Washington Is Still Chasing the Perfect War

Bret Stephens, who has said he does not regret supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq, now counsels the Trump administration to seize Kharg Island, an operation that would likely result in significant U.S. deaths without a clear strategic benefit. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which loudly endorsed the 2003 invasion, now applauds President Donald Trump for “standing firm” in a war that clearly isn’t succeeding. Think tanks such as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Vandenberg Coalition (chaired by Iraq War architect Elliott Abrams), Jewish Institute for National Security of America, and some prominent fellows at the Hudson Institute have rejected all forms of diplomacy, including the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and prescribed policies that have led to this war without a cause.

But the continued tolerance of warmongers even after failure upon failure is just one manifestation of a wider problem. The United States’ leaders are still chasing the fantasy of a perfect war—one in which Washington’s technological and logistical might leads to a clear, swift victory. It’s a misconception rooted in what U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal called the “three great seductions” of modern warfare: covert action, surgical special operations raids, and airpower. Together, they sustain the illusion that war can be precise and controlled.

The hope cuts across ideological lines. It leads neoconservatives to assume that societies can be remade through force, or that airstrikes and assassinations in Iran will spark a popular uprising. It is why some diaspora communities have called for maximal force against regimes but wince when civilians, maybe even their own family members, are inevitably killed.

It leads humanitarian interventionists to expect that wars can advance human rights without trade-offs; it is why even single- or double-digit U.S. casualties provoke surprise at home, even as the sacrifice is largely shrugged off by a nation that is overwhelmingly out of touch with its own military. It’s why some senior Democratic leaders, such as Sen. Chuck Schumer, have been more concerned with the war’s conduct than whether it needed to happen at all.

The roots of this hope for a “good war” lie in U.S. exceptionalism and the belief that war can be morally righteous while also being packaged as a quick, clean operation. The mythologized view of the “good war” is epitomized by World War II—a just war and, critically, not a war of choice, but one whose extreme human cost; morbid ethical dilemmas; distortionary effects on society, including the imprisonment of fellow citizens; and human sacrifice are alien to contemporary Americans, who are hostile to any future draft or mandatory service and detached from the realities of war known to past generations.

It is also the product of a hubris born from the quick, relatively low-cost operations of the 1980s and 1990s, including Panama, the first Gulf War, and Kosovo, and from our leaders’ enduring desire to recapture that era of seemingly decisive U.S. military success. Layered onto this is a more recent fetishization of special operations warfare.

But real war is defined by trade-offs, uncertainty, and collateral damage. The enduring belief in a perfect war distorts U.S. decision-making by making it politically untenable for U.S. leaders to be honest with themselves or the American public about the true costs, timeline, and likelihood of success of any given war. It also prevents honest debate in Congress when our leaders and lawmakers refuse to use the very word “war,” sidestep the constitutional process, and when our legacy media, already primed to accept the myth of the perfect war, fail to properly hold them to account. It also hinders de-escalation, mediation, and dealmaking, because even when it is clear that the United States is failing to reach its objectives, the belief in perfect war continues.

The fantasy of a perfect war has an ideological elasticity that should embarrass Washington. In a 2023 Wall Street Journal op-ed endorsing Trump precisely because he had refused to recklessly send U.S. troops to fight overseas during his first term, Vice President J.D. Vance warned that the bipartisan consensus in favor of intervention had “led the country astray many times,” citing “the invasion of Iraq, the decadeslong nation-building project in Afghanistan, regime change in Libya and guerrilla war in Syria.”

A year later, as Trump’s running mate, Vance told podcaster Tim Dillon that “our interest, I think, very much is in not going to war with Iran” and that such a war would be “massively expensive to our country.” Vance is now publicly defending the war, but his more honest former self was right about the price tag. The U.S. Defense Department put the cost of Operation Epic Fury through the end of April at $25 billion, while some officials say the real figure is closer to $50 billion—and neither number captures the billions of dollars in losses that Americans are collectively absorbing at the gas pump and across the broader economy.

U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who in 2020 warned that a war with Iran would “make the wars that we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan look like a picnic” and sold  “No War With Iran” shirts on her presidential campaign, sat in the Situation Room as Operation Epic Fury launched and has largely been publicly silent since.

Even those who today concede that Iraq went badly, and have no professional interest in supporting Trump, tend to legitimize the next war’s goals while critiquing its execution. Columnist David Frum, who wrote former President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech and later acknowledged that he had been “powerfully swayed” by which side his “team” was on rather than by the merits, now walks a tightrope, writing that the Iran war “offers opportunities to the Middle East” even if it raises constitutional concerns at home.

Max Boot, who supported Iraq and came to deeply regret it, is a rare exception and has firmly rejected the current war. But if one watched major news channels at the onset of the war, the acceptable range of debate almost immediately narrowed from “should we be doing this?” to “how do we win this?”

Catastrophic errors such as the bombing of a girls school in southern Iran briefly flickered across the news cycle, only to be overtaken by other events. Indeed, civilian casualties are a reality of war, one that the American polity seems unable to confront honestly before the fact. A war should be so just and so vital to our interests that its risks can be acknowledged upfront, rather than met with feigned surprise when they appear. By the time that wars are questioned, it is often too late. While many Democrats, especially younger lawmakers, have criticized the war and its lack of congressional approval, most senior lawmakers have largely framed their objections to Trump’s Iran war around competence rather than the war’s legitimacy.

Figures such as Sen. Chris Murphy have criticized the war but focused on its lack of warcraft, such as conceding control of the Strait of Hormuz, while Schumer has called Trump a “military moron” and emphasized the war’s cost, lack of strategy, and worsening outcomes. Similarly, Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Jeanne Shaheen has pointed to the absence of a clear strategy and the failure to achieve stated goals, although she later also critiqued the lack of authorization.

This criticism centers less on fundamental opposition to the notion of wars of choice than on erratic decision-making, poor execution, and strategic incoherence.

The fantasy of the perfect war is what allows these positions to coexist. This fantasy takes many forms, but its most common version is the belief that if only a more competent commander in chief, secretary of defense, or military leadership were in charge, there would be no big mistakes, even though scandals and errors have plagued nearly every war and every U.S. administration that has overseen one.

The other side of the same fantasy is the belief that if the U.S. military were fully unleashed, free from guardrails, politicians, and military lawyers, our warriors could finally do the job that they have supposedly been prevented from doing.

It allows the politician to promise regime change without occupation; the exiled princeling to promise quick revolution without bloodshed, at least not his own; the columnist to discuss the bombing of schools, apartment complexes, and infrastructure and the opportunities that might come of it, as if it were a business merger; and opposition politicians to critique the war not at its foundations, but against the evergreen fantasy of a perfect war waged by an expert commander in chief.

It is a self-deception that ignores that even “just” war is brutal and unpredictable, and an unnecessary one is bound to be disastrous because it lacks the legitimacy, shared sacrifice, and political commitment necessary to have any chance at success.

It permits Washington to relitigate Iraq or Afghanistan at the level of personality and process, expressing remorse for not getting it right while leaving the underlying premise undisturbed: that this time, the war will be a precise one. None of them ever are, and the reality is that as hostilities in the Gulf surge again this week, no one knows what will happen next.