There’s no shortage of predictions that the US-Israeli attack on Iran will end disastrously. Some would argue that it is already a disaster. From learned military wonks pointing out the lack of clear war aims or proper planning, to tankies licking their lips at the prospect of the schadenfreude to come, according to a wide spectrum of opinion the Trump administration is too incompetent and dangerous to avoid the beartraps it is walking into. Even many supporters of the war seem to be relying on Israel's military skill to counterbalance the Trumpian chaos.
Memories of the Iraq war loom large. As with Iran, even before the Iraq invasion many observers pointed to the Bush administration’s inadequate planning and unrealistic war aims. These people were vindicated and it’s hard not to assume that those predicting disaster this time around will be vindicated too.
The problem is that predictions of disaster, both during the Iraq war and today, are too often based on unquestioned assumptions about “success” and “failure”. These fail to recognise the radical shift in what policy and its enactment have come to mean for wide swathes of the right, not just in America, but globally.
As an undergraduate and postgraduate studying sociology in the 1990s, I was inculcated into an intellectual tradition founded on an appreciation of, and concern for, what Robert Meron called the “unanticipated consequences of purposive social action”. Sociology emerged in the 19th century out of a desire to understand the transformations wrought by the emergence of modern industrialised capitalism. The discipline offered a way of diagnosing the pathologies of the new world that was being brought into being. It saw them not necessarily as willed by anyone or solely as the outcome of the cruel desires of the rich and powerful. Instead, they were byproducts of structural forces too mighty to be controlled by any individual.
Sociologists have for generations been trained on classic studies that make this kind of argument, such as Max Weber’s imputing of the “spirit of capitalism” to the unintended result of Calvinist theological insecurity, or Emile Durkheim’s argument that suicide isn’t simply the result of individual sickness but can be traced back to the nature of modern society. Marx too is a crucial part of this curriculum; the dictum “men make their own history but they do not make it as they please” encapsulates the delusions of agency’s power against the might of structural and historical forces.
The social sciences were, at least as they developed in the 19th and much of the 20th century, tied into the development of planning and policy as preoccupations of government and civil society. By weighing up the possible results of action and learning from the results of previous policies, humankind could tame the power of structure and minimise unintended consequences. Anthony Giddens—whom I heard lecture as an undergraduate and who subsequently became a New Labour policy guru—spoke of sociology as “the reflexivity of modernity”, the place where we learn from our actions in order to build for the future.
It is tempting to treat the disastrous consequences of the Iraq war as a paradigmatic case of the unintended consequences of human action, unleashed by human hubris. What was supposed to be an awesome demonstration of American force turned out to demonstrate the opposite. The neo-cons who pushed for war in Iraq ignored social science lessons on the limitations of power in shaping the world as those who wield it please. Trump is ignoring the same lessons today.
This conclusion misses the point, however. This kind of perspective assumes that war is, as the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously said, “politics by any other means”, that it is a tool to achieve a clear end. If we accept that dictum, the Iraq war was a disaster because, while it removed the perceived threat from Saddam Hussein, it brought with it new threats from insurgent groups such as ISIS and increased Iranian influence across the region (to say nothing of the immense suffering caused to ordinary people). Similarly, the Iran war will be a disaster if the regime holds, if the conflict becomes a wider war or if the country collapses into a failed state.
Yet what if these outcomes were not viewed by those responsible for the war as unintended consequences? What if they are seen as no more than unfortunate byproducts of the successful achievement of other “intended” consequences? Amongst the successes of the Iraq war were, for instance, lucrative no-bid contracts given to political and business allies of the Bush administration and the normalisation of the use of private military contractors. The Iran war already is a success in distracting from the Epstein scandal.
These successes hide a much greater and more consequential success, however: that of transforming the very nature of power and governance. The pursuit of war without planning for potential unintended consequences was not a failure of policymaking when it came to Iraq, it was the policy. The famous quote attributed to Karl Rove at the time that derided the “reality-based community”, encapsulates this: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again.”
In a recent column in the New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang called the Iran war “the no-explanation war”; the lack of coherent war aims doesn’t just mean you can’t ever fail to achieve them, war also becomes a pure demonstration of power. The deeper sociological substrate on which much of the thinktank and policy studies world rests (and parts of journalism, too) is ill-equipped to appreciate war as a visceral experience pursued for its own sake. There is a psychoanalytical aspect here, too. Awesome violence satisfies some of the deepest desires a human can have; note Pete Hegseth’s evident thrill at unleashing such disorder.
In the end, that’s why the classic sociological tradition, while still widely studied, was eventually followed in the postwar era with paradigms that emphasised the study of process itself; how governance is done rather than what it claims to intend to do. Unfortunately, this kind of sociological tradition has had a limited impact outside of academia.
The Trump administration sometimes pays lip service to older paradigms. Shortly after the war began, JD Vance argued that the US won’t get bogged down in Iran because Trump is “smart” in a way that previous presidents are not. This was a nod to the outgoing assumption that policy needs to be intelligent and goal-oriented to be successful. At the same time, the absurdity of Vance’s statement allowed him to signal his fealty to an administration that makes its own reality. For now, the cannier members of the administration still think such feats of triangulation are necessary. The war will be a success for them if they never again have to triangulate this way again.
Perhaps we should see the Iran war as at least three wars: The first is the long-planned onslaught pursued by Israel for definable and stated goals of, at minimum, neutralising the possibility that Iran and its proxies can be seen as a threat again. This war is monumentally risky and may well have terrible consequences even for Israel itself, but it can still be judged according to the logic of intended or unintended consequences. This is a war that some Israeli political and military leaders think they are fighting, together with supporters of Israel, liberal interventionists in western countries and some Iranians who hope for the liberation of their country from tyranny. They are the ones who will have to reckon with the unintended consequences of the actions they support.
Then there is the second war; the one fought for cynical short-term reasons. Both Trump and Netanyahu’s recent careers consist of an endless series of improvisations against the legal and reputational disasters that pursue them. This is the latest. In staving off their reckoning for a while longer, this has already been a successful war.
These first two wars are widely known and understood, but too many are ignoring the other war also being pursued by Trump, but part of a much broader and ambitious project. This war aims at nothing less than overturning the connection between actions and consequences. The foe isn’t really Iran. This is a war against sociology and for untrammeled power and the lust to dominate. This war may well succeed even if what results from this conflict is disaster in conventional terms. In fact, by escaping the bounds of the consequence-ridden world that most of us live in, it may already have succeeded—even if the current Iran war ends tomorrow.
