Central planning fails, always and everywhere. Leo Tolstoy wasn’t the first to see this, but he provided readers with one of the best articulations of the previous truth in War and Peace.
In it, Tolstoy rejected all the “great man” theories of war. He’d seen war up close, and knew that the natural human instinct to survive rendered the best-laid war plans mostly ridiculous, and much worse, tragic. Human action can’t be centrally planned, and the truth of the latter is multiplied when lives are at stake.
Which is why it’s both comical and sad to read so much all-knowing commentary from the various Iran hawks inside the U.S. commentariat. Having seemingly forgotten how flawed their predictions were about Iraq, Afghanistan and the Midde East broadly, they’re now writing as though they’ve uniquely detected precise effects of what was and wasn’t done in Afghanistan during the Biden years and beyond to explain what’s happening today.
More realistically they don’t know. Neither do Tucker Carlson and the various critics of possible U.S. involvement in Iran. And that’s not an insult as much as it’s a statement of the obvious. Commercial markets are impossible to plan, and just as hard to predict, no matter the experts planning and predicting them. That war and its effects are exponentially more difficult to chart and plan should be an obvious corollary to the previous truth, but not to various Iran debaters. Though they’d nod along to the truth about the “knowledge problem” as applied to central planning of markets, they pretend that when it comes to war the answers are easy as are the effects of choosing, or not choosing war.
Isn't Iran the next Germany as some hawks allude if we don't do something, or is it more realistic to ask if with nuclear Russia unable to vanquish Ukraine, why the fear of Iran? Except that the questions are obnoxious simply because they imagine easy-to-predict effects of government intervention. Sorry, but there are none. Better to just not intervene based on the historical truth that "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" isn't any less terrifying when the intervention involves ammunition, and is taking place overseas. The U.S. should stay out of Iran not because thousands of Americans will die (Carlson), or get in because the invasion would be of the "limited" (where have we heard that before?), no-boots-on-the-ground kind, but because government meddling is on its own wrongheaded and dangerous, only for it to frequently add exponentially more tragic qualities when guns, bombs, and super-bombs are involved.
Which brings us to the seemingly easy decision (as expressed by the never in doubt Iran hawks) for the U.S. to drop a “bunker buster” in Fordow to “permanently” disable Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It brings to mind the O.J. trial, and the gloves the government’s lawyers were “sure” would fit…
This is important as the Iran hawks tell us a failure to take out Fordow will signal to China that we won’t do anything about Taiwan. What investors would give for their ability to see around the proverbial corner. But even that’s not the point.
The better point can perhaps be found in what my great friend Bob Reingold pointed out to me: what if the “bunker buster” doesn’t succeed? Talk about a message to China.
War is hard to predict. And it’s hard to predict in ways that manifest themselves tragically precisely because human action is impossible to predict. That's why the founders wanted national defense, over offense. Let’s not just avoid war because it’s hell, but because central planning is always and everywhere hell.
