So You Lost A War To Iran

And you're going to try to convince us you… won. Wow. Wow, OK

Edited by Sam Thielman

IT'S WEEK FIVE of the Iran War—past the point Donald Trump initially forecasted it would be over—and the Trump administration has a new line: The Strait of Hormuz doesn't matter. 

Secretary of State-plus Marco Rubio attempted in an interview with al-Jazeera yesterday to convince an audience that the aims of the war were limited, achievable and consistent. Iran can't have a nuclear weapon; well, that's been Iran's position, which, the day Trump launched the war, the Omani foreign minister said was within reach. "They have to stop making all of these drones and all of these missiles," Rubio declared, as if Iran would negotiate away either program and leave itself defenseless in the face of aggression; and in any event, while the missiles demand is a longstanding poison pill by the American right and Israel, the drones demand is a new one, now that the U.S. and the Gulf has experienced the potency of the Shahed-136.

"We have very clear objectives that we're trying to achieve here," Rubio said. "Those objectives are the destruction of their air force, which has been achieved"—that's an add-on; Trump on Feb. 28 said it was their navy that the U.S. would destroy—"the destruction of their navy, which has largely been achieved; a significant reduction in the number of missile launchers that they have, which we're well on our way to achieving; and we are going to destroy the factories that make those missiles and those drones that they are using to attack their neighbors, and the United States and our presence in the region. We will achieve those objectives… in weeks, not months."

Now. While I don't want to marry form and content by bogging this edition down into cataloguing the drift in these objectives, it's necessary to point out that Rubio has abandoned as unachievable the fantasy of regime change. And while any state would prefer to have an intact navy and its air force, Iran has just proven that its ability to project power resides in its missiles and its drones, rather than its conventional military. And seeking a "significant reduction" in anything is a tell that you know you cannot eliminate the threat from that thing, so you employ a vague term you can define as needed to save face. But most importantly, Rubio is making one gigantic elision: the state of the vital commercial waterway, open when the U.S. and Israel launched this war, now throttled by Iran, which blocks ships flagged to the U.S. coalition. 

"One way or another," after the war, Rubio hand-waved, the strait will be opened. "We'll achieve those objectives in weeks, not months, and then we'll be confronted with this issue of the Strait of Hormuz," he said. "And it'll be up to Iran to decide. And if they choose to try to block the strait, then they will have to face real consequences. Not just from the United States, but from regional countries, and from the world." 

It'll be up to Iran to decide is the only accurate thing Rubio said. Here we have the foreign minister of a belligerent power—the regnant superpower, no less—insisting that if the U.S. ceases fighting with the Strait of Hormuz closed, it's still victory by the original terms the U.S. set out, no matter how thoroughly Iran has obviated those terms. Rubio has no choice but to persist with this absurdity, since otherwise he'll contradict Trump, the only fireable offense he could commit. Whether or not Rubio believes what he's saying, what he's describing is a situation in which the U.S. quits the war, leaving other combatants—the sort that never manifest and would certainly never manifest within range of Iranian missiles— to impose "real consequences" on Iran. That's not just a lost war. That's a humiliation.

But this isn't just Rubio. At the White House, spokesperson Karoline Leavitt similarly attempted to abjure responsibility for the closure of the Strait by presenting it as a steadfast refusal of mission creep. "The full reopening of the Strait is something the administration is working towards, but the core objectives of the operation have been clearly defined for the American people by the Commander in Chief," she said yesterday, and dubiously on the clear-definitions point. Trump himself is reduced to whining that if the nations that won't save his war for him really want oil so bad, they should go get it themselves. 

Until the U.S. actually ceases fighting, I will remain skeptical of any narrative attempt, whether by the administration or its critics, to herald the end of the war. The 82nd Airborne and 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit elements recently deployed to the Middle East have yet to enter the conflict. David Petraeus used to contrast the "Baghdad clock," meaning the Iraq War as it existed on the ground, with the "Washington clock," meaning the diminishing congressional tolerance for the war. Trump's narrative efforts target what we might call the Wall Street clock, to forestall the market panic that would be a rational reaction to the extended closure of one of the world's most important energy and commercial waterways. 

But Rubio, Leavitt and Trump are up to something else as well. They're trying to establish a narrative of victory regardless of when and how the war ends. They must do that, or the depths of the American humiliation in Iran will be as unavoidable at home as they are abroad. 

Iran, despite the decapitation of its leadership, has dealt the United States a strategic defeat in the classical sense. It will end the war in a stronger position than when it came under attack. The United States will end the war in a weaker position than before it launched its war. The rest is details. 

As Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times acknowledged—and I suppose, tacitly, Rubio is acknowledging—the U.S. can't militarily force the Strait open. We're at $4/gallon gas and rising in the United States, with the global economic shockwaves just beginning. (Here I'm not measuring the war in terms of human lives only because that is not a compelling metric to the United States, while economic pain is. It looks like the U.S. and/or Israel bombed an orphanage on Monday.) And remember, even if the U.S. were able to force the strait open, all the U.S. will have achieved is the state of affairs before it launched the war. 

Welcome to strategic defeat—or, I should say, welcome back, considering the whole War on Terror and all, and the Vietnam War. Only this time the consequences of defeat for the Americans are set to be far more severe. 

