The legendary General George S. Patton once quipped, “No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country,” but the experts have suddenly decided otherwise based on at least two false assumptions.
On Tuesday, Israel reported that the head of Iran’s security forces and a person who CNN described as a “de facto leader” of the entire country, Ali Larijani had been killed in a targeted strike. On Wednesday, Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib was killed in another. Both Mr. Larijana and Mr. Khatib joined a long list of high-ranking Iranian officials who have been taken out since the conflict began less than three weeks ago. These include the former Supreme Leader of the country since 1989, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Minister of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics Ali Shamkani, a second Minister of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics Aziz Nasirzadeh, the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Mohammad Pakpour, the commander of the Basij Forces Gholamreza Soleimani, another head of intelligence Saleh Asadi, and well over a dozen more. In addition, Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in public since he was selected by the Assembly of Experts approaching two weeks ago, prompting many to believe he’s already dead or seriously injured including a report out of Kuwait that he was airlifted to Russia for specialized treatment. Considering their military has been decimated with the number of rockets and drones fired plummeting by over 90% since the war began, their navy is largely at the bottom of the ocean, and they have no air force to speak of, one would think decapitating those in a position of power would indicate the United States and our Israeli allies are making significant progress towards the goals of ensuring Iran never has a nuclear weapon, ceases production of drone and missiles, stops terrorizing their neighbors, and slaughtering their own citizens. In a rational world, a country does not win a war by losing its leaders, much less its military capacity. As General George S. Patton famously put it, “No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country” and “We want to get this war over with. But you can’t win a war lying down. The quickest way to get it over with is to get the bastards who started it. We want to get the hell over there and clean the goddamn thing up.”
Sadly, our world is no longer a rational one – as I have noted many times before – and so long as President Donald Trump remains in office, no news is good news. Thus, before Mr. Larijana’s body was even cold, the mainstream media including The New York Times, CNN, and others deployed a full phalanx of experts to declare that his death could actually prolong the war, making it more difficult to win rather than easier. To do so, the man who was the leader of Iran’s internal security forces and who has likely been running the country since the death of the Ayatollah, a person believed to be responsible for killing some 30,000 Iranian protestors in January was suddenly rebranded as reasonable and pragmatic, a potential peacemaker even though he’d shown no signs of being so up until his death. The Times’ Nicholas Kristof was one of the first to posit this fantasy, writing on X, “When I met Ali Larijani I found him an absolute insider kingpin of the Iranian regime — but also the kind of strong and pragmatic leader who just might be able to hammer out a peace deal. Not sure, but I wonder if the war will now be harder to end.” The Times as a whole went on to claim, “Israel Is Picking Off Iran’s Leadership, but “Decapitation Has Its Limits,” noting “Ali Larijani’s death highlights how heavily Israel is relying on targeted killings to achieve its war aims. That approach can backfire.” For its part, CNN attempted to provide additional, but equally nonsensical detail. “As Iran’s top national security official and de facto leader,” their “analysis” of the impact on his demise began, “Ali Larijani had emerged as the key architect of the country’s military and diplomatic strategy since the start of the conflict with the US and Israel. On Tuesday, Israel said it had killed him in a strike – a move that experts warned could prolong the fighting.” Setting aside that it’s not clear a country launching missiles at other Arab Nations with abandon can be said to have a “diplomatic strategy” in any meaningful sense of the world, CNN continued to describe a cold blooded killer as an “astute and powerful voice” in Iran before quoting Hamidreza Azizi, a visiting fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. She repeated a variation of the oft touted claim that the Iranian government is somehow so advanced, diversified, and resilient, unlike any that has ever before graced this Earth, where leadership no longer matters except when the experts say it does. “The Islamic Republic is designed to survive the loss of individuals, but figures with such diversified experience are not easy to replace.” In that regard, Mr. Larijana was a “true insider who spent decades at the center of the system, which gave him credibility across different parts of the elite.”
Ironically, CNN promptly proceeded to undercut their own narrative by providing a short biography describing what being an insider in Iran really means, though they seem to lack the self awareness to recognize it. Despite the plaudits as some kind of practical, potential peacemaker, Mr. Larijani “pushed for a crackdown against Iranian protesters, took a front seat in lashing out at the US and Israel and assumed a key role in strategizing kinetic military actions.” For better or worse, this should not be the least bit surprising when he served the Iranian regime for almost five decades, holding “key positions in the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the security establishment, state media and parliament.” He was also “Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator in the first decade of the century,” meaning he stonewalled the entire world as Iran attempted time and time again to develop a nuclear bomb it would use to intimidate the world and defeat the two Satans, the US and Israel. Equally unsurprising, he was very close to the former Ayatollah, the deceased on day one Ali Khamenei, who made him an advisor in 2004. He was speaker of Iran’s parliament, head of its National Security Council, and “the most important decision-maker in the country” according to many analysts. If these credentials weren’t enough to call him a hardliner, “Larijani’s core position within the regime was reinforced by his family’s prominent clerical background. He was married to the daughter of a prominent ayatollah. One of his brothers, Sadegh, is also an ayatollah and former head of Iran’s judiciary. Another brother, Mohammad-Javad Larijani, has also held various roles in the Islamic Republic.” Incredibly, none of this prevented Ms. Azizi from echoing Mr. Kristof and referring to him as a “pragmatic,” someone who would “ bring together a coalition within the elite to negotiate an end to the war.” Now, however, “His death may make it longer. On Monday, state media announced that a 71-year-old former IRGC commander, Mohsen Rezaei, had come out of retirement to become the senior military adviser to Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. That suggests the leadership is becoming more reliant on the Iraq war generation and therefore more militarized, Azizi told CNN – without the counterbalance of Larijani’s pragmatism.”
