Why we have not won the Iran War

The last few weeks have been positively insane.

The off-again, on-again war in Iran has been spectacularly mismanaged. The President of the United States is conducting a war like a befuddled hamster trying to escape from a maze. He goes around and around with no possibility of freeing himself.

Trump needs to send in troops to take Kharg Island and dominate the land around the Strait of Hormuz. Cut off all Iranian revenue. He also needs to bomb Iranian infrastructure: bridges, train stations, airfields, roads, and water treatment plants. This is a war against an implacable enemy fueled by fundamentalist, fanatical, revolutionary religious fervor, seeking to become the hegemonic power in the Middle East, dominate the Sunni Muslim world, and destroy the Abraham Accords and any reconciliation between Arabs and Jews. Surely this theological Frankenstein cannot be allowed to acquire a nuclear capability that shields its aggression. And just as surely, the President needs to step up to the plate. We have been at war with Iran for forty-seven years. We need to end it on our terms.

Unfortunately, Trump is more concerned with maintaining power in Congress so that he is not impeached for corruption, prosecuted after leaving office, and possibly sent to prison. The big house instead of the White House. (I did not make that up.) It has been argued that this was the reason he ran for a second term.  His prime-time crazed rant, absent of evidence, this time may finally wake up some of his cultish followers to his bat shit crazy 2020 election loss obsessions.  Because Trump can never lose?  Right?  J.D?  What do you say?

Shortly after Putin's war began, I said that the Europeans needed to mobilize and prepare to fight the Russians. They, too, are acting fearfully. That will get them nowhere. They need to send troops into Ukraine and kick Putin out. Issue an ultimatum. Conscript an army. With the aid of the Ukrainians, Putin could be evicted in short order. Dictator-bullies respond to force. History has taught us that lesson very well. I will not bore you with examples; just trust me. Putin has stated his raison d'être—the restoration of the Soviet Union, the collapse of which he considers the greatest tragedy of his life.

But Putin knows he cannot use nuclear weapons. Finally, the Germans are rearming (isn't that a frightening thought?), but they have the wherewithal to defeat the Russians, especially with their French and British allies. They must not wait for the mercurial Trump to leave them twisting in the wind if they do not meet his transactional agenda. (We know he is a crude, money-grubbing, gilded parvenu.) Trump, however, was right to make the Europeans spend more instead of freeloading on American largesse. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. The perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. Yada, yada, yada. Sometimes clichés and memes work well. Originality in all things is not possible. It may not be possible at all. There's nothing new under the sun. Okay. I talk too much.

These days, immediacy has become the public's default expectation. There is less patience for results to emerge over time. Social media, television news, and diminished attention spans all push us toward instant conclusions. People can no longer concentrate on a book. They prefer doomscrolling on X, Facebook, or Instagram, where snippets of information appear by the minute. I do, too. But I am old and have read many books.

If one looks back to World War II, which for America lasted four years, battlefield losses did not provoke roundtable discussions on CNN. People waited for the next day's newspaper to report the news. They then went back to their lives, clipped ration coupons, and hoped for better news tomorrow. Columnists wrote weekly columns that allowed people time to think about what they had read and form their own opinions. They did not simply tune in to their favorite network to confirm what they already believed.

I do not know whether that was better, but it left more room for thought. Yet here I am sounding off and expecting people to agree with me. Or not. Well, mostly agree.

The Founders Return

"Well, Doctor, what have we got—a republic or a monarchy?"
"A republic, if you can keep it."
— Benjamin Franklin, September 17, 1787

Morning

Dawn breaks over Washington on July 4, 2026. The city is unusually quiet. The first light catches the Capitol dome, the Washington Monument and, beyond them, the Lincoln Memorial. Three familiar figures emerge from the morning mist. They stop without speaking.

For several moments they simply look.

Jefferson: It has changed.

Hamilton: Everything changes.

Jefferson: Not first principles.

(He looks toward the Capitol.)

Some things endure.

Madison: If they did not, we should not be standing here.

(A long silence.)

Hamilton: Two hundred and fifty years.

I confess, gentlemen, I doubted our experiment would endure so long.

Jefferson: I never doubted the people.

Hamilton: No. You doubted governments.

Jefferson: With reason.

Madison: Which is why we required both.

(Jefferson smiles.)

Jefferson: We entrusted our future to scarcely four million souls.

Now there are hundreds of millions.

Hamilton: We stitched together thirteen uncertain states.

They united a continent.

Their commerce circles the globe.

Their influence reaches every shore.

I confess, dear sirs, even my ambition did not extend so far.

Jefferson: Nor mine.

History has exceeded even our fondest hopes.

Madison: As it should.

The purpose of one generation is not to prescribe the future, but to preserve its freedom.

(Church bells begin to ring in the distance.)

Jefferson: Listen.

Hamilton: Bells.

Jefferson: No.

Freedom.

Many languages.

Many peoples.

Many faiths.

One Republic.

When I wrote that all men are created equal, I understood those words less fully than those who came after us.

History has enlarged them beyond their author.

Hamilton: There speaks wisdom.

History has corrected me more than once.

Madison: It has corrected us all.

The Constitution

Morning awakens the city.

Hamilton: Tell me, James.

Has the Constitution succeeded?

Madison: Better than its authors deserved.

Jefferson: Better than its enemies expected.

Hamilton: Better than its guardians?

Madison: It has survived civil war...

economic panic...

world wars...

assassinations...

prosperity...

depression...

and every variety of ambition.

No Constitution preserves liberty by itself.

Only a people can do that.

Jefferson: Franklin understood.

Hamilton: "If you can keep it."

Madison: Exactly.

The Constitution was never intended to govern in place of character.

It presumes restraint where the law is silent.

Hamilton: A commodity forever in short supply.

Jefferson: Especially in politics.

(They exchange knowing smiles.)

The Argument

They begin walking toward the Capitol.

Hamilton: What troubles you most?

Jefferson: Not disagreement.

We disagreed on almost everything.

Hamilton: With considerable energy.

Jefferson: Sometimes more energy than wisdom.

Madison: Disagreement is the price of liberty.

Contempt is its enemy.

Hamilton: Explain.

Madison: We imagined no perfect government because we knew there would never be perfect men.

The Constitution was not written to guarantee wisdom.

It was written to restrain folly.

Every generation discovers new ways to test it.

Every generation is tempted to believe its own necessities justify ignoring it.

If the Constitution has survived, it is because enough Americans have remembered that no victory is worth preserving if liberty is lost in winning it.

Jefferson: Every administration discovers reasons to enlarge its authority.

Hamilton: Every opposition discovers an affection for constitutional restraint.

Jefferson: Human nature has been remarkably consistent.

Madison: It was the only constant upon which we dared rely.

Lincoln

The three men stop before the seated figure of Lincoln.

None speaks.

At length...

Jefferson: Who is he?

Madison: Abraham Lincoln.

Hamilton: The Union was threatened.

Madison: It nearly died.

Jefferson: And slavery?

Madison: It nearly destroyed everything we built.

(Hamilton removes his hat.)

Jefferson: Then our greatest contradiction became their greatest trial.

Hamilton: And their greatest triumph.

Madison: They preserved both the Union and the Constitution.

That was no small achievement.

Jefferson: Then perhaps constitutions are not defended by lawyers after all.

Hamilton: No.

By citizens.

The Republic

Night settles over the National Mall. Fireworks illuminate the sky. Families gather. Children laugh. The Founders watch quietly.

Hamilton: Tell me honestly.

Knowing all that has followed...

would either of you begin again?

Jefferson: Without hesitation.

Liberty has never been safe.

That is no argument against it.

Hamilton: James?

Madison: I would alter very little.

We did not write for angels.

We wrote for men.

Jefferson: Then we understood human nature.

Madison: We understood enough.

(The fireworks intensify.)

Hamilton: What have we learned in two hundred and fifty years?

Jefferson: That liberty is harder than revolution.

Hamilton: That governing is harder than winning office.

Madison: That preserving a republic is harder than creating one.

(A long silence.)

Jefferson: Alexander...

Were we successful?

Hamilton: Not entirely.

Jefferson: James?

Madison: No generation ever is.

Each inherits the Republic.

Each enlarges it...

or diminishes it...

before placing it in the hands of those yet unborn.

That is the covenant of self-government.

