Two things occur to me about President Trump’s overnight attack on Iran. The first is one we’ve discussed many times. The issue with this attack or war isn’t just the lack of consultation with Congress or any congressional authorization. The issue is more global: The White House hasn’t given any explanation of why any of this is even happening. This is very much a presidential war in a way we’ve seldom seen before. It’s personal to him. Again, not surprising: I suspect the lack of a public domestic campaign is because it is none of our business. To him, his country, his army. He’s in charge.
The other point is that we’re hearing that the president means to overthrow the Iranian regime. But he’s encouraging the civilian population to rise up and overthrow the government. Those two facts say very different things.
First, that virtually never works. Even in the most unpopular and repressive governments, people seldom want to make common cause with a foreign attacker, certainly while such an attack is underway. But the bigger tell is that the White House clearly has no plan to overthrow the Iranian government. That’s not surprising. Overthrowing an entrenched state is a massive military undertaking. Encouraging the civilian population to rise up is what you do when you plan on dropping a lot of bombs and seeing what happens.
This gambit is no different from what the first President Bush did when he encouraged Iraqis to overthrow Saddam Hussein after his armies had been ejected from Kuwait. It’s a punt which signals that the White House will cede control of the situation to forces it can’t control or even well-understand. It is, as the president now says, a war for regime change. And yet there appears to be no military plan to accomplish that. Only the hope that the civilian population will take the opportunity. So, putting the old military adage on its head, hope is the plan.
