Good Wars, Bad Wars, and Stupid Wars

I remarked to Sam that Donald Trump’s war with Iran seemed to be the stupidest war ever and he challenged me to back it up. I couldn’t because history is full of stupid wars. In any case, how does one measure stupidity to allow comparisons to be made?

Nonetheless, our conversation concluded with the thought that it might still be instructive to explore why this war is so stupid and at least to compare it with other stupid wars of our time waged by Western countries to help understand the potential consequences for the US and the Middle East. Autocracies have their own ways of waging stupid wars, as Putin demonstrated in Ukraine with, in this case, human and material costs far higher than those of the Iran War. But democracies are supposed to have mechanisms for challenging such stupidity by subjecting the big decisions on war and peace to intense scrutiny. The need for secrecy may be used as an argument against letting too many see the plans, but there ought to be opportunities for the various agencies involved in any war-making to comment on the wisdom and feasibility of any proposed action.

For a war to be stupid it does not have to lead to the worst outcomes or be the most brutal in its conduct. For my purposes (and this is not an academic paper) three conditions have to be met for a war to count as stupid:

1. The war is launched even though there is a high probability that it will fail and even be counterproductive;

2. This probability could and should have been known in advance;

3. Later decisions compound the original mistake, even as it becomes apparent that the war is going badly.

Certainly Iran meets these conditions for a stupid war. It was set in motion on the basis of a flawed strategic logic and without thinking through the likely consequences. The possibility that the decapitation attack would not lead to benign regime change but instead to harmful retaliatory action, including the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, was evident to anyone who had studied this conflict. The Wall Street Journal reports how unequivocally the second condition was met:

‘Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard outlined assessments from America’s intelligence apparatus. According to people familiar with the meeting, she told Trump that killing Iran’s supreme leader would likely usher in a more hard-line regime open to acquiring nuclear weapons. Tehran would rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market. And it would strike U.S. forces and partners in the Middle East, prompting questions about American resolve and reliability with allies.’

The administration had no right to be surprised by how things turned out.

But where this war really excelled in its stupidity was in meeting the third condition in its response to the original setbacks. This reflects a feature of the Iran war: it has been waged by stupid people, not only Trump but also his Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth.