The Objective is the Objective
Why Are We at War With Iran?
I’m currently experiencing a fate worse than death, a torture beyond medieval cruelty, an affliction so harrowing it makes the most neurotic of my Jewish matrilineage shiver. I’ve been thinking a lot about a Pete Hegseth press conference, one he delivered shortly after the start of the Iran war.
At this point, the ever-tormenting press conference is nothing special. Immediately after we started this war, the Trump administration spent a week repeatedly dodging what should have been a softball question: why we struck Iran in the first place. Hegseth’s March 2nd press conference was just one example of this initial deflection. Nevertheless, it’s stuck with me:
Mr. Hegseth spent much of his time chiding reporters for their questions rather than answering them. When a reporter said that “people also want to know what they’re sending their men and women to war for,” and asked whether there was a concern that the conflict could spiral into a longer war, Mr. Hegseth turned confrontational.
“Did you not hear my remarks?” he said. “We’re ensuring the mission gets accomplished, but we are very clear-eyed, as the President has been, unlike other presidents, about the foolish policies in the past that recklessly pulled us into things that were not tethered to actual, clear objectives.”
Asked why we’re going to war, Hegseth replied that we were ensuring the mission gets accomplished. Put another way, the objective was to accomplish our objectives. Truly tortuous logic.
A lot has happened since that press conference—most notably, a tentative ceasefire that, while not ending the war, ushered in a new, less-lethal phase. And as the conflict transitions to this new stage, so too has the administration’s messaging. Out are the opaque and contradictory justifications for mass slaughter and self-imposed quagmires. In are increasingly breathless assurances that it will all be over soon.
But I’m not ready to move on. Part of the reason is anger. The fact that our government took us to war without bothering to explain why feels personally offensive, an insult to both my own intelligence and the nation’s democratic values. But like when a friend hints at a secret without divulging what it is, the question “Why are we at war with Iran?” has also become the subject of my deepest curiosity.
In their own words, how has the administration answered this question? First, they said that Iran poses an imminent threat to the United States, but then quickly abandoned that argument after our intelligence community concluded that Iran was “years away from developing missiles capable of hitting the United States.” Next, they fell back on an old favorite, Iran’s nuclear program, which Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress Iran was trying to recover. This justification quickly evaporated when Gabbard—in a feat I consider genuinely impressive—managed to pre-contradict herself in her testimony’s written statement, which said: “there [have] been no efforts” since July’s strikes “to try to rebuild [Iran’s] enrichment capability.”
Then there’s Israel. We know that Israel helped persuade Trump to bomb Iran, yet the administration insists they are not the reason we’re at war. Weeks before the attack, Benjamin Netanyahu and a team of Mossad officials—possibly coached by Sen. Lindsey Graham—gave Trump a PowerPoint presentation about why the U.S. should go to war with Iran. Trump liked this presentation. But when Marco Rubio tried to pin the conflict on Israel by saying they were going to strike Iran with or without American involvement, therefore forcing America to preempt an Iranian retaliation against U.S. assets, Trump said that the opposite could be true: “I might have forced [Israel’s] hand,” he said, “and it was my opinion that [the Iranians] were going to attack first.”
Is the war meant to spark a revolution? Trump was pretty excited about this possibility early on, but now he thinks the chance of revolution is “maybe not immediately.” Is this a regime change war? Finally, we receive an affirmative “yes,” but then the administration defines regime change as any change to Iran’s government, regardless of what ideology or faction the new government belongs to.
I guess you could say that the clearest reason for the war is to open the Strait of Hormuz; then again, the Strait was open beforehand.
After weeks of conflict, the administration finally settled on four objectives: 1) destroying Iran’s missile capabilities, 2) “annihilating” its navy, 3) ensuring Iran can’t develop a nuclear weapon, and 4) stopping Iran from arming and funding its regional proxies. Why Iranian missiles, ships, or proxies pose any threat to the United States is unclear. Why war was necessary to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, considering they made no effort to do so, is also unclear. Suffice it to say, no explanation is forthcoming.
So now that we’ve started and tried to end the Iran War, it seems that, in a feat of remarkable stupidity and incompetence, the Trump administration remains incapable of explaining why we went in there in the first place.
The stupidity and incompetence are even more remarkable when you consider that the administration is trying to justify the conflict retroactively. They had the opportunity to evaluate the situation ex post facto, assess what the public needed to hear, and then deliver a carefully crafted justification to the American people. Instead, we get only more stupidity and incompetence. The Right has a word they use to describe stupidity and incompetence like this. We don’t use it in polite society.
The stupidity and incompetence are so remarkable that I can’t help but wonder if it’s really stupidity and incompetence at all, or rather the deliberate misleading of the American public.
The distinction between lying and hubris is not always so clear, as Hannah Arendt suggests in Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers. Writing in late 1971 as the Vietnam War was sputtering to an end, Arendt tries to answer the same question we’re asking today: why our government took the country to war.
Arendt begins by reminding us to focus on the practical utility of the political lie rather than our own moral outrage. However angry lying in politics may make us, history shows that “secrecy…and deception, the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends, have been with us since the beginning of recorded history.” With its historical permanence in politics, it’s far more productive to analyze what the political lie is trying to achieve than to call out the liar for their iniquity. For while we’ve long considered truthfulness a personal virtue, it “has never been counted among the political virtues.” Lying did not “creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness.”
In fact, Arendt argues, the lie is an essential aspect of what is good about politics, which is its ability to change the circumstances in which we all live through human action (emphasis mine):
In order to make room for one’s own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed. Such change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we are physically located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the ability to lie, the deliberate denial of factual truth, and the capacity to change facts, the ability to act, are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source, imagination….