(The bells begin to ring.)

Jefferson: They are still arguing.

Hamilton: Good.

Jefferson: Good?

Hamilton: Better argument than obedience.

Madison: Better still if argument leads to understanding.

(The three men turn toward the sound of a familiar voice.)

Jefferson: Benjamin is calling us.

Hamilton: Shall we go?

Madison: Our work was never to finish the Republic.

It was to leave it in their hands.

(The three walk slowly into the morning light.)

Only one voice remains.

Franklin: "A republic, if you can keep it."

Public Sentiment and the Iranian Threat

Franklin Roosevelt was always a politically astute observer of the American public. That understanding was one of the foundations of his success as a leader and one of the reasons he was elected four times. He understood well what Abraham Lincoln meant when he wrote that "Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions."

Moving America from isolationism to a war footing was a herculean task. Mobilization required more than factories and ships. It required shaping public will. Roosevelt accomplished it incrementally through a long campaign of persuasion: a fireside chat here, a warning there, a patient explanation of gathering dangers abroad. He spoke to Americans with intimacy and confidence. There was little braggadocio, little exaggeration, and no obvious effort at self-glorification. Most importantly, the public generally believed he was telling the truth.

Events in Europe certainly helped his case. Britain was being blitzed nightly. France had fallen. Much of Eastern Europe already lay in ruins beneath the Nazi boot. The threat was becoming harder to ignore.

Yet Americans remained deeply reluctant. Barely twenty years earlier they had endured the slaughter of the First World War. The mud of the trenches, the bloodshed, and the Spanish influenza pandemic remained vivid memories. The prevailing sentiment was simple: no more foreign wars.

Roosevelt therefore moved step by step. Rearmament. Cash-and-carry. The first peacetime draft in American history. The destroyers-for-bases agreement. Lend-Lease, which he famously compared to lending a neighbor a garden hose to extinguish a fire without demanding payment in advance. Each measure would have been politically impossible had he attempted it all at once.

The present administration has done none of this with respect to Iran. It has not undertaken a sustained effort to explain the Iranian threat to the American people. It has not sought congressional support. It has not articulated a coherent strategic vision. As a result, many Americans believe the United States is merely being dragged into another Middle Eastern conflict on behalf of Israel rather than confronting a threat that affects Western interests more broadly.

Iran's rulers seek regional dominance. They aspire to exercise influence or control through proxies and client forces stretching from Lebanon and Syria to Yemen and beyond. They seek a nuclear umbrella beneath which that influence could expand further. They have repeatedly threatened Israel, challenged freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf, and used disruption of maritime commerce as leverage against the world economy.

The economic implications are not abstract. A closure or serious disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has reverberated through global energy markets and affected consumers far removed from the Middle East. The resulting instability has not stopped at the region's borders.

Nor is the problem purely economic. The regime's ideology is fundamentally hostile to liberal democracy. As Douglas Murray has observed, it is animated by a revolutionary religious zeal that is difficult for secular Western societies to comprehend. When political leaders repeatedly proclaim their intentions, prudence suggests we should take them seriously.

Iran must not acquire a nuclear weapon. On that point there appears to be broad agreement across much of the American political spectrum. President Trump likely understands this. Yet understanding a danger and persuading a nation to confront it are two different things.

Roosevelt understood that the cost of confronting a threat early is often less than the cost of confronting it later. He recognized that free citizens had to be persuaded that a distant threat would eventually become their own. A Nazi-dominated Europe, he believed, would ultimately threaten American security and prosperity.

Iran is not Nazi Germany. Historical analogies always break down if pressed too far. Yet Roosevelt never had to contemplate a Nazi regime on the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons. But the lesson Roosevelt taught was not about Germany. It was about leadership. Democracies do not automatically mobilize in response to distant dangers. Their leaders must explain, persuade, educate, and prepare.

Despite placing himself rhetorically alongside Lincoln, President Trump has yet to demonstrate Roosevelt's understanding of broad public sentiment. Leadership requires more than declarations, slogans, or social-media posts. It requires building a durable public consensus behind difficult decisions.

Whether this president possesses that capacity remains an open question. The stakes are high enough that Americans deserve a clear answer.

