There are many critics of our war against Iran, particularly on the left. My jaunty riposte to them is in the form of a Rolling Stones/Mick Jagger quote: You can’t always get what you want, but you just might find you get what you need. Or at least a lot of it.
Part of the opposition to this broadly unpopular war is our now generational American exhaustion from the forever wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, and is quite understandable. Part of the opposition is simply “anything Trump does I hate.”
Let’s take a sober assessment about what has been gained so far, and the cost.
The killing of the Ayatollah in the first minutes was a major win when you consider his government would have sacrificed tens of thousands of Iranian lives to defend him. That’s one hell of a chess move from the outset, a way to kick over the board. Evaporating with Khamenei was a whole stratum of his top cronies.
Their nuclear program is undoubtedly mauled “bigly” due to our actions: the nukes are the main game here, not regime change, though that would be excellent.
In concert with our Israeli allies, Iran’s ballistic missile program is, if not ruined, very depleted. Consider: with one tragic school exception, Americans and Israelis can shoot straight, and given the thousands of airstrikes – even without exact metrics – we can guess their effectiveness has deeply impacted Iranian power.
The Iranian Navy is sunk. Again, with the help of our Israeli friends over recent years, Iran’s air defenses and antique air force are now toast, sad though it is to see those classic 1970s American military jets destroyed. Like in Venezuela and Syria, this is terrible advertising for Russian air defense technology. I know where I’m NOT shopping for my next over-the-horizon theater air defense radar system.
So USA 3: Russian armament industry (its second largest after oil): 0.
Missile factories and Iran’s ability to produce other armaments like Shahed drones that kill our Ukrainian allies have been ruined.
Strategically, the war has opened a rift – or rather exposed the fragility of Iran’s alliances with Russia and China – and isolated them from the Gulf countries who endured (Qatar), put up with (Saudi Arabia), or did business with Iran (UAE) previously. All are geopolitical slam dunks.
We tightened the sanction screws and, vitally, the Rial went from being merely troubled to now worth less than animal fertilizer in international finance: our efforts over the past few years.
Sure, no regime change – though after 40 years of totalitarianism that goal was a tall order which would have required a really, really large effort and cost for Iran’s dissidents, the Gulfies, Israel, and ourselves.
An unreported win is the (probable) shift in power dynamics within the chaotic upper reaches of government in Tehran, tending to suggest the IRGC rather than the Mullahs are running the show.
This assumes nepo-baby Mojtaba Khamenei is dead or indisposed and out of the game. Hard to argue he isn’t at this point. Or did we miss his latest press conference?
Although speculative, generals are generally less apocalyptic, less bent on martyrdom than clerics, so I see this as a win for our side. We also whacked many of the religious establishment’s hugely important “Assembly of Experts” early in the war in another spectacular strike. Generals and soldiers make more rational decisions than holy men who talk to God and think He talks to them.
I wouldn’t put too much stock in the M.o.U. “deal,” mainly because both Trump and the Islamic Republic are two of the most spectacularly untrustworthy liars. Both parties are compulsive, reflexive conmen (“con-nation?”). I’m only interested in results: burnt-out missile factories, chaos, garbage Rials, sunk navy, angry elites, dead mullahs. These are today’s reality. Plus, the war isn’t over.
It’s not all a win; everything is a trade-off, and so let’s look honestly at the costs.
Money: our troops, satellites, and warships need to be paid and continue to work forever anyway, so they’re fixed costs. Munitions are made to be used and indeed useless and an actual loss if never fired. It does cost a lot to move people and metal about the planet, but “THE WAR COST xxx GAZILLION” headlines are quite misleading if you understand how money works.
As a former finance guy, I really don’t see an accounting disaster here. Surely the real cost, the one that matters most, is lives. First and foremost, our servicemen and women, of whom fourteen have been killed. Every flag-draped coffin arriving in Dover, Delaware, is horrible, but so are wars.
Our allies’ lives are also important and there have been some deaths—though not many in the Gulf and Israel: according to Al Jazeera, between 130–170 total deaths, 60 in Israel. Further, if we’re balancing scales, all these combined deaths are fewer than the Islamic Republic routinely kills in an afternoon’s protest in any Iranian city lately.
I’d ask critics of this war, including my fellow Manhattan liberals: how could it have gone better if you take into account the extra blood and treasure those maximalist goals would have required to do, say, regime change?
Further, this fight has a huge imperative, strategic and moral. This isn’t 9/11 revenge inflicted on Afghanistan, nor is it a crazy war of choice in Iraq.
I challenge my readers to find a more evil regime in our lifetime than the Islamic Republic of Iran. Sure, North Korea, Somalia, or Afghanistan treat their people worse, but their “negative externalities” have been limited. Be sure to include in this moral accounting Iran’s destruction of five countries over the last 40 years.
Let’s go down this rabbit hole:
The odious Syrian Ba’athist regime of the Assads was almost entirely reliant on both Russia (of course!) and Iran. Iran even gave Iranian citizenship, a dubious reward, to Afghan fighters and illegals in Iran to go fight in Syria to prop up the Assad dynasty.
The suffering of the Lebanese people was sponsored and financed directly from Tehran, plus the blowing up of 241 U.S. Marines in 1983, ditto the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the Western hostages.
Hezbollah—along with the murderous curse of Palestinian “refugees”—jointly are the destroyers of the beautiful Republic of Lebanon. Hezbollah is an Iranian project leaving unlucky Lebanon a vassal state of Iran.
Connected to all that: worldwide terrorism like two huge bombings of Jews in Argentina in the 1990s, assorted hijackings, and assassinations worldwide.
If you count Gaza as a “country”—as ill-informed people do—Oct. 7th and the consequent payback, the IDF “redecoration” of that terrorist enclave, was in large part an Iranian project whose help to Hamas was crucial.
We also have the Houthi hooligans of Yemen who, since the 1980s, have ruined that country and caused perhaps the worst decades of human suffering in our current era. Their piracy boosted the price of your Amazon purchases. All Iran all the time.
The Republic of Iraq was and is infested with Iranian-paid and trained Shia militias. This is ongoing. There’s your five ruined countries.
And money: the Iranian people are so poor in large part because of clerical/IRGC corruption and because of their foreign adventurism. The good citizens of Iran have been generationally robbed to the extent that, looking at economic growth rates under the Shah and projecting, without the revolution Iran SHOULD have a living standard/GDP close to southern EU countries like Portugal or Greece.
Further, the broader Islamic cause, which was juiced and financed by Iran and Saudi Arabia since the 1980s, has resulted in an almost unlimited amount of human suffering: from 9/11 to various empowered Islamists and their murderous jihads from Morocco to Malaysia. The dysfunction of the Middle East is directly attributable to Iranian revolutionary “Third Worldism,” Saudi religious propagation, and the Palestinians’ uniquely toxic efforts.
There is no worse actor, no more insidious global cancer than the Islamic Republic.
Finally, I’d ask doubters and critics to answer: how could it have gone better? What is your vision of the perfect outcome here? At what cost?
What do critics of the war imagine? After blasting the Ayatollah and his turbaned mates to hell, the IRGC could have said “You got a point there, thanks Yankees and Jews,” then turned Iran into a Jeffersonian democracy, opened big shiny American and Israeli embassies, and behaved up to the civilizational level the Persian people were capable of before 1979?
Perhaps critics think that with the right magic dust, and Obama maybe, Iran and the rest of the world could sing Kumbaya in Farsi around the campfire and live our best wellness lived-experiences? Maybe, but in the words of Mick Jagger…
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