Trump's Confusing War of Hyperbolic Claims---But No Comparable Results
The administration's narrative of omnipotence amounts to spin, which itself has been ham-handed.
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The aphorism that “truth is the first casualty of war” has become a cliché. And isn’t accurate, either. Human beings are the first to be hurt or killed in war. Still, the maxim remains germane. Governments at war routinely lie, distort, and conceal facts. The United States and Israel have been busy lying and spinning to dominate the “who’s winning narrative.” Iran has been doing the same thing. But our claim has been that we’re different: that it’s the Iranians who peddle propaganda and lie. That assertion invites scrutiny of the Trump administration’s record in truth-telling. Consider some of its most prominent assertions, and the chasm between its rhetoric and reality becomes evident.
A War of Necessity?
Iran was on the verge of building nuclear weapons, President Trump and other officials said, and even had in the works a missile that could strike the continental United States. Yet no American intelligence agency has confirmed either statement, even under Trump. Moreover, there is no evidence that Iran was preparing to attack the US or Israel in the run-up to February 28, the day Israel and the United States launched the war. That’s why the threat claim has been accompanied by the “evil regime” script. The problem: depicting a government as repressive doesn’t prove that war against it was unavoidable.
And if the prospect of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons posed such a big threat, it’s strange that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu campaigned tirelessly against the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Iran reached with the US and five other countries, including in his March 3, 2015 address to a joint session of Congress a few months before the agreement was signed. Later, Netanyahu played a part in Trump’s 2018 decision to jettison the JCPOA, even though there was no evidence that Iran had been cheating. As far back as 1992, when he was a member of the Knesset, Netanyahu warned that Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons would succeed within a few years and tied that ambition to the nature of the Islamic Republic itself—meaning that the solution was bringing down the regime.
Nor did Trump, having denounced JCPOA’s flaws, open negotiations to get a better deal. And he walked away from the Geneva negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program just before launching the war, even though, as the mediator, Oman’s foreign minister, has revealed, Tehran was prepared to accept limits that were far more stringent than any in JCPOA.
The result of tearing up JCPOA was that Iran continued enriching uranium, reaching 60 percent by the eve of the war. JCPOA wasn’t perfect but it did limit Iran’s uranium enrichment to 3.67 percent, decommission the Arak nuclear power plant and ban heavy water production—both provisions closed off the plutonium-based path to nuclear weapons—and required the dismantling of several thousand centrifuges. Iran’s fulfilment of these obligations was to be monitored, electrically and through spot inspections. Yes, there were sunset clauses for the various parts of the agreement, but there was no reason that the JCPOA could not have been extended, especially had Iran received the sanctions relief it desperately sought.
Contrary to the Trump administration’s narrative, an Iranian nuclear weapon was not imminent. Nor was war the only means to prevent it. Moreover, the repressiveness of Iran’s rulers was no justification for a war, which, to be ethically and legally defensible, requires a credible and imminent threat.
Regime Change: Yes or No?
Was regime change among Trump’s military goals? Well, it depends on the day. At the outset, he denounced the Islamic Republic for being both dangerous and repressive and–like Netanyahu–called on the Iranian people to take to the streets and topple the state. At other times, the president said—after it was clear that the Islamic Republic wasn’t crumbling under the pressure of war—that precipitating regime collapse hadn’t been his goal (“Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change.”), suggesting that perhaps he had in mind a Venezuela option: finding a pliant insider who would do Washington’s bidding. At still other times, Trump made the bizarre claim that he’d in fact already achieved regime change—more than once. To back up this assertion, he pointed to the number of top Iranian officials that Israel (in particular) and the United States had killed and the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As it happens, each of the officials–including Khamenei–has been replaced, and the net effect has been that Iran has doubled down on the war instead of negotiating.
And if regime change wasn’t a goal, why promote the candidacy of Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah, who fled following the 1979 revolution that produced the Islamic Republic? (To be fair, Israel’s government has been a far more avid Pahlavi booster than the Trump administration.) And why backanti-regime Kurdish militias and send them arms?
The Islamic Republic proved far more resilient than Trump (and Netanyahu) had bargained for. It was helped by the fact that the war began to look like an attack on the Iranian nation, not merely the government. The US and Israel destroyed the recently-opened Karaj B1 Bridge, targeted educational institutions (the Iran University of Science and Technology and Shahid Beheshti University, one founded nearly 100 years ago, the other in 1960) as well as scientific research institutes (the famed Pasteur Institute, established in 1920), and took aim at Iran’s power installations. And now add to this list the bombing of Sharif University, Iran’s leading school for civil engineering, according to Iran expert Trita Parsi.
