The Wall Street Journal has a bombshell report revealing that President Trump’s national security team sought options from the Pentagon for striking Iran. Daniel Drezner, a Tufts professor and Washington Post columnist, responded to the reports by calling national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “batshit insane,” his unfortunately common response to those who disagree with him.
I have long opposed military strikes on Iran, and my opinion has not changed. But the entire report is much ado about nothing.
When developing ranges of options, it makes sense to plan for eventualities that hopefully will never occur. Frankly, the Pentagon should constantly plan for conflicts against not only Iran, but also North Korea, Russia, China, or any other imaginable belligerent. One of the biggest mistakes in the run up to the 2003 Iraq War was then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice’s refusal to allow open planning for conflict until just a couple months before the outbreak of hostilities out of fear that the optics of preparing for war might undercut diplomacy.
In contrast, open and credible preparations for war are the best enabler of effective diplomacy.
Of course, there is also the case of the Obama administration. In the run-up to negotiations that culminated in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the so-called Iran nuclear deal, former President Barack Obama and his top advisers repeatedly said all options remained on the table with regard to Iran. The pundits, journalists, and academics who are now raising alarm bells about Bolton (including those anonymously sourced in the Wall Street Journal) either have no idea what “all options” mean, or recognized that Obama was lying. If Obama was not serious about all options being on the table, it should have come as no surprise that his diplomatic leverage evaporated ahead of the JCPOA, which even prominent and progressive Democrats recognized was a flawed agreement.
Then there’s the complaint that the rocket attack on the U.S. consulate in Basra missed. If the consulate was indeed the target (it is co-located in the Basra airport complex) and if U.S. authorities were certain (via intercepts, for example) that Iranian authorities had ordered their proxy militias in Iraq to target the Americans, the idea that Iran should be rewarded for bad aim is bizarre. Policies of procrastination (tempering responses until Americans come home in body bags) is not a strategy; it is irresponsibility.
Of course, this is not the first Wall Street Journal report that took simple military concepts and spun them in illogical ways. The press and its pundits can play into the image they have crafted for Bolton but, in this case, a simple understanding that military planning does not lead to or even enable pulling the trigger might be warranted. Of course, there is a silver lining: If authorities in Tehran read the report, they may recognize that they face a very different set of Washington decision-makers than they have over the previous administrations. It would be a very good thing for Iranian authorities to recognize that they may face accountability for any decisions they make that lead to the deaths of Americans.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
