We're Losing the Iran War — And We Shouldn't Be Surprised
My interview with Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition
The largest, most capable military in the world has consistently lost the wars it starts since Vietnam. Iran is no different. I spoke with NPR’s Scott Simon this weekend about why American war-fighting strategy keeps failing — and why bombing Iran may actually increase, not decrease, the nuclear threat we set out to eliminate.
Transcript
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
President Trump says some kind of deal to extend the ceasefire with Iran may soon be signed, but he has yet to make any decisions - now, three months after the U.S. and Israel began to bomb the country. And so while many Iranian leaders have been killed, the hard-line regime remains in power, and Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz has increased oil prices, setting off economic crises across the globe. Ivo Daalder is a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, now a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He joins us now. Ambassador, thanks so much for being with us.
IVO DAALDER: Always a pleasure, Scott.
SIMON: You have written recently that America’s war-fighting strategy is wrong and has been, really, since Vietnam. What’s your reasoning?
DAALDER: Well, here is the largest military and the most capable military in the world consistently losing the wars that it starts. And I wanted to figure out, what’s the paradox? How does the paradox get explained? And the reason is that we’ve forgotten to remind ourselves what war is about. War is, as the great Prussian theorist, strategist Karl von Clausewitz said, the continuation of politics by other means. And we tend to look at war as somehow a failure of policy, not its continuity. And so we resort to massive use of force in the hope that somehow the political ends that we seek will magically appear. And we see in Vietnam, of course, but more importantly in Afghanistan and Iraq and now in Iran, that that just doesn’t work.
SIMON: You cite the 1991 Gulf War as maybe the lone U.S. military success in recent history. I covered both of the Iraq wars. Wasn’t President George H.W. Bush criticized then for letting a cruel regime stay in power?
DAALDER: Yeah. He was, but then the goal he had set was not to overthrow a regime. The goal he had set was to restore the status quo that existed before Iraq had invaded Kuwait. He marshaled a global coalition. He received a remarkable degree of global support, including a U.N. Security Council resolution. He got domestic support. And together, they restored the status quo ante.
Yes, a brutal regime remained. But importantly, because of the victory, because of the way in which this war was fought, the United States was able to work with the international community to put in charge a inspection regime to find and destroy the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein possessed. Indeed, it was so successful that when, in 20 - in 2003, the United States went to war because there were these weapons of mass destruction supposedly hidden, we found out that they had all been destroyed.
SIMON: The Trump administration says that this current war is about making certain that Iran doesn’t possess nuclear weapons. Doesn’t the U.S. and the world, for that matter, have a powerful interest in ensuring that Iran is free of nuclear weapons?
DAALDER: Absolutely. And the question is, how do we best achieve that? We had an agreement in 2015, negotiated by President Barack Obama in concert with our European allies, the Russians and the Chinese, that prevented Iran from acquiring the capabilities necessary to build a bomb and, if it were to break out of that agreement, to take more than a year to do so. And look where we are today. If this agreement had still been in force and President Trump had not walked away from it in 2018, today Iran would have had no more than 300 kilograms of enriched uranium enriched to 3.67%, which is sufficient for fueling its research reactor. That would be the case today.
What is in fact the case is that Iran now has 8,500 kilograms of enriched uranium, some of it - 500 kilograms - enriched to 60%, other material enriched to 5% and 20%, sufficient to build not one but perhaps 10 and perhaps even more nuclear bombs. And that’s the situation we find ourselves. This has been created by the president deciding to walk away from an agreement that was working and replacing it with, frankly, nothing other than now the use of force, which still hasn’t fundamentally altered the nature of the Iranian threat - nuclear threat - as it is today.
SIMON: Well, let me ask you about the whole idea of trying to reach some kind of an agreement with the Iranian government. From the Iranian point of view, wouldn’t having nuclear weapons be the best way to guarantee the survival of their regime? To cite the obvious, there have been countries in Europe, for example, who gave up nuclear weapons, and they got invaded.
DAALDER: Yeah, Ukraine being, of course, the obvious example. Indeed, I think the fact that the United States has now launched two wars - one in June and again now this time - against Iran increases the incentive for the Iranians to maintain the capacity, if not the actual building a nuclear weapon. And I think that’s the legacy of this war. Rather than eliminating the nuclear threat, it is more likely to aggravate it over the long run.
SIMON: Former U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder, now at the Belfer Center at Harvard University. Mr. Ambassador, thanks so much for being with us.
DAALDER: Thank you for the opportunity.
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