A Recent Attack on TAC Falls Flat
I was right about Iran, actually.
On Iran and the Middle East broadly, The American Conservative gets everything wrong.
At least, that’s what pro-Israel neoconservatives would have you believe, notwithstanding much evidence to the contrary.
Last week Commentary published a hit job on us with the rather uninspired headline, “Neither American nor Conservative.” According to the subhead, “The flagship paleoconservative publication got everything about Donald Trump’s Middle East policy wrong—and then melted down.” The author, James Kirchick, is a longtime neocon who has supported such America First causes as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, gay rights in Eastern Europe, and slandering antiwar conservatives as “objectively pro-fascist.”
As senior editor at TAC, I have a pretty good handle on what we run online and in print and what goes on inside our DC office, and I don’t recall anyone ever “melting down” about the Middle East.
But what about the other, sweeping claim, that TAC has gotten “everything” about Trump’s Mideast policy wrong? Au contraire, we have gotten a lot right, and Kirchick, who seems to have scoured our coverage of Iran and tallied the (alleged) misses and none of the hits, surely knows that. Allow me to survey my own recent writings on the subject to refute this claim.
After Trump bombed Iran in late June and then announced a ceasefire to end the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, I recalled that in May I had predicted that
the U.S. would attack Iran, rather than strike a deal that limits its enrichment of uranium for nuclear fuel. While Trump seemed to genuinely want such a deal, I reasoned, Israel would go to great lengths to sabotage diplomacy.
“What I’m imagining is that Israel conducts strikes and then we get dragged into war in support of them,” I said on an episode of TAC Right Now. “They [Israel] can’t take out these underground nuclear reactors on their own; they need bunker busters for that, 30,000-pound bunker-busters that require B-2 Spirit stealth bombers.” The U.S., and not Israel, possesses those bunker-busters and B-2 Spirits, and I expected the U.S. to use them on Israel’s behalf.
This weekend, that prediction came to pass. Though America’s intervention now seems like a one-off, and though Israel and Iran have agreed to a ceasefire, the same dynamics that last month made me so pessimistic are still in play.
Does this sound to you like the rantings of a Mideast melt-downer who is wrong about “everything”? Compare my prediction from May to arguments then being advanced by pro-Israel conservatives. Back then, figures like Ben Shapiro were confidently proclaiming that Israel could take care of Iran all by itself, and that the U.S. absolutely wouldn’t attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, so the White House shouldn’t restrain Israel out of misplaced fears of getting dragged into the conflict.
Moreover, as I had warned would be the case, America’s deep involvement in the conflict went beyond its own offensive military action, despite what the Israel-Firsters would have you believe. Throughout the war, Washington extended its superpower shield over Israel, defending it from Iranian retaliation and, in the process, rapidly depleting American stocks of scarce missile interceptors. Had the U.S. refrained from coming to the rescue, the damage done to Israel would have been even more severe than it was, perhaps catastrophically so.
In fairness to Kirchick, he didn’t quote the piece from late June, so maybe he never got around to reading it.
Nor does he refer to my discussion on Iran with Daniel McCarthy, a board member at The American Conservative, though TAC published a transcript in mid-June, after the war kicked off but days before the U.S. bombed Iran. One reason for publishing that transcript was to expose our readers to McCarthy’s argument that, in my words, “some figures on the antiwar right have become mirror images of the neocons: While the latter push for Trump to join Israel’s war with Iran, the former argue he should have prevented it.”
During the conversation, McCarthy warned against assuming a “nightmare scenario” of Iraq War 2.0 and reminded me of
the responsibility we have to look at each step of this mess that we have, and to say, you know what, America has a choice every step of the way and can back down or choose not to be involved at any point.
That proved excellent advice, which guided my subsequent analysis. The piece constitutes a rather glaring counterexample to one of Kirchick's central criticisms and generalizations: that TAC routinely insisted that any engagement in Iran would spin out of control.
So, which of my pieces did Kirchick highlight? The only quote by me comes from an early July piece. Kirchick writes:
Senior editor Andrew Day sourly fumed that Israel “instigated” the war and that “its campaign, though impressive, failed to eliminate the Iranian threat, and probably made it worse in the long run.”
Where to begin?
