Wars are unpredictable. It’s part of what makes war so dangerous. Nothing goes exactly according to plan, especially in the absence of a plan. With strategic carelessness, outcomes of wars are reduced to games of chance, or opportunities for those who are prepared to take advantage of them. Every war exposes fools and foolishness in preparation, execution and aftermath. Wars also reward the cunning.
Nitwits are opportunists who believe they are cunning, so they come crawling out of the woodwork when they think their moment has arrived.
The Biden administration was infiltrated by anti-Israel political operatives who exposed themselves through resignations of their posts while castigating Israel’s self-defense as a mythical “genocide.”
In the Trump administration, the recent resignation of Joe Kent with a fusillade of anti-Semitic rage laid bare the kinds of crackpot neo-Nazis that the current regime has filling its ranks.
In both cases, the lies told reveal a basic truth that there is no deterrent to reaching positions of power by adhering to delusional, unpatriotic notions that the most economically and militarily powerful country the world has ever known is somehow led about by a tiny country — Israel and a tiny minority of people — Jews — who exist only to undermine it.
With so many cuckoos running about in the halls of power, it can be difficult to discern who the voices of reason in our era might be, but there are a few who have made more reasonable comments.
When the current war began, it was an entirely foreseeable response by Iran that they would seek to close the Straits of Hormuz to use the price of oil as a weapon. John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at West Point, who has become a bit of celebrity and celebrated figure for his defense of Israeli tactics in Gaza, recently opined in the Washington Post that this eventuality is the result of decades of policy failure to create a viable alternative for transiting oil from the Middle East.
Spencer intimates that despite decades of lambasting the Iranian regime for its threat to peace, it has been far easier to accept a Faustian bargain tacitly acknowledging Iranian control of the Straits than to invest billions in circumventing it.
Another interesting voice is that of Eliot Cohen, who is notable for having been an advisor to Condoleeza Rice during the George W. Bush Administration, but who appears to have been substantially at odds with the strategic perspective of then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld’s vision of the American military was a smaller, cheaper, faster force that was more reliant on technology to fight two small-scale wars simultaneously in what was then perceived to be a monopolar world with the US as its chief.
Cohen recently asserted in The Atlantic that the current war illustrates how the US is woefully underprepared for prolonged conflict both with Iran and other, more challenging adversaries because we have ignored the need for industrial output like fighting ships and drone defenses.
Both Spencer and Cohen point out the weaknesses in the American long game.
Policy failures that extend over decades collide with near-term considerations and result in improvisation whose impact on the future is hard to predict. The absence of a coherent strategy for the governance of postwar Iran when embarking on our current military adventure allows those with improvisational skill to dictate the outcome and they are doing so in real time.
For example, it recently came to light that the hit list of Iranian leaders included Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian minister for foreign affairs, but his assassination was called off at the behest of Pakistan. Why? The answer may be that he is seen as a viable candidate to be the next leader of Iran because he is perceived as someone the US (and Pakistan) can deal with.
Designating Abbas Araghchi as a “pragmatist” or a “moderate” is a shining example of how the veneer of an education at a Western university bestows legitimacy on the ultimate apologist for Iranian tyranny.
Araghchi earned his doctorate at Kent University in the UK with a dissertation entitled “The Evolution of the Concept of Political Participation in Twentieth-Century Islamic Political Thought.”
In it, he says from the start, “While the very foundation of the concept of democracy-liberalism is rejected, its tangible appeals and advantages are more or less approved and sought after.”
In other words, the Iranian state, which maintains certain democratic institutions for “its tangible appeals” nevertheless must exist as a repressive, tyrannical regime. Indeed, Araghchi served in the IRGC, so he knows very well the machinery that is necessary to keeping a “democratic” Iranian regime in power.
He writes further, “The two concepts of divine and popular sovereignty co-exist in the Constitution (of Iran) in a symbiotic context, with the upper hand given inevitably to divine sovereignty.” He means by this, of course, that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” as Orwell put it.
The United States, having gone out to war without a succession plan on the heels of decades of inadequate strategic preparation for precisely the circumstance in which we find ourselves, means that the way out of this conflict may rely heavily on ad hoc solutions that leave us no better off than we were when the war began.
Certainly, it is for the best to degrade Iranian military capabilities and perhaps set back its nuclear program, but anything that has been destroyed can be rebuilt, even faster if as a condition of ending the war we grant sanctions relief to a presumptive moderate who is anything but. This war, like all others, is unpredictable.
The US or Israel might decide tomorrow to kill Araghchi, but that will just mean moving on to the next improvisational choice. At some point, the US must have serious leaders who will think seriously about long-term American strategy.
While we’re at it, perhaps we could also realize that employing fanatical bigots in White House roles impedes that work.
