War on Iran Would Be No Cakewalk
Politicians often fail to grasp how terrible a proposed conflict would be.
President Donald Trump continues to give mixed, but generally hardline, signals regarding U.S. policy toward Iran. With respect to the nuclear weapons issue, he has shown greater openness to negotiations with Tehran than he did during his first term, when he torpedoed the multilateral agreement then in effect. However, Washington’s position is still characterized by maximalist demands on most of the specific issues, even setting a deadline of just two months for Iran to make a deal with the U.S. Moreover, even the new, marginally more conciliatory stance regarding Tehran’s nuclear program is fully offset by the administration’s extremely belligerent posture toward Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen. This week, Trump warned that he would hold Iran responsible for any attacks carried out by that faction. U.S. forces had already launched a new wave of airstrikes in Yemen.
Other GOP hawks, including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), have advocated using force against Iran for years, and they show no signs of softening that position. “I have, for a long time, been willing to call quite unequivocally for regime change in Iran," Cruz said in December 2024. Hardliners have tried to preempt warnings that a military intervention would risk triggering yet another endless war in the Middle East. Writing in 2015, Cotton contended that those opposed to attacking Iran “want to make you think it would be 150,000 heavy mechanized troops on the ground in the Middle East again as we saw in Iraq, and that’s simply not the case.” Instead, he assured readers, “it would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. Several days of air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities.”
Trump himself reached a similar conclusion in 2019. He emphasized that if the United States used force against Iran, Washington would not put boots on the ground but would wage the conflict entirely with America’s vast air power. Trump exhibited no doubt about the outcome, asserting that such a war “wouldn’t last very long,” and that it would mean the “obliteration” of Iran. Senator Cotton remained equally confident of a quick and easy victory. He asserted that the war would be over in two air strikes.
Such boasts are eerily reminiscent of the statement that Kenneth Adelman, a former assistant to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a prominent figure in the U.S. foreign policy community, made prior to the Iraq War. Adelman famously predicted that a war to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein would be a “cakewalk.” Over 4,000 American military personnel died in that conflict, and Washington is still mired in the turmoil more than 20 years after Adelman’s confident prediction.
Initially, it appeared that Trump in his second term would receive far more sensible advice from some of his current advisers. Tulsi Gabbard, his director of national intelligence, for example, has warned for years against being flippant about the probable consequences of attacking Iran. Indeed, she once threw Adelman’s prediction about Iraq back at him and other hawks who exuded optimism about the ease of a war against Iran. Such a war, “would make the war in Iraq look like a cakewalk," she admonished. The “devastation and cost” would be “far greater than anything we've experienced before.” However, Gabbard now seems to have adopted a more confrontational position. She has even called on other countries to join the United States in attacking Houthi targets in Yemen. Although that stance does not necessarily signal a major shift in her views about the recklessness of launching a war against Iran itself, her new statement is worrisome.
Unfortunately, confidence that a looming war will produce a quick, definitive victory for the “good guys” is a fantasy that has lured and entrapped numerous political leaders throughout history. Supporters of Abraham Lincoln’s administration traveled out from Washington, D.C. in July 1861 to get a view of the impending battle of Manassas in northern Virginia. Some of them took along picnic baskets, as though the occasion was nothing more than a festive, recreational outing. Nearly four years later, after enormous destruction and bloody battles that collectively consumed the lives of more than 600,000 soldiers, it had become horrifyingly apparent that the original optimism about a quick end to the war had been tragically erroneous.
Yet, arrogant European political and military leaders on both sides of the war that loomed in early 1914 made an even bloodier blunder. After World War I broke out that July, there was widespread confidence throughout European officialdom as well as the press that it would be over by Christmas. More than 4 years later, when the fighting finally ceased, more than nine million soldiers were dead.
In March 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson sharply escalated American military presence in South Vietnam by sending tens of thousands of additional combat personnel. The existing contingent of a few thousand U.S. troops had definitely played a greater role than their official title of combat “advisers,” but until the 1965 escalation, South Vietnamese units had done most of the fighting against communist forces. Johnson’s team of civilian and military advisers was extremely confident that with much more capable U.S. forces now taking charge of the war effort, a decisive triumph would be imminent. Undersecretary of State George W. Ball was the only senior administration official to express doubts about that thesis. The other high-level civilian and military policymakers clearly did not anticipate that nearly eight years would pass before the last U.S. combat personnel could come home from Vietnam, and that more than 58,000 American troops would perish in the crusade.
Occasionally, the prediction of a quick victory at the start of a war turns out to be true, as it did for the United States in the 1898 Spanish American War and the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Far more often, though, a predicted “cakewalk” turns into a multi-year human meat grinder. Even if subsequent events do not produce a bloodbath on a scale as monstrous as the Civil War and World War I, the fighting frequently becomes a prolonged, futile, and counterproductive mission. America’s military interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan all fall into that category.
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There are multiple reasons to conclude that a war against Iran would be the opposite of a “cakewalk.” As has been apparent already, Tehran’s Houthi allies in Yemen have been able to cause significant disruptions in commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Such instability has the potential to produce major negative effects in the global economy. Tehran’s Shiite co-religionists in Iraq have the ability to cause headaches for the remaining U.S. forces in that country. Even the beleaguered Alawites, who dominated the recently ousted government in Syria, are still strong enough to mount guerilla attacks on U.S. forces.
Iran itself has military capabilities that are far from trivial. U.S. military leaders have long worried that if Iran sank an oil tanker or some other large ship in the narrow Strait of Hormuz, the impact on the oil flow and the rest of the global economy would be extremely serious. That risk has not dissipated in recent years; indeed, it has grown. Perhaps most worrisome of all, Iran is a significant player with respect to military drone technology. Russia has purchased more than a thousand Iranian drones and used them quite effectively in its war against Ukraine.
Launching an attack on Iran would be a reckless move that could trigger yet another major war in the Middle East. Doing so with the expectation that the attack would produce a rapid, decisive victory for the United States at little cost of blood and treasure would be the height of arrogant folly. The Trump administration needs to back away from the beckoning abyss.
