After I wrote a column criticizing “the folly of attacking Iran,” I had pushback from some Iranians, who understand the region far better than I ever will.
“We the Iranians wanted this,” one replied on social media. “You don’t know how it’s like to live under the boots of one of the most brutal regimes.”
They raise a fair question: If some Iranians are celebrating in the streets — so desperate for change that they welcome the bombing of their own cities — should we object?
I sympathize with those Iranians, because I’ve seen the oppression firsthand in my own reporting in Iran over the years: police officers swooping in on my interviews; security thugs shouting at women to cover up; and intelligence agents who once detained me in Tehran, accused me of being a spy and told me I could be imprisoned indefinitely until I confessed. It is terrifying to feel the breath of Iran’s dictatorship on your neck.
In Iran, I saw resentment of the regime everywhere. Once I encountered it even in the office of a grand ayatollah in the holy city of Qom: My interpreter jokingly introduced me as coming from the Great Satan, and an aide to the ayatollah responded with a laugh: “America is only Baby Satan. We have Big Satan right here at home.”
Iran contains multitudes, of course, and the regime does have supporters, especially in rural areas. ven among reformers, there is some fear that this war will make things worse and perhaps threaten the nation’s survival. When I asked one Iranian dissident what he expected from the war, he was pithy: “Nothing good.”
While it’s natural for some Iranians to hope that this war can liberate their country and let them breathe again, I also remember being in Kabul early in the Afghanistan war and having Afghans tell me how thrilled they were to see the last of the Taliban. I witnessed crowds in Basra, Iraq, celebrating the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In Tripoli, Libya, I saw throngs cheering the American intervention. In short, initial enthusiasm is not a reliable predictor of success.
For now, the Iranian regime is not crumbling, but is expanding the war. The Iranian people are not overthrowing their government, and the war is spreading across the region. Aside from the deaths of Iranians, Americans and others, oil and gas prices are rising, and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz is being choked off. The suffering is felt even far away: UNICEF reported that 18,000 children were displaced in Lebanon after the war reached that country.
All this had cost us, by one estimate, $5 billion as of Day 3 of the war.
The Trump administration may be about to add to the chaos by supporting armed Kurdish separatists, perhaps propelling Iran toward civil war. Syria’s civil war sent millions of refugees pouring across the world, and a similar conflict inside Iran — with roughly four times the population of Syria — could lead to even greater flows of refugees, especially if ethnic conflicts involving Kurds or Baluchis spilled over to neighboring countries.
But … but … but we killed Iran’s supreme leader!
Yes, that’s true. But while Americans saw the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a way to weaken his regime, there’s some reason to think that Khamenei welcomed his own martyrdom as a way to strengthen it. Indeed, his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, is now said to be a leading candidate to become the new paramount leader — a way for hard-liners to perpetuate their brutality.
The security apparatus, especially the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (with which the younger Khamenei has close ties), seems likely to play a more significant role in Iran. That could mean even more enthusiasm for nuclear weapons and regional proxy forces.
Look, we all need some humility here. It is of course possible that the regime will collapse and that a democratic Iran will emerge. Occasionally, optimists are right, even in the Middle East.
The outcome of this war may depend in part on whether Iran runs out of missiles and drones first, or we exhaust our supply of interceptors first.
Depletion of munitions for this unnecessary war is a real problem. Linda Bilmes, a Harvard expert on the cost of wars, told me that the United States used up more than 20 percent of its entire worldwide stockpile of THAAD interceptors last year defending Israel during the 12-day war with Iran. And even if our munitions of THAADs, Patriots and Tomahawks are adequate, it may take years to restore supply levels for the next crisis.
One of America’s great senators, J. William Fulbright, responded to the Vietnam War in 1966 by denouncing what he called “the arrogance of power.” He cautioned: “Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.” He framed it this way: “We are still acting like Boy Scouts dragging reluctant old ladies across streets they do not want to cross.”
In Iraq, our arrogance of power led us to start a war that ended up costing hundreds of thousands of lives (mostly those of Iraqis) and perhaps $3 trillion — and ultimately benefited Iran. In Afghanistan, we wasted lives and some $3.4 trillion over two decades to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
Having covered both wars and had friends killed and injured there, I fear that Trump’s new war — in the nation located between Iraq and Afghanistan — will similarly end in mangled bodies and shattered hopes.
President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the architects of this war, both seem afflicted by the arrogance of power. It was Netanyahu who in 2002 told the United States Congress: “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots, is gone.”
I have no evidence that Trump started this war to distract us from the Epstein files or other political troubles. But in 2012 Trump did tweet, “Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin — watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran.”
I also don’t know to what degree Netanyahu pushed Trump into this war. But what I do believe is that in Trump and Netanyahu we are seeing tactical brilliance harnessed to strategic confusion, with no clear goals or offramp. I worry that if the war stalls, Trump could even put boots on the ground on Kharg Island, Iran’s oil base, taking us even deeper into a potential quagmire.
A president’s first task is to make us safer. Instead, it seems to me that Trump has catapulted us into an unnecessary conflict, consuming American and Iranian lives alike, costing billions of dollars and damaging the economy — all while propelling us into peril.
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