The gap between spin and reality is a gulf in the Iran War.
Academics, intelligence agencies and military commanders are ringing the alarm bells – and of course, it’s always someone else’s fault when things go wrong.
The blame game is already beginning.
The war is about to enter its fifth week, with no end in sight.
“We projected four to five weeks, but we have capability to go far longer than that,” US President Donald Trump told a shocked world when the missiles first started flying.
But almost five weeks later, he’s suddenly insisting the Iran war was all his Secretary of War’s idea.
“Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up. You said, ‘Let’s do it’,” the President intoned to a silent Peter Hegseth during a media conference on Thursday.
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) chief Tulsi Gabbard was also worried about where blame could fall when fronting a Congressional hearing last week.
Under oath, she repeatedly avoided questions about the role US intelligence agencies had played in determining the Trump administration’s war strategy.
The United States and Israel have clearly won every battle they have so far engaged in. Their air and missile dominance is absolute.
But Iran is doggedly hanging on. And its strategy of choking the world’s energy and food supplies keeps it in contention to win the war.
How did this happen?
“This is what makes the White House’s posture feel less like strategy than performance,” argues Atlantic Council analyst Maisoon Kafafy.
“The Trump administration is attempting to use narrative to compensate for a form of operational control that it cannot quickly impose.”
Fact versus fantasy
“Dramatised spycraft makes for great entertainment. But the more important work of intelligence agencies is painstakingly collecting and assessing bits and pieces of information of various kinds,” argue international relations analysts James Horncastle and Jack MacLennan.
That means they don’t always tell politicians what they want to hear.
Or, at least, shouldn’t.
President Vladimir Putin’s “three-day” invasion of Ukraine is a case in point. Now in its fifth year, the blitzkrieg his loyal lapdogs promised him has turned into a bloody shambles.
And, of course, experts are not always right.
Western analysts did not believe Russia would invade. They knew the Kremlin wasn’t up to the job. But they didn’t know the Kremlin.
“Vladimir Putin, however, had isolated himself from objective analysis and continues to do so,” Horncastle and MacLennan state.
“Instead, the structure of the Russian state encouraged people who agreed with him rather than those who provided analysis based on expertise.”
And, sometimes, experts are just plain wrong.
“When intelligence agencies fail, as they did before 9/11, the price is steep. But, more often than not, intelligence analysis is very good,” the analysts argue.
Then there’s the blame game.
“Intelligence agencies are often blamed when the use of military force has an unexpected or negative outcome … (But these) failures are far more likely when political leaders manipulate, ignore or even revise intelligence findings for their own purposes,” the analysts add.
Such deadly political spin is something the CIA complained about only a few years ago.
And it’s happening again.
“In her congressional testimony, Gabbard avoided the topic of whether intelligence agencies agreed that Iran posed an imminent threat to the US,” say Horncastle and MacLennan.
“Given that Gabbard was under oath, her evasion suggests the White House interpreted information differently or dismissed intelligence reports.”
‘I told you so’
“Expert knowledge is often dismissed by this administration, but in retrospect, it seems that academics understood better than policymakers the cohesion of Iran’s regime and its ability and willingness to fight back,” argues George Washington University professor Marc Lynch.
By chance, he had been surveying Middle East analysts and experts as President Trump launched his war on Iran.
“Only 5 per cent of academic experts polled in the days leading up to the February 28 US-Israeli attacks supported launching a war, and only 1 per cent thought that a broad assault would produce a pro-American democratic regime in Iran,” he states.
“A solid 51 per cent expected the Iranian regime to survive in something like its pre-war form – an outcome that is looking increasingly likely and that the scholars anticipated far better than the pundits or the Israeli and US officials briefing them.”
It’s a case of “I told you so”.
But academic, intelligence and economic experts are increasingly unwilling to say so.
“The shift toward self-censorship as the war unfolded could be an alarming canary in the coal mine for the ability of scholars to freely share their expertise on yet another critical foreign-policy issue,” the professor warns.
They’re worried about the political price.
They could be labelled unpatriotic, pro-regime – and nobody wants to hear what they have to say anyway.
Words as double-edged swords
“The deeper failure is not that the United States miscalculated Iran – it is that it miscalculated itself,” argues the Atlantic Council’s Kafafy.
“What has emerged across every dimension of this crisis – market signals, military timelines, alliance management, diplomatic claims – is a single, consistent pattern.
“Washington has been governing by announcement, declaring things into existence and hoping that the declaration holds long enough for reality to catch up.”
It’s an age-old political ploy.
But not one well suited to the harsh realities of war – or economics, as the global financial shock demonstrates.
“This is precisely the kind of crisis that governments try to contain quickly because the economic damage compounds in real time, long before any military or diplomatic resolution can be reached,” Kafafy explains.
The pitch of the Trump and Netanyahu administrations is clear enough.
Their military superiority is complete. That means the situation is under control.
“The difficulty is that narrative management works only when it remains tethered to operational reality. Here, that tether has become visibly strained,” warns Kafafy.
The Strait of Hormuz remains closed.
The US Navy is refusing to run tankers through the gauntlet. And Europe, Asia and the Middle East don’t want to fix Mr Trump’s self-imposed crisis for him.
“This pattern is not a series of awkward overstatements,” Kafafy adds.
“It is the clearest expression of the Trump administration’s broader governing reflex: to intervene verbally … before the state has secured the conditions that would make such intervention credible.”