The Iran that survives Rubio's timeline will need to secure its deterrent capability against an America and an Israel that retain the capability of attacking it. Iran will be (1) in a position of leverage over the global economy; (2) under the control, as even the war's enthusiasts acknowledge, of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; (3) recognized by everyone outside of the U.S. coalition as the party that sought to avoid the conflict, and; (4) unwilling to negotiate without guarantees that no U.S. administration of either party would accept. It is for these reasons that the U.S.' gulf clients are now unambiguously pleading for Trump to continue the war. Knowing that if the war ended today the Iranians will be stronger, they need to draw the United States in deeper, to destroy sufficient Iranian military capability or otherwise force Iran to stop its successful strategy of targeting the Gulfies in response to U.S.-Israeli assaults. Their inability to achieve that objective through the United States is another gift to Iran, which will highlight the inability or unwillingness of Washington to defend the clients it endangers.  

As Anusar Farooqui writes at Policy Tensor: "Regardless of the war aims of the aggressors, it is clear that control of Hormuz is the main objective of the war. If the United States cannot forcibly retake Hormuz, that would constitute an unambiguous strategic defeat for the United States and a clear victory for Iran." Farooqui's piece is called "Iran Is A Great Power," and he supports his thesis compellingly, in a manner that the foreign-policy blob will be allergic to but unable to refute. (I would quibble with Farooqui's decision to move swiftly past the implications of Iran using China's BeiDou GPS alternative to forestall U.S. jamming capabilities. In fairness, we've all yet to process those implications, but I think this is worth returning to when the fog of war lifts. Also, his forecast that Iran emerges the regional hegemon may or may not be correct, but it should probably contend with Israel's current moves toward regional hegemony.)  

You can see why all the Trump people have left is to assert that this isn't defeat, it's victory. It's extremely important to resist this narrative, because the picture that Rubio presented to al-Jazeera is one where nothing between Iran and the United States is resolved. In such a case, it will be easy for the administration or a successor to return to war. A narrative that the 2026 War was a success will hasten both that return and to the deeper catastrophes it will unlock. You know how I know that? Because that's what happened once the U.S. adopted the narrative that Petraeus won the Iraq War and that the Taliban victory in Afghanistan was no big deal. 

In 2006, when I was on the cusp of being fired from The New Republic, I wrote a piece called "War-niks," intended to indict the bellicosity of people who were about to fire me. Ostensibly the piece was about how the American right adopted the alibi that "the true danger to national security is not misguided wars, but overzealous opposition to misguided wars." But it was really about the editors of TNR running away from their responsibility for the Iraq War, much as Rubio is trying to do for the Iran War. The piece isn't online anymore—I had to go through the Nexis news database to find a piece from nearly 20 years ago—but this is the part I hoped would sting: 

[I]t is a profound and painful thing to accept that one's country has involved itself in a futile or immoral cause; it is worse still to ask what intellectual or political mistakes led to such a nightmare. Faced with a disastrous war, the most important consideration is not "Were we wrong?" but "Why were we wrong?" and "How can we avoid being so wrong in the future?" These are questions that often will implicate the country's leading politicians and intellectuals, and its cherished myths. The anguish of confronting them has been on display in the Democratic Party's foreign policy debate for 35 years. … It is only when the United States shrinks from asking such agonizing questions that we wade back into agonizing wars. 

We will be right back here if the architects, the profiteers, the propagandists and the forerunners of this war get away with their evasions once again.  

SPEAKING OF THINGS that those TNR editors would have apologized for, the Israeli Knesset has passed an appalling escalation of its apartheid structure: a law authorizing the execution of Palestinians whom a military court "convicts" of killing Israelis. The Times of Israel reported a "jubilant" attitude in the Knesset displayed by architect Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose jacket was "sporting the golden noose-shaped lapel pin he and other advocates of the measure have donned to symbolize their campaign for the death penalty." It's a grim testament that the Times of Israel is more straightforward than the liberal Haaretz about what this law means: 

The law effectively enshrines capital punishment for Palestinians alone, as it explicitly excludes Israeli citizens or residents, and only Palestinians are tried in military courts. Israelis are tried in civilian courts.

Make no mistake, Marwan Barghouti's life is in danger, and hardly only his.

I REMEMBER BEING a teenager reading 1984 and thinking Orwell was unsubtle for writing that people would go along with a slogan like war is peace. George, I owe you an apology. (The schools should assign Homage to Catalonia and Burmese Days, not just 1984 and Animal Farm. Not exactly the direction school curricula are moving these days, but still.)

I CAN'T LEAVE RUBIO alone yet. 

"Imagine an Iranian government who, instead of spending billions of dollars supporting terrorist groups and building up all these weapons, had invested that money into Iran, for the people of Iran," Rubio also said in that al-Jazeera interview. Yeah, what must that be like? 

And at the very top of the interview, Rubio called the Iranian assertion of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz illegal under international law. Not the Trump administration, left without grounds to defend its aggression and the epic mistake it committed, invoking the sanctity of international law! 

FINALLY, Iraq War architect Doug Feith, legendarily referred to by Gen. Tommy Franks as "the stupidest fucking guy on the planet" (Franks could plausibly qualify for second stupidest, however), has an op-ed in National Review to tell us that focusing on the imminence of the threat from a country attacked by the United States is the wrong question. There needs to be a word that combines deja vu, impunity and hypernormalization.