First, as my friends know, I’m rarely sour and never fume. Second, as I like to remind the younger writers here at TAC, you can’t magically enhance your argument by stuffing attributions with adverbs or using colorful alternatives to the time-honored “wrote” and “said.”
Some questions: Does Kirchick disagree that Israel, by launching a surprise attack on Iran, thereby “instigated” the war? Does he believe that Israel did indeed “eliminate the Iranian threat”? (The Israelis themselves don’t seem to think so.) Lastly, is it patently absurd of me to assess that Israel, by heightening Tehran’s threat perception and spurring its buildup of military forces, worsened the long-term threat posed by Iran?
Kirchick evidently thinks that merely quoting this line is sufficient to discredit my analysis, but I’m not sure why. Note also my use of even-handed, probabilistic language when forecasting. No meltdown here.
Of course, I didn’t get everything right on Iran. But I was sometimes wrong in a direction opposite the one Kirchick emphasizes. In a piece entitled “Trump Can, and Must, Avoid War with Iran,” published on June 12, I wrote:
Fortunately, the U.S. and Iran still plan to hold nuclear talks this weekend. Israel is not likely to attack before then, meaning Trump has one more shot at salvaging diplomacy.
As we now know, Israel attacked Iran the very next day. Evidently, I underestimated Israel’s willingness to sabotage U.S.–Iran diplomacy and overestimated Trump’s abilities to avoid getting dragged into another Mideast conflict.
Kirchick would surely reply that I nevertheless assumed the risk for America was getting dragged into a “forever war” in the Middle East, whereas Trump—to his credit—wound up authorizing limited strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and then pushing the two main belligerents to cease fire. Fair enough. But before Trump’s intervention, my published conversation with McCarthy highlighted the possibility of limited U.S. engagement.
Kirchick faults TAC for repeatedly predicting that war with Iran would lead to “World War III,” and he seems to think we’re terribly embarrassed by our failures of prognostication.
In fact, none of the articles mentioned by Kirchick used the term “World War III,” though a speech he cites delivered this September by Curt Mills, our executive director, does reflect on the criticism that so-called isolationists falsely predicted World War III. And one TAC article from June argues that America’s accumulation of security dependents (not just Israel) makes World War III more likely.
When I myself have talked about the possibility of world war in recent months, I’ve cautioned against alarmism. For example, when the foreign policy analyst and podcast host Brandon Weichert interviewed me in August and asked whether a renewed war with Iran could widen into a global conflagration involving Russia and China, I answered, “I am not quite concerned about World War III breaking out over that particular issue.” This might be the mildest meltdown in human history.
That podcast proves instructive in another respect: As my comments clearly demonstrate, I harbor no hysterical animus toward Israel, and I have often criticized its actions on the basis that I think they are counterproductive to Israel’s own long-term interests. On the podcast, I even emphasized that, in the short term, Israel’s bellicosity toward Iran is comprehensible and rational (though not optimal), given its threat environment. As I made clear, the problem for me is that it’s not in America’s interests to subsidize and enable that bellicosity, and Trump should avoid becoming embroiled in a war on Israel’s behalf.
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Kirchick, unsurprisingly, also painted TAC as a motley collection of nefarious antisemites. His most confident accusation of Jew hatred was leveled against Harrison Berger, TAC’s newest staff writer, who also happens to be a devout American Jew. I’ve enjoyed hours of conversation with Berger, once involving copious amounts of wine, and have yet to hear him slip up and express bigotry against himself. Perhaps Kirchick wouldn’t deem these facts dispositive, but consider his own evidence: Berger “scornfully referenced the Hebrew word hasbara without translation… a sure sign that the writer is an anti-Semite.” Okay.
In recent weeks TAC has been subjected to what feels like a coordinated campaign to delegitimize our magazine and demean us personally. We’ve even weathered a DDoS cyberattack, originating in Israel, that briefly took down our website. Kirchick and others are, of course, free to criticize our ideas—we enjoy rough-and-tumble debate—but so far the most impressive attack was the one against our website.
As the TAC staffer who has written the most on Iran this past year, and who wrote the most articles cited by Kirchick, I don’t consider it cherry-picking to review my own output to refute his critique. Of course, I would welcome a riposte, if Kirchick’s not too busy sourly fuming.