Beyond the reality that there is little to no Iranian leadership left, there are two, fundamentally flawed in my opinion, underlying assumptions. First, as we have often heard from the so-called experts, is the idea that the Iranian government is somehow different from all others, more resilient and able to operate without leaders for prolonged periods or leaders that are entirely absentee. While anything is possible, there is no government in the entire history of the known universe that has ever been capable of doing so. Leadership matters and it seems to me they are confusing how governments and political systems operate with the more diffuse, individual cell structure taken advantage of by terrorist networks. In that case, ideologically motivated yet loosely connected individuals can mount and plan, at times, devastating attacks without having traditional command and control structures, but a functional government in a country of almost 100 million people needs to do far more than simply attack. There is infrastructure to be maintained, services to be provided, security to be insured, revenue to be raised, and more, simple things like keeping the roads paved, the trains running, and the planes flying. A government is not simply a collection of fighters. Beyond the military, there are police, courts, the normal alphabet soup of departments, lawmaking bodies at all levels, schools, temples, hospitals, a near endless number of either government run or government adjacent bodies that require people to lead them, funds to operate, and a certain amount of stability to be reliable enough the average citizen doesn’t start taking matters into their own hands. If you don’t believe me, just look at Mr. Larijani’s resume and all the different functions he was involved in. None, or at least very little, of these things can function for long with a revolving door of less and less experienced leaders who have no expertise whatsoever in their fields. Running a government is not the same as putting on a suicide vest and blowing one’s self up. Putting this another way, Iran may well be able to put up a fight for a time, but at some point in the not too distant future, whether that be a month or three, a complete inability to perform basic functions will lead to a collapse and once the collapse occurs, it will become impossible or near impossible to continue fighting.
Second, there is an implicit assumption that no one in the Iranian government responds to incentives and they are completely impervious to making rational decisions about their own future. In this framing, they are religious zealots as a whole who will fight until the death rather than agree to even the most reasonable of reforms. It makes a great talking point, but that doesn’t make it true. As far as I can tell, the assumption is based on equating a government with a terror network, similar to the resilience phenomenon discussed earlier, and our own negative experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the Taliban ultimately regained power and a hardline insurgency rampaged the country for years respectively. This, however, presupposes that we are pursuing the same strategy despite that President Donald Trump has said over and over again that we are not. In those cases, we announced in advance that we planned to remove every vestige of the existing government and replace it with a new one, meaning that every member of the regime was given a choice to either fight or lose everything. Faced with that decision, one needn’t be committed to religious martyrdom to conclude that fighting until the end was the superior option when you didn’t have a country anymore or anywhere else to go, much less facing either death, prison, or effective banishment. In either case, they had no real agency, or perhaps even worse, only had agency if they chose to take up arms. The members of the Iranian government still among the living aren’t facing such a choice, however. They have the agency and the power to decide the sort of future they want, whether to fight to the death or accept some modest reforms in exchange for a much brighter tomorrow for their country and their fellow citizens. They also have a lot to personally lose. Iran isn’t a backwater desert. It’s a resource rich country and the upper echelons of the government don’t exactly live in mud huts. They have money, power, and prestige, and if they agree to these reforms are likely to have more of all three. They’re also probably astute enough to recognize that President Trump will take anyone who steps forward and transform them instantly into a heroic figure, as he has with Venezuela’s new President, Delcy Rodríguez. Balanced against facing death or ruin, is it really much of a choice?
Lastly, it’s worth noting that the experts frequently undercut their own position on matters big and small. Last week, photos of Mr. Larijani strutting around in public prompted detractors to claim that he was fearless and used as evidence that our strikes were ineffective, but after he was taken out, his death was immediately used as evidence the war will last longer. On a larger scale, the Iranian government is equated with a terrorist organization and deemed incapable of reform whenever it suits them, except if someone like Mr. Larijani is in charge. While I don’t know what the future holds, I do know that these positions are incompatible and that killing an enemy’s leadership isn’t a sure fire way to lose a war.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 