Yesterday, numerous media outlets reported that a preliminary intelligence assessment found that the US bombing mission set Iran’s nuclear program back by only a “few months.” To the extent this preliminary assessment holds up (and isn’t suppressed or manipulated by the Trump Administration), its results are not surprising: bombing campaigns often don’t work as hoped. The bombing of Tora Bora failed to eliminate Bin Laden, and the sustained air campaign against the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Viet Nam war didn’t shut down that vital North Vietnamese supply line. These are just two examples that come to mind. There certainly are others.
Some of us are actually old enough to remember these events. But even if the responsible Administration officials don’t remember them, they should have learned about them. Perhaps it’s news to the Trump Administration, but one can learn about things that happened in the past–sometimes quaintly referred to as “history.” For instance you can learn about history from books, Podcasts, and the internet. There are TV shows about history.
Admittedly, it’s naive to suggest that Trump could learn anything (especially, hard stuff like history), but what about the people around him? Are they all just as cognitively limited as their dear leader?
The problem may not be the Administration’s collective cognitive (in)capacity. It may be a shared attitude–one that regards “history” as inherently suspect. After all, history purports to deal in facts, interpretations, and explanations. Facts, in particular, are problematic, because Trump prefers to believe his “gut” rather than, say, analyses prepared by intelligence services. And to survive in the Administration, his underlings probably have to ape Trump’s approach to decision-making.
In addition, an Administration that instinctively gaslights the public at every opportunity is unlikely to care about facts and other old-fashioned rationalist preoccupations like objectivity. (There’s been a startling reversal in attitudes toward objectivity in the decades since I was in college. Back then, it was the post-structuralist and deconstructionist lefties who pooh-poohed facts and objectivity. Today, it’s the ostensibly ring-wing MAGAs who proclaim that there are “alternative” facts or facts that are “my facts.”)
A little more respect for facts probably would not have made Trump hesitate about bombing Iran. Doing so was attention-getting and transgressive–two features that make an option impossible for Trump to resist. But a bit of knowledge about history might have spared Trump the unpleasant surprise he no doubt experienced upon hearing that the bombing sorties were not entirely successful.
Trump can take some solace from the fact that he isn’t the first President to be disappointed by a much-heralded bombing campaign. And, of course, he and his Administration have already begun attacking the assessment as fake news–in the words of Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, its findings were “flat-out wrong.”
And it’s even possible that, as the analysts continue to pore over the evidence, the assessment may change (even without Trump Administration manipulation). That’s the nature of the search for truth: analyses, interpretations, and explanations may change as facts are discovered and reviewed.
But this has to sting, nonetheless. We can only hope that Trump can hold up in the face of this disappointment and the negative initial polling about the attack on Iran–a poll conducted before the news about the intelligence assessment. We wouldn’t want the guy to just up and quit, would we?