The Iran War: The Eagle and the Lions

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Like most people in the western hemisphere, I woke on February 28 to an overwhelming rush of footage, reports, and rumors from the Middle East. The United States and Israel had launched a surprise attack on Iran overnight (after the markets closed for the weekend), and were pummeling the Iranians with massed air strikes. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei - a longtime fixture in regional politics - was dead, according to soon to be confirmed Israeli reports. A few hours later, Iran began retaliating with missile strikes on targets all around the region, including Israel, American bases, and the Gulf States. We were off to the races. In the weeks that have since elapsed, the emerging Iran War has been subject to analytic confusion that becomes nearly overwhelming. In some sense, this is baked into the conflict given the participants. Israel is, to put it mildly, a controversial state that occupies an inordinate amount of cognitive real estate in the United States. Depending on who you ask, Israel is either a prophetically heralded political avatar of God Almighty, which the United States is bound by sacred obligation to defend, or it is an overtly nefarious parasite which manipulates the American government through a mixture of campaign contributions, religious trickery, and blackmail. All of this is bad enough on its own, and sure to confuse conversation about why and how the war is being fought. To make matters worse, however, the Trump Administration has been unusually bad about communicating either motives or explicit aims for the conflict. In the span of barel…