Put yourself in the shoes of an Iranian who despises the government. How would you interpret Trump’s ham-fistedthreat to bomb your country, which has an ancient civilization “back to the Stone Ages”? Perhaps you’d echo what a twenty-year-old Tehran denizen toldthe BBC after the bridge was destroyed–and on April 2, the last day of the Iranian New Year, Nowruz, which has been celebrated for three millennia–“We’ll end up with a ruined country. I am more disappointed and saddened that I am in the middle of a situation where I see Iran being destroyed and I can’t do anything.” Now consider how Iranians, regardless of their political beliefs, would feel if Trump followed through on his threat to destroy Iran’s power plants, leaving millions without electricity.
Regime change was indeed one of Trump’s goals, but there was no intelligent plan to accomplish it, and when the efforts failed, the administration said it never had any such objective—or that it did and had accomplished it.
Military Hubris Encounters Surprises
From the early days of the war, President Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth–whose model for press conference demeanor brings to mind a mix of John Wayne and Rambo–have said Iran’s military power had been eviscerated. This refrain has continued, with Trump declaring recently that the US could hit Iran’s power plants at will “because there’s not a thing they could do about it. They have no anti-aircraft equipment. Their radar is 100% annihilated. We are an unstoppable force.” Yet somehow, in a single day, Iran managed to down an F-15E and an A-10 Thunderbolt II (it crashed near the Persian Gulf; the pilot ejected and was rescued), and hit two helicopters, though both returned to base.
The administration’s hubris and dismissal of Iran’s military resources may have led it to overlook the possibility that Iran adapted and improved its air defense after last June’s Israeli-American airstrikes. Tehran appears to be relying more on infrared and heat-seeking systems rather than on equipment that uses radar and reveals its location by emitting signals.
Iran has also dispersed launch authority to regional commands so as to increase the agility and speed of response and reduce dependence on a centralized system more vulnerable to decapitation strikes—not least because of the proven ability of the United States, and especially Israel, to eliminate dozens of senior military (as well as political) officials. Iran has also made it harder to detect its air defense radars and launchers by increasing the use of mobile systems and using its rugged terrain to conceal them.
The administration has also claimed that Iran was running out of ballistic missiles and drones. Early in the war–on March 4–Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Iranian missile salvos had fallen by 86 percent and drone launches by 73 percent. Hegseth stated that Iran was firing 90 percent fewer missiles. And five days into the war he boasted that the United States “will have complete control over Iranian skies. Apparently, both failed to consider that Iran was conserving its missiles and drones because it anticipated an extended war and wanted to vary the intensity of its strikes.
The reality: Iran has managed to do extensive damage to 13 American military bases in the Middle East: an estimated $1.5 billion worth in the first thirty days of the war, including the destruction of an E-3 Sentry AWACSplane and damage to five KC-135 aerial tankers at Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia, as well as to radar and communication equipment at the Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain, which has been hit several times, necessitating the evacuation of 1,500 service members and their families to the US.
It’s also puzzling that the extraordinary rescue on Sunday of the downed F-15E’s weapons service officer necessitated sending into Iran two C-130J Super Hercules transport planes, which are huge targets. Their destruction to prevent Iranian forces from accessing sensitive data and technology added at least another $150 million to the cost of this war. If these aircraft were included because the mission was more ambitious than the rescue of a single individual, such as spiriting away Iran’s estimated 974 lbs.of enriched uranium–a gambit Trump has reportedly considered–it appears to have failed.
Washington was also blindsided by Iran’s relentless strikes on the US-aligned Gulf monarchies’ refineries, oil storage sites, LNG plants, and the tankers stranded inside the Gulf. Another surprise: despite Israel’s superb, layered air defenses, Iranian missiles have broken through numerous times, hitting targets in or around Tel Aviv, Haifa, Dimona (home to an important nuclear research and weapons site), Arad, Beit Shemesh, Eilat, and elsewhere. For Israelis, the wail of air raid sirens and scurrying to shelters have become routine.
Iran has been hit much harder by the US and Israel than vice versa. But that was expected. What was not expected was how long and how successfully Iran could continue its drone attacks—and how Israel and the United States would start worrying about depleting their interceptor missiles, which Iran swarmed with cheap drones: the Iranian Shahid-136 drone costs more than 100 times less than the American Patriot system.
A final example: Trump claimed after the June attack on Iran that its nuclear infrastructure had been “obliterated.” But in mid- and late March, Vice President JD Vance, Hegseth, and Rubio said that the war had to continue for a bit longer—to ensure that same infrastructure has been destroyed.
The Truth vs. Fact Chasm
The administration’s spin about a pulverized Iran–whose leaders are repeatedly begging for a deal–and about an invincible American military is just that: spin. If the war, which has cost $42.5 billion so far, has been mismanaged, the same goes for the PR campaign to portray it as a smashing success.
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