In 2003, in the opening days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Maj. Gen. David Petraeus famously said to a journalist: “Tell me how this ends.”
Those words, which felt plaintive then, described a war that was poorly planned, based on the singular untruth that Iraq had an active program of weapons of mass destruction, and lacked an achievable political objective. It’s why the Iraq war is generally considered one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in American history.
The Iran war has a long way to go before it reaches the dark lows of that earlier conflict. But in terms of sheer incompetence and strategic incoherence, this war and the decision-making of America’s leaders make the invasion of Iraq look like the D-Day landings.
The incompetence of Trump’s demands — and then the quick reversal as financial markets began to freak out — is head-spinning.
President Donald Trump and his administration have taken the country to war in an astonishingly slipshod manner. So much of what has gone wrong so far is the completely predictable result of the White House’s lack of planning, misplaced hubris and erroneous assumptions about what would happen once the U.S. attacked Iran.
Yet for all the obvious mistakes made by Trump and his advisers, the most glaring is that neither Trump nor his aides offered a clear explanation for what Iran could do to forestall an attack — and once military action began, to stop it.
Usually when you start a war, you give the enemy a sense of what needs to happen for the fighting to end. That simply hasn’t happened. At the outset of hostilities, Trump said the war would end if Iran would utter “those secret words, ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon.’” Never mind that Iranian leaders have repeatedly said this, including the day the war started. Indeed, what is perhaps most striking about the current conflict is how few of the military strikes appear to have targeted Iran’s nuclear program — the nominal reason for going to war in the first place.
Other supposed objectives come and go by the day. In announcing the attack on Feb. 28, Trump told the Iranian people, “the hour of your freedom is at hand” and “when we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.” The administration has since retreated from that goal of regime change, which always seemed more like a pipe dream than a real possibility. For all the armaments dropped from U.S. and Israeli planes — and damage done inside Iran — the country’s tyrannical regime seems no closer to falling than before the war began.
Trump has also said the war will end when Iran “unconditionally surrenders,” an outcome that is even more unlikely and that doesn’t even appear to be on the table anymore. And in perhaps his most disquieting statement, Trump said earlier this month that the war will end “when he feels it in his bones.”
The U.S. is asking the Iranians to open a strait that is closed only because of the war that America and Israel started.
However, it is the latest U.S. “objective” that is undoubtedly the most damning. According to The Washington Post, reopening the Strait of Hormuz has become the “paramount objective” of the war. This weekend, Trump threatened to strike Iranian power plants unless Iran opened the strait. Such attacks against primarily civilian targets would almost certainly represent a war crime. And as is so often the case with this administration, it took only a few hours for the White House to backtrack. Trump claimed that Iran and the U.S. “have had very, very strong talks” and that the two sides are negotiating a “COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST” — a claim the Iranians vehemently denied. At this point, it’s hard to say who is more believable — the Trump administration or the Iranians.
Still, the incompetence of Trump’s demands — and then the quick reversal as financial markets began to freak out — is head-spinning.
In raising the prominence of the reopening of this key waterway, the administration has surrendered its military and political leverage and allowed Iran to dictate the terms of the conflict and the path to a cessation of hostilities. Even if Trump suddenly announces an end to the fighting and declares victory, Iran can keep holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage. Tehran can continue to demand concessions from the U.S. and Israel, including assurances they will not attack again or reparations for damage and loss of life from the war. As long as Iran can withstand U.S. and Israeli military strikes (which it has done so far) while also keeping the strait closed (which it also continues to do), political pressure will increase not on Iran but, rather, on the U.S. and its allies as oil prices spike and the global economy shudders. So no longer is the U.S. demanding that Iran’s despotic rulers give up power or cease its nuclear program and ballistic missile development. Rather, the U.S. is asking the Iranians to open a strait that is closed only because of the war that America and Israel started. This isn’t mission creep — it’s mission lunge. And it’s a direct consequence of a president who had no plan other than to drop some bombs and no political strategy for what came next. That’s why Congress needs to emerge from its cowardly stance and demand answers from the White House — and some semblance of a plan. To date, neither the Senate Foreign Relations Committee nor the Senate Armed Services Committee has held a single public hearing on the war. This dereliction of duty by Congress is par for the course when Republicans are in power. But the Pentagon’s $200 billion funding request, which many on Capitol Hill have balked at, can be an effective lever to bring Trump administration officials to Capitol Hill to answer simple questions about the war. Until Congress does its job and pushes the administration for answers, this war is likely to drag on aimlessly, with the president acting, as usual, on whim and impulse. Above all, it doesn’t get us any closer to answering Petraeus’ old question: How does this all end?
Michael Cohen is an MS NOW columnist. He is also the publisher of the newsletter Truth and Consequences and hosts the weekly podcast That ‘70s Movie Podcast. 
