Three Thoughts About the War with/on Iran

In the U.S., sloppy administration PR and clichéd media coverage. For Iran, human losses and economic retaliation.

Many people are writing now about the American and Israeli strikes on Iran, the Iranian response that is regionalizing the conflict, and the wider implications for the future of Iran and the region. Given the deluge of commentary on the topic I’ll just add a few brief thoughts.

1. Strikingly little effort to get popular buy-in: Inside the United States, the war has very little support; various polls (for example this one) have found 25% or less of Americans saying they support the strikes. President Trump has certainly posted a lot and spoken to the press a lot about the war. But I see a huge contrast between his administration’s public relations and the intensive, long-form PR buildup by the George W. Bush administration in the lead-up to the Iraq War. The Bush administration was in a fundamentally different position given the immediacy of 9/11, the impact of those attacks on the American psyche and the administration’s skillful (vicious, also, in many ways) harnessing and politicization of that impact. Trump has no 9/11 to draw on and 10/7 had a much more complex impact in the United States than 9/11 did, to say the least. Still, Trump’s team could have attempted a much more sophisticated public relations strategy, and probably would have found eager partners in many media commentators and elected officials, Republican and Democratic alike - many of whom have lined up to support the war anyways, even without being seriously pressured. Atrios makes this point much more pithily here. The sloppiness of the PR element partly reflects Trump’s personal style, but I think it reflects something deeper too - a combination of the ability of unpopular leaders to take hugely consequential decisions without any serious checks, and also self-sustaining power of various narratives, even as they become more and more abstract. 2020s geopolitics draws heavily on 2000s-era narratives, and even 1980s-era narratives, but in a weirdly offhanded way. The narrative that Iran deserves or demands violent regime change is so entrenched in American political discourse that in a way Trump does not have to bother to re-articulate it.

2. The low quality of U.S. media conversations on Iran: Speaking of the discourse, I’ve been struck yet again by the poverty of the conversation around Iran. That’s an old problem, of course. But this time specifically, I’m struck by the fixation on Ali Khamenei as an individual combined with a kind of flattening of the Iranian population. Khamenei was one of the most important people in the world for more than four decades, to say the least, and his death merits long-form obituaries and analyses. Yet there is a running thread in many pieces I’ve seen where Khamenei and/or figures such as Ali Larijani and/or “the regime” are juxtaposed against a faceless mass. The reader is told (often without any evidence produced) how “many Iranians” supposedly feel. The complexity of Iranian society - of any society - gets flattened in those kinds of pieces, many of which feed back into the assumption that “many Iranians” (how many?) are eager for U.S.-led regime change. Authors often acknowledge that the air war and the death of Khamenei will likely not suffice to generate regime change, but without spelling out one implication, namely that the authorities likely retain some significant popular support (which may be going up now as schools and hospitals are bombed). Meanwhile, as former Ambassador Patrick Gaspard pointed out in a blunt tweet, the media hype around the “inside story” of assassination operations can drown out crucial questions about power on both the U.S. side and the Iranian side. In sum the U.S. media coverage of the war is playing out largely worn-out but still very persistent stock tropes.

3. Iran is receiving human losses and retaliating with economic warfare: There is already a massive disparity between the high death toll inside Iran (already well over 500, including not just leaders but also hundreds of civilians) and the relatively low death toll Iran has inflicted. To state something fairly obvious, Iran appears to be aiming to retaliate through massive economic damage to refineries, tankers, hotels, and more - inflicting direct economic damage as well as enormous secondary disruption and reputational damage, above all to the United Arab Emirates. One question then is whether Iran can cause enough economic fallout that Trump and Netanyahu will be forced to adjust course; killing Khamenei is probably already enough for Trump to declare victory, but there remains the practical question of what the exact off-ramp from the war is, and when and whether Trump will take it.