The One Question on Iran

Can only be answered by a historically unreliable narrator.

“We keep bombing our little hearts out.” — Donald Trump

“We negotiate with bombs.” - Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth

The language is cavalier. These are men talking about killing people— sometimes children— and risking the lives of the Americans doing the fighting. Keep that in mind as you calculate the costs.

As the costs accumulate—the civilian dead, the oil prices, the global economic pain which will endure, the regional fires still burning—the question is still the same: Was this war of choice worth it?

That question has two inputs. How dangerous was Iran? And was war the only way to answer that danger? You need both to reach a verdict.

Start with the threat. Iran was and is dangerous. It wanted to destroy Israel and kill Americans. It had enriched enough uranium for potentially ten nuclear weapons and had no civilian justification for doing so. American presidents and candidates of both parties have promised they would keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. This war is what that looks like.

In that sense, Donald Trump is keeping a campaign promise when he, as president, chooses denying Iran a nuclear weapon from his carousel of justifications for starting a war. (The fact that campaign promises become wars is why we shouldn’t treat presidential elections as a game.)

It is possible to ask questions about this war without being naive about Iran, though the president’s defenders make it seem those who question are naive: to question the war is to misunderstand the danger.

Here, for example, is Senator Rick Scott speaking to reporters about whether he thinks it’s a good idea to lift sanctions on the sale of Iranian oil.

They want to kill us. The Iranian government wants to kill all of us. They want nuclear weapons to destroy everyone standing here. They want to ill our kids our families. That’s what they want to do. We’ve got to stop. We’ve got to stop and make sure they don’t have ballistic missiles. We have to stop it. We have no choice.

Scott is employing a standard rhetorical trick: respond to hard questions by raising the stakes until the question seems irresponsible. The implicit argument is that all actions are justified by the threat. If you’re asking questions let me remind you of the threat.

That move only makes sense if there was exactly one possible response to the threat—if the existence of the danger and the necessity of this particular answer were the same proposition. They’re not. Or at least, that proposition has not been proved. The threat being real is the beginning of the analysis, not the end of it.

If anything, taking the danger seriously demands harder questions about whether the response was calibrated to actually diminish it—or whether a battered, humiliated Iran with its industrial base destroyed and its dignity in ruins becomes more dangerous, not less.

So back to the question: was this the only means available? Negotiations in February were showing progress. The Omani channel was open. Whether those alternatives were genuinely exhausted or strategically abandoned is exactly what we need to know to answer the central question.

Which brings us to the real problem: The only person who can tell us the threat level at the time the decision was made is the president. The only person who can tell us whether alternatives were real, or there were none at all, is the president.

The person who holds the answers to both questions is someone who lies repeatedly — about matters big and small, and when the truth would do just as well.¹ The administration has treated reality as a disposable commodity, redefining words when their plain meaning is inconvenient and asking us not to believe what can be seen with our own eyes.

The last time America went to war based on a president’s judgments about intelligence and the futility of diplomatic progress, the leading figure in American politics called for his impeachment. That charge rested on a specific claim: not that Bush had misread the intelligence, not that he’d been wrong, but that he’d known the truth and said otherwise. Lying wasn’t a side accusation. It was the whole indictment.

Here is Donald Trump making that case²:

President Donald Trump would not survive the judgments of candidate Donald Trump. Which leaves you where the piece began: calculating costs you can see against a threat you have to take someone’s word for. The someone, in this case, is a man who has already told you what it looks like when a president lies a country into war. He described it precisely. He called it a big fat mistake. He said they knew. That’s the standard he set. Whether President Trump, in his own war, has had an outbreak of telling the truth, Americans have no way to know.

1. And NBC has a story that suggests the President is not exactly up to speed on what’s going on in the conflict.

2. FOOTNOTE: DICKERSON: … on Monday, George W. Bush will campaign in South Carolina for his brother. As you’ve said tonight, and you’ve often said, the Iraq War and your opposition to it was a sign of your good judgment.

In 2008, in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, talking about President George W. Bush’s conduct of the war, you said you were surprised that Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi didn’t try to impeach him.

You said, quote: “which personally I think would have been a wonderful thing.” When you were asked what you meant by that and you said: “For the war, for the war, he lied, he got us into the war with lies.” Do you still believe President Bush should have been impeached.

TRUMP: First of all, I have to say, as a businessman I get along with everybody. I have business all over the world.

(BOOING)

TRUMP: I know so many of the people in the audience. And by the way, I’m a self-funder. I don’t have — I have my wife and I have my son. That’s all I have. I don’t have this.

(APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: So let me just tell you, I get along with everybody, which is my obligation to my company, to myself, et cetera.

Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right? Now, you can take it any way you want, and it took — it took Jeb Bush, if you remember at the beginning of his announcement, when he announced for president, it took him five days.

He went back, it was a mistake, it wasn’t a mistake. It took him five days before his people told him what to say, and he ultimately said, “it was a mistake.” The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don’t even have it. Iran has taken over Iraq with the second-largest oil reserves in the world.

Obviously, it was a mistake.

DICKERSON: So…

TRUMP: George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.

DICKERSON: But so I’m going to — so you still think he should be impeached?

BUSH: I think it’s my turn, isn’t it?

TRUMP: You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

(BOOING)