Az Me Darf a Gonef

My father was a hotelman. He often relied on unreliable employees who either did not show up for work, got drunk, or were dishonest. He would stand by the window watching employees sneak off the premises with towels or food from the kitchen hidden in laundry baskets. The aggravation never ended, yet he needed them to run the hotel.

One day, in youthful innocence, I asked him, “Dad, why don’t you just fire the ones that are dishonest or don’t show up?”

He looked back at me wistfully and said, “Duvid, Az me darf a ganef, nemt men im fun der tlie.”

“If one needs a thief, one takes him from the gallows.”

These marginal employees often lasted only until payday, when they inevitably got drunk or disappeared, leaving the kitchen and dining room short staffed. Dad would find himself back in the kitchen cooking, washing dishes, and mopping floors. The philosophy that sounded so practical in the moment simply kicked the proverbial can down the road. It solved nothing permanently, but it functioned long enough to get through the rush season.

America made a similar Faustian bargain with Donald Trump.

Many Americans believed he would cure the ills he railed against: inflation, unemployment, foreign wars, uncontrolled immigration, jobs lost to globalization, and institutions they believed had abandoned or humiliated them. Some were hanging on economically while working two jobs. Others watched manufacturing towns collapse after decades of trade deals that exported jobs to countries with cheap labor. Many believed cultural elites looked down on them as backward, disposable, or irrelevant.

Trump understood that anger better than his opponents did.

To his supporters, he was not merely a politician. He was a battering ram. A man willing to fight institutions they believed no longer represented them. They overlooked the vulgarity, the dishonesty, the chaos, because they believed only someone outside the accepted rules could break a system they thought was already corrupted against them.

In their minds, they were cutting the thief down from the gallows because they needed him.

And, in fairness, some of the administration’s policies did address real concerns. Illegal immigration was reduced. NATO allies were pressured to spend more on defense. Iranian proxies were weakened. The administration projected strength in ways many Americans found reassuring after years of drift and uncertainty.

But the bargain carried costs that grow more visible by the day.

We have watched a kaleidoscope of ethical evasions, loyalty tests, self dealing, and assaults on institutional norms. A President increasingly treating the machinery of government as personal property. An Attorney General viewed by critics less as guardian of the Constitution than as personal counsel to the man who appointed him. The line between public duty and private protection has become dangerously blurred.

Yet if one opposes this administration only with outrage and moral superiority, one learns nothing.

Economic dislocation is real. Cultural humiliation is real. The anger of people who believed themselves abandoned by political, financial, and media elites is real. A democracy that ignores those realities creates conditions in which citizens become willing to make dangerous bargains.

That may be the enduring lesson of Faust.

Faust thought the devil would bail him out of a universe of despair. Americans, too, sought a solution for profound dissatisfaction — revenge against scornful elites, relief from insecurity, humiliation, economic fear, and the feeling that the people running the country neither understood nor respected them anymore.

But Goethe’s Faust obtained redemption not because he was innocent, but because he kept striving to be better. The damnation of eternal hell was avoided because Faust never stopped reaching beyond his own failures and illusions toward something higher than himself.

So, too, must we strive to blow past this dark chapter of our times.

Not merely by condemning one man, however deserving of condemnation he may be, but by understanding how millions of Americans came to believe that cutting the thief down from the gallows was their only remaining choice.

Are things as bad as they seem?

May 2026.  Observations

People are thinking that Trump has lost his way. But that does not seem possible, because he never found it in the first place. For someone with his keen political instincts, it strikes me as not unusual that he has no moral compass, because voters either do not care or care only about themselves. This has been true many times throughout our history, but moral leadership, or at least a modicum of it, has existed to some extent among the elites.

If it is true that leaders do not possess some element of decency and respect for their countrymen, then we are doomed to fail. It almost seems that we are on the cusp of that, if one looks around. But maybe not. Even a crook makes some correct decisions. After all, Nixon went to China. Trump may solve part of the Middle East problem while he screws everything else up domestically.

American history teaches us that there have been moral lapses before: presidents who presided over the killing of Native Americans, who were segregationists, who were racists, who were slaveowners, who catered to robber barons. There were titans who built the railroads, cornered the oil markets, burned down their competitors, shot strikers — but often these lapses were followed by reform movements. Hopefully that will happen again after this dark chapter of corruption returns permanently to Mar-a-Lago or to Leavenworth. I believe the American voter will wake up from this nightmare.

Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian, has just written a new book, We the People, the premise of which is that the Constitution needs to be amended from time to time, and that the difficulty of amending it has thrown a monkey wrench into not only the efficiency, but more importantly, the fairness by which we govern ourselves.

A number of things must be done — the discarding of the Electoral College, and the direct election of the President of the United States. One person, one vote. One methodology would be awarding each state’s electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, thereby avoiding the necessity of a national recount if there is controversy.

Next, proportioning the Senate more in line with population without abolishing the influence of each state — perhaps by adding senators in tiers and capping representation at six per state, so that the Senate does not simply become another House. Or alternatively, leaving the Senate alone but increasing the size of the House to create more equal representation. And stop gerrymandering through national legislation.  Moreover, institutions and lawmakers are not keeping up with vast technological change and upheaval.

Unfortunately, the conservative elements of society have vested interests in keeping things the way they are, even if that includes massive wealth inequality, raging corporate profits, and increasingly desperate economic conditions for the working class, soon to be run off the road by robots, literally and figuratively.

60 Minutes ran a piece this past Sunday night about immigrant truck drivers being disqualified from renewing their licenses. The piece made no mention of the fact that soon there may not be any truck drivers at all. Those 18-wheelers scaring the shit out of us, barreling down the middle of the expressway, will be piloted by more cautious robots, perhaps relegated to the extreme right lane as in Europe. No time pressure. No need to get to the next rest stop to sleep.

Americans are getting a rapid dose of the future, but lawmakers are struggling to keep up with it. The idea that a Terminator may someday come after us is frightening, but somehow we forget the past. There were frightening times then also: wars, famines, the Great Depression, the Spanish flu killing millions, the Cold War.

Surely we can survive a few years of an unscrupulous, narcissistic, self-enriching president who might occasionally make a correct call here and there. Even Chauncey Gardner got the flowers to bloom.

Why we do not know the end of the War story.

 

 

So, here’s the deal.  The Trump administration thinks that it can change the government in Iran by bombing the shit out of them.  

 

President Trump thinks that airpower has changed the equation that internal political forces can be changed from the air.  Historical precedent basically says otherwise, but we do not know if the assumption is still correct because warfare has changed with the use of precision guided bombs, accurate intelligence as to the conditions on the ground.  We also don’t know if the CIA and the Mossad are organizing opposition on the ground or what political forces are being internally deployed yet.

 

We have never really seen an entire class of political leadership eliminated on the first day of an air war.  David Petraeus said that it was a remarkable accomplishment.  It probably was.  But as they say in the stock market, since past performance is no guarantee of future success, we do not know if this success story will continue.  It’s a huge gamble.

 

What I do not understand is the need for US government officials to make up reasons that will play out better for optics than the truth.   The American objective is to alter the threat of Iranian hegemony and a world order threatening Islamist revolution.   The idea that women must cover their heads, that there be a morality police, that civil rights are absent is unacceptable to us.  This is not within our control, though.  It must become unacceptable to the Iranian popple, whose track record of Jeffersonian principles is the same as Russians.  They lived under a Czar, or a Shah or a Communist dictator for hundreds or thousands of years.   Can we change those cultures?  Will they ever change?  The Czar was murdered, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Shah was ousted and we got Putin and Khamenei. One a murderous kleptocrat, the other a religious theocrat.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

 

Yes, the idea that Iran was moving toward nuclear weapons by amassing a huge conventional shield of missiles and armaments to protect its malign project is true.  But an increased inspection program could arguably have succeeded in delaying it for a few years. But kicking the can down the road was not an acceptable alternative for Trump or Netanyahu.   Most Israelis favor Trump, despite the love-hate relationship of American Jews who lean left.

 

The argument that a nuclear armed foe that has been at war with the US and Israel for 47 years, exporting terrorism through its proxies, killing Americans throughout the Middle East, supporting the erasure of Israel,  spending billions in support of that goal dispels the argument that the US has entered a war of choice, a somewhat puzzling position for the Democrats to take.   The idea that because Trump did it transforms it into an evil deed.    Maybe so, but maybe not.  Hakeem Jeffries reduces his credibility by arguing that housing costs have gone up and poor people are starving because of this war.

