The Case Against the Iran War
Curt Mills argues that America has made a mistake in the current conflict.
We’re wrapping up our two-part debate series on the Iran War. Yesterday, the Edmund Burke Foundation’s Will Chamberlain laid out the argument in favor of intervention. Today, Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, makes the case against the war. Readers, please let me know which argument was most persuasive and if either debater changed your mind.
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Rufo: Curt, could you tell us where the war stands right now and your view of things?
Mills: Well, I can only share what I know. And frankly, I don’t think our government is being fully transparent, and the Iranian government, needless to say, is also not very transparent.
We have a full-scale war in the Middle East. The “Gulf War” is the term often used to describe Operation Desert Storm, but in many ways, this is a far better use of the name. U.S. citizens have been evacuated from more than 15 countries in the region. Businesses across the Gulf have shut down. Anybody who’s ever flown either into the Middle East or through the region on the way to India or China has probably stopped at the Dubai or Doha airports—those are not really functional right now.
Doha, Dubai, Muscat, and Riyadh—glittering, nouveau riche cities, particularly post-2008 and post-Covid—are getting slammed by Iran with ballistic missiles and its Shahed drones, the latter of which are an effective military technology that was first deployed on the battlefield in Ukraine.
There is almost no communication between the U.S. and Iran. The Trump administration has succeeded in eliminating Ali Khamenei, the longtime supreme leader who was pushing 90 and who many thought was the only guy keeping the original clerical rule system around. The administration has replaced Khamenei with his son, who appears to be something of a figurehead as Iran moves into what looks more and more likely to be a full military dictatorship.
The Iranians are resisting in a way that the Venezuelans and Nicolás Maduro did not—a lack of resistance, I should note, that constituted a major precedent for the administration making its move against Iran in late February. Iran is also resisting at a level of intensity that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was incapable of doing. Even in Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein didn’t put up much of a fight; by the time we finally got him in 2003, his regime was a defanged organization.
So, the administration is in something of a quagmire. If the U.S. goal was to just “mow the grass”—an Israeli term—they are eroding some military capabilities, exhausting some of Iran’s missile supply, and assassinating its top leaders. If that was the goal, the administration, at this point, could just declare victory and go home.
But the question is, what are the goals here? The administration has been all over the map. And then of course, the Israelis have different goals as well. To be clear, my view is that this is a joint Israeli operation and that, by all appearances, we are doing this for Israel.