We are free to change the world and to start something new in it. Without the mental freedom to deny or affirm existence, to say “yes” or “no…” no action would be possible; and action is of course the very stuff politics is made of.
This is not to say that Arendt has no moral qualms with political lying: she writes that “totalitarian rulers’ frightening confidence in the power of lying” is a key aspect of authoritarianism, and her disgust with Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers is the clearest indication of her awareness of the destructive, even violent nature of the political lie. But whether a lie is deployed for good ends or for bad is irrelevant to its ability to spark action. When connected to a tangible goal, to a vision for how our collective life could be different, the lie’s utility is undeniable. The reason truthfulness has never been considered a political virtue is because the lie is often better at getting things done.
Except it’s tough to get things done when, as in the case of the Iran War, the goal is unclear. For obvious reasons, critics have repeatedly compared the conflict to our past forays in the Middle East, but the comparison obscures key differences between the wars. In Iraq, it’s true that the Bush administration lied about the existence of weapons of mass destruction, but they did it to serve the clearly defined goal of regime change. If the Trump administration is lying about Iran, what goal is that serving?
In this sense, the Iran War has a lot more in common with Vietnam than Iraq or Afghanistan. In Lying in Politics, Arendt also struggled to figure out what goal Vietnam’s constant stream of deception served, because all the common explanations for the war—the Domino Theory, the specter of a Sino-Soviet communist bloc, the United States’ credibility as protector of its allies and the free world, the United States as an imperialist empire—were internally contradicted by the Pentagon Papers’ reports, testimonies, and documents. None of Vietnam’s official justifications could explain the U.S. government’s baffling decisions from 1955 onward.
And here is where the distinction between lying and hubris becomes increasingly blurred. With no tangible goals capable of explaining the catastrophe of the Vietnam War, Arendt writes that “The first explanation that comes to mind…is likely to point to the interconnectedness of deception and self-deception.” The government and its national security apparatus lied so much in public that they began to believe their lies in private—or, at the very least, those lies began to unconsciously shape their decision-making. The Pentagon Papers proved that the government considered Vietnam “devoid of decisive military objectives,” but that did not stop them from prosecuting the war as if such objectives existed.
The result, Arendt argues, is that the real goal of the Vietnam War was to foster a specific state of mind. Rather than admit that we had gotten ourselves into a quagmire with no strategic importance, the U.S. tried to lie the existence of military objectives into reality, so they could then accomplish those objectives and declare victory. We fought a war so we could declare a psychological victory.
Over a half-century later, we’ve found ourselves in the same situation. I won’t pretend to know whether Trump himself believes Iran actually poses a threat to U.S. national security. Same goes for Hegseth: “and if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” But when you examine how key administration officials described Israel’s presentation and the consequences of a U.S.-Iran war prior to the initial strikes, it’s obvious that none of them believe a word coming out of their own mouth. C.I.A. director John Ratcliffe called Israel’s pretensions of regime change “farcical.” Unnamed insiders said that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, thought war with Iran was a “terrible idea.” Marco Rubio was “ambivalent” about the whole thing. Vance accurately gauged Iran’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and directly cautioned the President against the war. Susie Wiles was trying to get all these men to share their concerns but wouldn’t say anything herself.
Yet all these figures now parrot the same incoherent justifications for the war as Hegseth and Trump. What this suggests is that, like the generals in Vietnam, the Trump administration is trying to lie nonessential military objectives into a factual basis for war, so Trump can claim a psychological victory in a war we’ve already lost. Even if the war ends with Iran’s military decimated, its proxies destroyed, and its nuclear program in ruins, the tangible impact on America’s citizenry will be zero, because these military objectives are fundamentally, well, trumped up. But Trump would relish in the image created: the omnipotent America, home of the greatest military on Earth, accomplishing the mission.
Suddenly, Hegseth’s enigmatic press conference makes perfect sense. Answering a reporter’s query that “people also want to know what they’re sending their men and women to war for” with “we’re ensuring the mission gets accomplished” is not a deflection or non-answer, but an admission of the war’s true purpose. It does not matter whether our stated goal is regime change, nuclear arms control, promoting democracy, destroying Iran’s missile capacity, destroying Iran’s navy, wiping out Iran’s network of proxies, preempting an imminent strike on U.S. military assets, securing the Strait of Hormuz, seizing Iranian oil, responding to “47 years of aggression,” or defending Israel. What matters is that we have a mission, and we accomplish that mission. The objective is the objective.
While Arendt understood the utility of any given lie, she also knew that “the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute.” Trump has a set of lies about threats to our national security that he hopes to make true through the Iran War. If he succeeds, he hopes to use the psychological victory to serve a set of greater lies at the heart of his political project: lies about the values and tradition America is meant to inherit, and about what it means to be an American. His movement has always been about myth-making, demagoguery, and a romantic, “Golden-Age” populism rather than the political program of a philosophical system, or a technocratic response to a set of well-defined issues. It’s lies all the way down.
But there are some for whom the Iran War is undeniably real. First and foremost is Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader of Iran. He lost his father, his wife, his teenage son, his sister, his brother-in-law, and his 14-month-old niece in a strike that burned his entire body and left him disfigured. Even if we destroy every missile Iran has—missiles, we must remember, that can’t even reach us—are we really supposed to believe that his grief leaves us safer? Or what about the families of the 120 children killed in an indiscriminate attack on the first day of the war, when the U.S. struck a school at an IRGC compound based on an AI analysis of outdated data. In the face of their reality, should our military superiority make us feel strong?