On War Plans

I usually don’t offer perspectives on foreign affairs. Like most Americans, I know less about the rest of the world than I should—less history, less geography, fewer languages, less about other cultures. That’s not to say that I don’t know anything—the history of Nazi Germany, for instajnce, I’ve spent a lot of time with. And I read widely. But I don’t consider myself sufficiently knowledgeable about the Middle East, our military capabilities or Iran’s nuclear capabilities, alliances, vulnerabilities and strengths to assess the war that we have just started. I suspect that those in power in the US who launched this war do not have significantly greater knowledge than I have, have less awareness of their limitations, and are more convinced that absolute confidence and raw power are a fair substitute for thoughtful, informed consideration. But again, I don’t know.

What I do have, which again I do not see as a strength of the current administration, is a strong capacity for evaluating and mitigating risks, for contingency planning in the event those risks materialize and for validating assumptions before acting on those assumptions. These capacities, either possessed directly or by trusted advisors, seem to be the minimum, the bare minimum, that we should expect from our leadership before it, for instance, bombs a foreign country. But that is not something this administration has tolerated, let alone embraced.

It appears that we misidentified a girls’ school as an appropriate military target—and that the people who would have been in charge of validating military targets were among those whose positions had been previously eliminated by Pete Hegseth in a purge of Pentagon personnel responsible for oversight and for preventing civilian casualties. Those charged with caution, care and oversight were roadblocks to “lethality.” And we have certainly been lethal. Indeed, given that Senator Lindsay Graham has said that “we’re killing all the right people,” perhaps no one in the administration is much bothered by the deaths of 175 school girls and their teachers at US hands. Perhaps high body counts, even of schoolgirls, were all they were seeking.

It also appears that the Pentagon and the National Security Council did not understand the risk that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, or the global consequences of the closure of a key shipping lane for oil. Indeed, it’s not clear that even now the Pentagon understands that the Strait is closed. The Wall Street Journal quotes Hegseth as saying that it is open: “The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that.” Huh. Hard to imagine why no commercial ships are passing through it.

The biggest problem, however, appears to be that we had no long term plans for Iran. Perhaps a vague intention of installing a puppet government that would be friendlier to the US, perhaps a vague hope that the Iranian people would rise up and demand regime change. We have a president who does not believe in honoring his commitments unless it serves his interests to do so, which makes a negotiated solution hard to achieve. So where, and how, does this end?

Those who started this war do not know how to end it. And those who started this war seem to have a lack of empathy and compassion as complete as their inability to plan. No arrangements were made to ensure the safety of American citizens in the Middle East, and no resources were available to evacuate them in the early days of the war. It seems that we started a war without specific goals, analysis, contingency plans or strategic end-game, and with no efforts to secure the safety of those caught in the crossfire, including our own diplomats and their families.

The deaths of US soldiers will not move this administration emotionally; they will be addressed only to the extent they increase the likelihood that the administration will lose power in the next election. As for the deaths of others throughout the region—as Lindsey Graham says, “we are killing all the right people.” To care about the toll of war, it is necessary to recognize the fundamental humanity of others. And that is, and has always been, a fundamental failure of this administration.

There is plenty of gloomy speculation on social media on where we are heading: terrorism on US soil, reinstatement of the draft, deployment of nuclear weapons. Indeed, the term doom-scrolling has never been more accurate. I don’t know where we will end up as a country, or a world, but I do know this: we cannot continue to allow leaders who have the emotional maturity of toddlers to continue to determine the future of the world without some form of adult supervision. We are going to see, are in fact already seeing, all sorts of efforts to block or reject a transition of Congressional power to Democrats in the midterms—from the SAVE Act to gerrymandering to claims of fraud, seizures of ballot boxes, and threats of martial law—that we must prepare for. This coming election is a matter of life and death. And the current administration has gone all in on death.