IRAN'S UNKNOWN UNKNOWNSWhat Trump didn't know he didn't know about the war he started
In February 2002, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said, in advance of the disastrous war he led against Iraq, when asked about evidence, or the lack thereof, linking Saddam Hussein’s government to supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists:
I have often thought of Rumsfeld’s obfuscating words while reporting on the unforeseen consequences of President Donald Trump’s decision a few weeks ago to go to war once again alongside Israel against Iran. He has at this point bombed himself into a global fuel shortage and economic chaos, along with more concern here and among his allies in Israel about his day-to-day competence. The US and Israeli bombing missions are not contested—Iran has no anti-aircraft defenses—and are continuing today, but there is no sign yet that Iran will surrender. I have been told that Mossad, Israel’s intelligence and covert operations agency, has recently completed a psychiatric study of Trump, based in part on the observations of those Israeli officials who have been in recent contact with him. One hopes that Mossad has also made a similar study of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who convinced Trump to join an air war that has resulted in devastation throughout Iran and, in response, successful Iranian bomb, missile and drone strikes against Israel and allied Gulf states. The number of city-dwelling Israelis spending their nights in air-raid shelters has reached new heights as the Iranian military, relying on drones and cluster bombs, is more and more evading Israeli air defenses and striking population centers. One recent night, I was told, as many of six million Israelis, out of a total population of ten million, took shelter. Tehran and Iran’s other major cities and defense sites, along with assassination targets, have been hit hard by the American and Israeli air forces. Some of the targets were struck in the name of Jesus, as proclaimed by Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense who maniacally sees himself as a modern-day Knight of Malta. The war we now have was not the war envisioned by Israeli planners in the beginning, according to an Israeli with direct knowledge of the planning. The anti-clerical riots that broke out last December in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, and then around the nation, were not subdued until the Revolutionary Guard and other defenders of the religious regime murdered thousands of anti-clerical demonstrators across the nation. There are no official estimates of the number of protesters slaughtered, but I have been told by an American official that the actual number was more than six thousand in Tehran alone. The slaughter offered Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, another reason to take a shot at the Iranian regime. Unlike last June, the goal this time would be to take out the religious leadership, beginning with the assassination of the Ayatollah Khamenei. He was replaced by his equally fanatical son, who was severely injured, I have been told, in a later air raid. If the son were to die from his wounds in the near term, as some in the US intelligence community believe might be possible, the next supreme leader would not be Mel Brooks. There were eventually secret meetings about how to proceed in Iran at a Midwest air base between a group of senior US Air Force and as many as forty Israeli planning officers as well as separate planning sessions in Washington with other visiting Israelis and senior presidential advisers. These included at varying times Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, Dan Driscoll, secretary of the Army, and Michel Waltz, the UN ambassador. The bottom line of the meetings was to keep on attacking Iran and making sure the ayatollahs did not get the bomb. The three are highly competent men, no matter their political views, but, let’s face it—at some point you are who you work for. An early option sought by some Israelis was the overthrow of the religious regime in Iran, but not immediately or directly. A revolt would need time, and a lot of confidence-building. Protesters taking to the streets, as happened over the winter, led to slaughter. The Israelis wanted more time—perhaps not until late spring or early summer, to recruit support from among the chary generals in the Iranian national army. Why not bring in a few retrained Army units and, with the recruitment of friendly locals, take on the Revolutionary Guards controlling a few smaller villages and towns far from Tehran and show that the religious faction was not insurmountable? The idea was to show the timid regular army and the often brutalized people of Tehran that revolt, with the right support, was possible. That plan, at whatever level it was presented, went nowhere in Washington. The Trump administration remained obsessed, not with bringing about a relatively peaceful overthrow of the sitting government in Iran, but about the possible nuclear threat posed by partially enriched uranium probably still in tunnels under one of the Iranian nuclear facilities attacked over the summer. Then came the US attack on Venezuela and the stunningly quick demise of the government of Nicolás Maduro, now awaiting trial in New York. There was no more naive talk of a peoples’ movement to take over Iran and no more talk of turning some units of the regular Iranian army. And no more talk of a government to serve its people. The air war was now on the cards. Trump had done in Maduro within a matter of hours, and he would do the same to the fanatics in power in Tehran, though it might take a little more time. The United States, working closely with Israel, would bomb Iranian missile sites and weapons depots to smithereens, and Israel would send in its commandos, if need be, to find and destroy the enriched uranium believed to be lurking underground. Surely some in Israel or the US planning team had anticipated that Iran would blockade the Strait of Hormuz and fire missiles and drones at US facilities allies in the Gulf in retaliation against the attack on Tehran, and noted or argued that the risks involved could lead to a worldwide energy crisis. If so, that argument did not win out. Trump has yet to complain publicly about the senior officials in the US and Israel’s intelligence services and military who did not foresee that the simple drones Iran has been peddling to Russia and other countries for years would cause so much chaos to the Israeli citizenry and the Gulf states. Nor was it foreseen that the heads of Israel’s main intelligence agencies—David Barnea, the soon to retire head of Mossad, and Major General Shlomi Binder, the head of Aman, the military intelligence branch—would end up in a bitter dispute, not widely known in the US, over accusations that the Mossad chief was more interested in doing the bidding of Netanyahu than in good policy, especially when it came to telling Trump only what the prime minister wanted him to know. Meanwhile Trump continues to demean the office of the presidency even as he gilds the White House in gold. He is said to read none of the top secret morning briefings from the CIA, prepared by a staff that works through the night. It is one of many reports he does not read. There is a precedent for such. Late in his second term, the men running the agency were frustrated by the aging Ronald Reagan’s inability to pay attention to the morning brief, which would run to three pages or more. A solution was found. Army General Colin Powell, then Reagan’s national security adviser, would make an early morning visit to the White House recording room and read the CIA report in full to a television monitor. A tape would be made and plugged into the TV set in the president’s office and Reagan could, if he chose, watch it whenever he wished. The republic survived, even if those running it often did not know what they didn’t know. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Seymour Hersh, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. © 2026 Seymour Hersh |