Early on Saturday, the United States and Israel began a military campaign to overthrow the governing regime in Iran. The strikes have already killed an unknown number of Iranian leaders and civilians; Iran has retaliated by striking American allies in the Middle East and an American naval base in Bahrain.
Hours after the war began, I spoke by phone with Matt Duss, an executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign-policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the U.S. has decided to embark on another conflict in the Middle East, how Trump fooled voters when he declared himself the peace candidate in the 2024 Presidential election, and whether the leadership of the Democratic Party is equipped to stand up to Trump on Iran.
What do you think has changed since June, when the Trump Administration claimed that Iran’s nuclear capacity had been totally destroyed?
It was clear pretty quickly that those claims of obliterating Iran’s nuclear program were false. There was even leaked information from a U.S. intelligence report that pushed back on that, and made clear that Iran’s program had been clearly set back, but not destroyed. And now, of course, one of the justifications it has given for today’s attack is that the Iranian nuclear program has become dangerous again, and that is why we’re doing what we are doing. But it’s offered multiple other justifications, which is one of the ways this is reminiscent of the lead-up to Iraq in 2002 and 2003: it’s just offered this buffet of reasons, and everyone can kind of pick the one they think tastes best. But none of these things really add up to anything close to Iran posing an imminent threat to the United States. I think the urgency here, if there is any, is that Iran has been reconstituting its missile capacity much faster than many people expected.
I heard this from Israeli analysts back in October. One thing that had really surprised them was how Iran was rebuilding its missile capacity much more quickly than expected. These missiles are defensive, and thus far have been used as retaliatory measures. You don’t have to like the Iranian regime—I don’t—to acknowledge that countries do have the right to defend themselves. Iran has used those missiles, again, in a horrible way, firing them into cities and civilian centers in Israel. That’s indefensible. But it seems like Israel’s regional security doctrine, now backed by the United States, is not just that Israel has the right to defend itself but that only Israel has the right to defend itself in the region. And now those missiles pose an unacceptable constraint on Israel’s ability to strike anywhere it wants at any time, an approach to regional security that is clearly backed by the Trump Administration.
You said the missiles were defensive, but they were also used to bomb civilian areas in Israel. So they were in response to Israel’s actions against Iran?
Right. They were retaliatory. Again, it’s indefensible the way they were used, but let’s just acknowledge that it was a response to Israeli and U.S. attacks.
You mentioned the Iraq War and the justifications given. But recalling that debate, there was an effort to make the case for regime change along several different axes, no pun intended. The human-rights violations, fears about the development of weapons of mass destruction, and even the connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda, which were obviously very overblown, were utilized extensively. In this case, a bunch of justifications are occasionally being offered, but there seems to be no consistent case at all, nor is it believable that they care about these non-nuclear missiles or human rights.
That is what is amazing about this: it makes the Bush Administration’s run-up to the Iraq War look better in comparison. The Trump Administration has barely made any attempt to make a coherent case to the American public, let alone to Congress or the United Nations, which the Bush Administration did. There’s not really even an acknowledgment that Trump should need congressional authorization to take the U.S. into another war. Certainly, there is no acknowledgment that the U.S. would need any international or multilateral support to do this. So, yeah, I would say that the differences between the lead-up to the Iraq War and this are very important.
Over the past several months, there has been incredible repression by the Iranian regime against Iranians. We don’t know how many people have been killed, but it’s in the many thousands. The Trump Administration has occasionally threatened Iran, saying that it can’t kill protesters, and has occasionally made noises about caring about the welfare of the Iranian people, but the Administration has obviously allowed the regime to continue killing protesters. What do you think would be a sane posture for America to take toward Iran, and does the repression that we’ve seen over the past few months change how you think about it?
Clearly, this is a bad regime. It’s a repressive regime. It uses enormous violence against its own people, which we’ve seen horrific examples of over the past few weeks. I think the approach to Iran that makes the most sense was the one that President Barack Obama had, which was to acknowledge that Iran poses a challenge on a number of fronts, the most important of which was the possibility of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. That’s why he pursued diplomacy to deal with that challenge aggressively. He did so with close international partners, and got what, I think, was clearly a pretty strong nonproliferation agreement that established heavy inspections and surveillance of Iran’s nuclear program. That dealt with that one challenge, but it also created the opportunity to begin to deal with the other challenges Iran posed.
