Tell me how this war will end

We need today to revive the question General David Petraeus posed after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, launched under fabricated pretexts: “Tell me how this ends.” But we ask it now in a completely different context, as we speak about Iran and a war that seems to be moving without a compass, driven by an excessive confidence in the ability of military force to produce political transformation. Is it conceivable that US President Donald Trump—with all his bravado—and the Pentagon, with its hardened rhetoric and overwhelming arsenal, do not understand Iran as they open a war against it? Or is this misunderstanding part of a recurring historical pattern in which the United States assumes that force alone can reshape the […]