With no end in sight, the war launched by the United States and Israel against Iran remains deeply unpopular. On the day it started, only 27 percent of Americans supported the unprovoked military operation that interrupted ongoing diplomatic talks. Five months later, that number has changed little, with 35 percent of the 4,505 U.S. adults polled by Reuters/Ipsos in early August saying they approved of the war.
Even those in the West who don’t object on moral grounds continue to take issue with the obvious lack of strategy. Few are convinced Iran was really two weeks away from a nuclear weapon, and confusion about the reasons for war continues unabated.
If this latest military adventure, which has already cost American taxpayers at least $37.5 billion, has exemplified one glaring feature of the second administration of President Donald Trump, it is the absence of advisors with the experience and self-assurance to provide their leader with honest assessments.
Clearly, this didn’t originate from an overnight souring of views on Iran, or as a reaction to some unexpected provocation by the Iranians. Both before last year’s 12-Day War and again before this latest war kicked off, Tehran and Washington were in the middle of active negotiations.
The current imbroglio is the culmination of decades of fearmongering about an exceptional Iranian threat, one that purportedly demanded nothing less than all-out war. This perception was consistently inflated by a squad of media conglomerates, hawkish think tanks, and Iran experts who have been making the case since the late 1990s that Iran was so different from other foreign policy challenges that it was utterly immune to a diplomatic resolution.
From the democracy-averse ideologues of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) to the ensemble of prominent diplomats and scholars comprising the nonprofit United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), organized voices pushing for an iron fist in dealing with Tehran have been untiring in keeping the flames of enmity burning.
Diasporic hawks advising U.S. governments at different times have also contributed to manufacturing the crisis. The activist and media personality Masih Alinejad, the Hollywood actress Nazanin Boniadi, and the pro-monarchy advocate Saeed Ghasseminejad are some of these experts who have championed the short-sighted focuses and policies that have led us into the current situation.
And then there were the non-Persian-speaking Iran experts who have never set foot in the country, but have successfully marketed themselves as authoritative voices. The neoconservative writer Joshua Muravchik, who in 1995 was one of the founders of the Maryland-based Foundation for Democracy in Iran, argued as early as 2006 that bombing Iran was the only real solution to a supposedly existential threat to U.S. national security.
The late Michael Ledeen, a former State Department consultant, spent much of his political career advocating for a war on Iran, a country he always wrote about with rage and unfiltered contempt. He called Iran “an accomplice to evil,” and referred to it as a “ruthless and determined enemy,” claiming without evidence that in 2009, it was preparing for “an all-out attack on American, British, French, and German targets wherever possible.”
Many of the reasons cited for this war, and to which Trump alluded in his remarks announcing Operation Epic Fury, have been circulating in Washington for years, even decades. Trump even referred to the 1979 hostage crisis; it was only through direct confrontation, he seemed to suggest, that this blot on America’s honor could be avenged.
“When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take,” he told the “great, proud people of Iran” in his address, promising them that the hour of their freedom was “at hand.”
But the reckless conduct of the war, including the killing of at least 120 Iranian schoolchildren in Minab, is only one strike against it. Equally condemnable is the fact that the operation was built on the false assumption that a war would lead inexorably to regime change in Tehran.
The debate about regime change in Iran is not a novelty, and it has been under way for almost the lifespan of the Islamic Republic. But even many of the most devout proponents of regime change cannot articulate what a political transition in Iran would entail in practice. Which is perhaps why, to rationalize his lavish spending on this war of choice, Trump insisted on several occasions that regime change had already been accomplished.
On March 24, Trump said at a White House meeting that “we really had regime change” because “the leaders are all different.” A few days later, talking to reporters aboard Air Force One, he reiterated his position by arguing that “we’ve had regime change,” and that his team was negotiating with a third regime made up of “very reasonable” people.
Trump’s about-face on forever wars has startled and disappointed many of his supporters. Indeed, he settled on or was goaded into starting a war of aggression in February, the president had a very different perspective. “In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins,” he told the Saudi-United States Investment Forum in Riyadh last March.
He commended the technological achievements of the Persian Gulf states, acknowledging that they were not the outcome of external planning: “And it’s crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western interventionists or flying people in beautiful planes, giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.”
And if his long history of lamenting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and warning against future Mideast wars is any guide, the 47th president understood that these expeditions were often futile. As such, the stalemate today is what the motley crew of experts and lobbyists feeding the White House misinformation should also take responsibility for.
Think tank groupthink about regime change has long dictated that Iran would be toppled through an act of insurgency or sustained coercion. The experts also suggested to decisionmakers in Washington that Iranian leaders had their one-way tickets booked for Moscow, and would ignominiously flee the second the bombs started falling.
But there’s a lot that the self-interested advisors have withheld from successive administrations, and particularly the current White House, which has demonstrated an astounding lack of knowledge about Iran. As Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, observed earlier this month, “One of the fundamental reasons the war in Iran is failing is a lack of basic understanding of both the country we started a war with and of the Middle East as a whole.”
Indeed, as a nation-state whose borders were not arbitrarily drawn up through a post-war convention, Iran will not collapse with the bombing of its military sites or assassination of its leaders.
Although it has long been portrayed as a bastion of authoritarianism, it is far from a monolith. Indeed, the political culture in Iran is much more competitive and dynamic than in places like China, Cuba, and Russia. More acts of protest have taken place in Iran than in any other nation in a neighborhood that is not exclusively the province of democratic bulwarks.
Unlike Iraq under Saddam Hussein, or Syria under Bashar al-Assad, or Afghanistan under the Taliban, Iran is not entirely under the thumb of a single leader or ruling clique. The state apparatus is multi-layered, and the civilian institutions that serve the public, despite their rampant corruption, have never been totally dysfunctional.
Compared to those of its neighbors, Iran’s developmental indicators, housing and transportation infrastructure, and financial institutions are in a deplorable state. However, it is notable that Iran has reached basic self-sufficiency in meeting most of its agricultural and industrial needs (and this despite five decades of sanctions).
The country has been increasingly pauperized, but higher education is still subsidized by the state. And despite chronic shortages of medicine and medical equipment, a 2019 Lancet study found its Healthcare Access and Quality index to be one of the highest in the Middle East and North Africa.
An entrenched antipathy to foreign intervention, which predates the 1953 coup, has long characterized the Iranian people’s perception of their relations with major powers, and this is one of the reasons why the Delcy Rodriguez model couldn’t be repeated in Iran.
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Regional adventurism, domestic repression, and economic mismanagement continue to be the hallmarks of the Islamic Republic of Iran. But these are enduring problems, and there is little reason to believe external intervention can provide a permanent remedy.
If the combined power of two of the world’s most powerful militaries failed to bring down this state, then perhaps there were material facts that the “Iran experts” populating think tanks and consulting firms inside the Beltway have not shared with their seniors. It’s quite difficult to emerge triumphantly from a confrontation with a party about which you don’t know anything.
