What the Trump administration is doing is bass-ackwards, to the dismay of supporters of action against the Death to America regime and, no doubt, to the delight of Trump detractors, who can’t believe their good fortune: a president who has allowed them to highlight his erratic nature while obscuring their hand in making Iran a more formidable threat.
If the Justice Department told a local federal prosecutor, “We’re going to give you two more prosecutors, three FBI agents, and a paralegal for the next four weeks,” the prosecutor would initially think, “That’s great, I’ve really been strapped for resources.” But if the Justice Department then told the prosecutor, “We want you to take these additional resources and build a historical conspiracy case that will eradicate organized crime in the United States,” the prosecutor’s reaction would be, “You’re out of your mind.” And rightly so. The contemplated mission, if it could be carried out, would call for a robust squad of prosecutors, hundreds of investigators and support staff, and months — maybe years — of time.
In the rational world, you first figure out what your objectives are. Only then do you assign to the task the resources — including the necessary time — to accomplish it.
Of course, I am not saying that no initial consideration is given to resources. Accounting for your store of assets is essential to calculating what you can reasonably hope to accomplish. Ergo, you consider your resources in forming your objectives. While you may have goals you’d love to accomplish in a perfect world, you must operate in the real world, where objectives must be formed with an eye toward what you are willing to risk.
That, naturally, involves clear-eyed assessments of (a) the threat that you face, (b) the risks of inaction, and (c) the possibility of failure — i.e., if you act but don’t accomplish your objectives while expending some resources, what shape will you be in to face other threats? Once you’ve estimated what you need to accomplish and what you’re willing to risk that could plausibly get that job done, that becomes your timeline. Caveat: If, for various reasons, you know going in that time is of the essence, then you have to downsize your objectives to what can be accomplished in a shortened time frame.
This is not quantum physics. It’s common sense informed by experience. On that score, President Trump is lucky to have at his disposal highly experienced, competent military and intelligence officers who’ve been through conflicts and understand the traps — very much including the trap of assuming that an enemy from a different culture steeped in an apocalyptic ideology is going to think and act the same way we think and act in warfare.
Yet, rather than leaning on common sense and this collective experience, the president bull-headedly relies on his gut and ever-shifting perception of his political needs. His gut tells him: If I pound them hard enough, Iran will surrender in a few days because . . . who wouldn’t rather make a deal than endure that? And his political radar tells him: I don’t want to deal with Congress or give Iran too much heads-up, and much of my base will feel betrayed because I’m starting the kind of war I vowed to avoid, so this has to be quick — I’ll win and be done before opposition can mount.
Thus, his plan: Smash the stuffing out of them for a week or two. That’ll do it.
Yes, it was a week or two, not even the utterly unrealistic four to six weeks he finally settled on — also irrationally. Remember, when Trump greenlighted the attack on February 28, he was sure it would be over by late March/early April — when his meeting in China with Iran’s patron, Xi Jinping’s regime, was originally supposed to happen. That meeting, now ongoing, had to be postponed for over a month because the war ran long. And the president has since pretended that there is a “cease-fire” (notwithstanding persistent bombings, firefights, and blockades), and that “hostilities” have “terminated,” so he could have his summit with Xi under the illusion that there is no war (an illusion that the coldblooded Xi must find daft).
This has been Trump’s pattern all along. First, impose disabling resource restraints (only aerial attacks, no ground troops) and an arbitrarily brief timeline (one to two weeks, that became four to six weeks); only then, announce objectives so grandiose that it’s necessary to keep shifting them as it becomes ever more obvious that the artificial resource and time constraints make their accomplishment impossible: regime change, total surrender, conclusive forfeiture of nuclear ambitions, full delivery of all enriched uranium, destruction of Iran’s navy and ballistic-missile capabilities, and eradication of Iran’s capacity to support its jihadist proxies.
The question of what is to be done at this point, if it’s to be answered sensibly, depends on what it has always depended on: What do you want to accomplish?
That’s more of a morass now than it was at the beginning of the war. The president’s overconfidence in his gut led him to disregard the likelihood that Iran would (a) close the strait, and (b) attack America’s Sunni Arab allies. Now, whatever other aims it makes sense to pursue, the strait has to be reopened (absent that, this becomes a humiliating and potentially calamitous American defeat), and the confidence of our allies has to be restored (because if, out of fear of Iranian attacks, they withdraw permission to use their territory and air space for vital military operations, those operations can’t happen). Unfortunately, the necessity of fortifying our alliances involves supplying them with interceptors and other air-defense munitions that are in short supply and that our warfighting forces need — that’s a huge problem.
All that said, there’s no avoiding blunt reality. Resources, plans, and timelines have to be determined by a realistic assessment of objectives that our government is truly committed to accomplishing. For example, if we are committed to reopening the strait and that requires ground operations, then we need ground forces. If our military commanders are convinced that Iran’s aggression on the strait cannot be quelled without ground forces, but the president is not willing to deploy them for political reasons, then reopening the strait cannot be a realistic objective, no matter how much we may desire it and how catastrophic it may be to surrender on that point. (This, among other reasons, is why I’ve posited that Congress should authorize the use of military force. At this point, congressional Democrats must grasp that the strait is about America’s security and economic needs, not Trump’s political prospects.)
You can’t wish or will things into reality. You can’t change reality by describing it with deceptive words. If the president is serious that Iran can’t be allowed to have nuclear weapons, and if our government is saying that a country may not seize and extort tolls on a vital international waterway as if it were that country’s sovereign territory, then we have to commit whatever military assets and time are necessary to accomplish those goals. There are no shortcuts.
You know how you get something as detrimental to American national security as Obama’s Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action)? By incessantly saying Iran can’t have nuclear weapons while being unwilling, out of political calculation, to do what must be done to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.
The laws of physics and common sense haven’t changed. You still must first figure out what you must have and then allocate assets and time. Not the other way around.