 

The jury is out on whether this will be a misbegotten adventure or an astounding success in eliminating a source of religious zealotry that threatens the world order.  Oil us up today, the stock market is down, but here in Miami, the sun is shining and the threat to Dade County does not feel as imminent as the Cuban missile crisis did so many years ago.  We simply do not know at this early stage what will happen.  Predicting success or failure is not possible—yet.

Unafraid and afraid

Are we sure that the currents of history are changing because of a President whose ideas are an anachronistic resemblance of an America gone by? A nostalgic view of a white country that existed before the internet, before social media, before cellphones, before smartphones. A country where gays were swept under a carpet of denial—whose existence was not even acknowledged by polite society? A Miami where hotels blatantly denied admission to Jews, Blacks, and Latinos? White and colored restrooms? Segregated lunch counters?

Where gentlemen’s agreements among the WASP class excluded all those who did not conform to the standards of whiteness that were de rigueur in polite society? I had a friend who belonged to those clubs and rationalized the membership because she wanted to be with her friends. “Would you want to be in a club if the people were not your friends?” she would actually say that.

 

I grew up in Miami Beach. My parents moved here permanently in 1948, and I attended first grade here. I attended North Beach Elementary, where we had to pray to Jesus in the morning with a devotional conducted by the principal, Mrs. Mizner, even though many, if not most, of us were Jewish. We learned Christmas carols, and our housekeeper took us to Burdines on Flagler Street to see Santa Claus. My parents were not around, because they were working at their hotel day and night during the busy Christmas season. In the spring, we would pack up and head north, closing our house, placing acrid “DampRid” crystals to absorb the humidity in the house and keep the palmetto bugs at bay. We had one television, and I was the remote control. “David, change the channel,” Dad would say, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth in his wife-beater undershirt. We had no air conditioning until later, and Dad did not want to run the monstrosity because it was in a wall by the dining room and created a hurricane-force wind of freezing air. Plus, it was too expensive. “Dad, it’s really hot.” “Nah,” he would say, “take off your shirt and air your body.”

 

Dad would watch the CBS Evening News with Douglas Edwards and then Walter Cronkite. He hated Republicans and would never vote for one. “There are no good Republicans; they just want to keep everything for themselves.” When Joe McCarthy came to Miami and stayed at Dad’s hotel, Dad put his principles aside after suffering through the McCarthy hearings and hosted the Wisconsin cheesemakers’ convention at his hotel. McCarthy was the guest speaker. Even though Dad hated McCarthy and was orgasmic when Murrow took him down, Dad was happy to pocket the revenue from the delegates, most of whom were just ordinary folks from Wisconsin trying to make a living and down here for a bit of sun and sand.

 

Dad was not a big fan of Ike either. He called him MacArthur’s aide-de-camp and did not like his treatment of Truman and Marshall, and that Ike took a long time to stand up to McCarthy and said nothing when Oppenheimer was blacklisted. Mostly he loved Truman and Roosevelt. When Kennedy was assassinated, we sat in front of the TV for three days, tears in our eyes. At least Kennedy had Marilyn Monroe, not Stormy Daniels. The other politicians simply did not measure up to the Democrats.

We would watch the early civil rights marchers on TV, and Dad would call them troublemakers but admitted that maybe they had a point. He understood prejudice, having been its victim in his youth and having lost all his family to the Nazis. He paid his Black employees the same low wages he paid his white ones. After all, he was a capitalist.

 

We had a housekeeper, Kay, who had lost her boyfriend in the war and worked for us for room and board plus $25 a week. She was our nurse, our babysitter, and referee between me and my spoiled princess sister.

 

Later on, when Nixon ran for President, Dad made no secret of how wicked and evil Nixon was. I was living in New York at the time and voted for Nixon. For this I was never forgiven. Even later, when I returned to Florida and lived through Watergate, refusing to acknowledge the crimes, I learned a good lesson. Dad understood good and evil better than I did. He also understood life a bit better. But I was young and unafraid.

 

Now I am afraid.