Three Things the Consensus Gets Wrong About Iran War
Open a newspaper or turn on a television these days, and you will likely find a dark view of the United States’ war with Iran. In part, this reflects difficult realities. The Strait of Hormuz is seemingly under Iranian control, salvos of missiles are still hitting the Persian Gulf states and Israel, and there is no clear path to victory, however defined. But such dark views also rest on other factors. Journalists, analysts, and intelligence officers are professionally inclined toward skepticism about their own side’s prospects. “A good intelligence officer who smells flowers looks for a funeral,” one former senior CIA official told me. If your job is to search for the contradictions, flip-flops, lacunae, and flat-out lies in a spokesperson’s happy talk, you will find them. Besides, other incentives in these lines of work align with pessimism: You look much more like a fool if you say things are going well and then disaster occurs than if you say the situation is grim but your side succeeds anyway. The latter may bring gentle mockery, …
