To the Editor:
In “The Illiteracy of the Iran War” (Opinion guest essay, March 31), Yonatan Touval correctly diagnoses the strategic failures of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, noting that policymakers possess a flawless “algebra” of destruction while remaining blind to the human realities on the ground. However, attributing this crisis to a lack of “literacy” or historical imagination misidentifies the root cause.
The disruption of the Strait of Hormuz and the widening of the war’s economic radius are not merely imaginative failures; they also represent a catastrophic miscalculation of risk.
While the defense and domestic energy sectors may experience a short-term boost from this conflict, the downstream effects on the broader domestic economy are severe.
American households and commercial supply chains are now absorbing the friction of paralyzed logistics networks, spiking fuel costs and lower profits. Relying exclusively on A.I.-powered targeting metrics while ignoring the cascading economic and geopolitical blowback is not an imaginative error — it is a fundamental failure of risk management.
We do suffer not from a deficit of literary imagination in Washington but rather from a strategic architecture that willfully ignores the devastating material costs of its own policies.
Steven Rhodes Mount Vernon, Va.
To the Editor:
Yonatan Touval offers a brilliant analysis of our failure to understand the difference between winning and losing in Iran. The president’s recent reference to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 may have suggested his unconscious awareness that simply sinking ships does not inspire surrender; it does the opposite.
The tragic failures we see in history suggest a fundamental truth about free will. When we choose to do the right thing, we do so because we see that it is in our interest to help others. When we choose to do something that injures others as well as ourselves, we say it’s because we must.
Perhaps we should choose leaders with enough self-awareness to understand what is truly in the national interest.
Duncan Schmitt Woodstock, N.Y.
To the Editor:
Yonatan Touval identifies a real problem in his critique of the war on Iran, but he stops short of a crucial point. The issue is not that technological systems cannot understand meaning; it is that we are increasingly allowing those systems to replace the human responsibility to interpret it.
A.I. does not remove human judgment. It amplifies the nature of the mind using it. If leadership is shallow, reactive or trapped in its own narrative, A.I. will amplify those shortcomings with extraordinary efficiency. If leadership is disciplined, historically grounded and capable of holding contradiction, A.I. becomes something entirely different: a force for clarity.
What we are witnessing is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of integration. We have built machines that can see everything, while failing to cultivate leaders who can understand what they are seeing. That gap is now the most dangerous terrain in modern conflict.
The real question is not whether A.I. can grasp human meaning. It is whether humans, in the age of A.I., are still capable of rising to meet the responsibility that its use demands.
Joseph Korson Jerusalem
To the Editor:
While reading Yonatan Touval’s essay about the Iran war, I couldn’t help but think of the lack of education in the humanities we as a society have become willing to accept. We have replaced learning with instant gratification, 30-second sound bites and performance art.
This is all exacerbated by a president and an administration that are attacking institutions of higher learning and that revel in and celebrate anti-intellectualism. Our society, from top to bottom, is becoming a place where nuance, respect for history and the understanding of human nature are completely irrelevant.
President Trump and his acolytes act on impulse and with an overwhelming need to compensate for their own shortcomings. They rely on simplified viewpoints of war and peace. If we elect simple-minded leaders, we end up with simple-minded policy, limited only, as the president has put it, by their “own morality.”
The experts in Persian and Iranian history, culture and policy in our government (those we haven’t lost to the misguided cuts to our so-called deep state) face the daunting task of convincing those in power that war is not just about exacting violence, and that their belief that this war will be short and decisive is, as Robert Wilson Lynd put it, “one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.”
Courtney Cherry Houston
To the Editor:
Yonatan Touval bemoans the lack of perspective of our leaders in Washington and Jerusalem in planning the war in Iran. He advises paying more attention to literature and history, citing Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” as models.
I was taught “Macbeth” for a few weeks in my junior year in high school in South Orange, N.J., in 1950-51. The following year, we spent even more time on “Hamlet.” A year or two later, I read “War and Peace” while working as a counselor at a summer camp in Maine.
All of my grandchildren graduated from good high schools and colleges. None read “Macbeth” or “Hamlet” and certainly not “War and Peace.” Strategic obtuseness about the outcomes of conflict seems destined to persist.
Lonnie Hanauer West Orange, N.J.
To the Editor:
Beautifully written piece. The irony is that the authors of this war lack an understanding not only of their enemies but of themselves as well.
John Clark Cold Spring, N.Y.
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