The Twelve Day War: Truths and Consequences

Operations Rising Lion and Midnight Hammer have been successful military operations, but a great deal of uncertainty remains, writes Adam Garfinkle.

Left to Right: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Flickr), Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (Wikicommons); US President Donald Trump (Gage Skidmore, Flickr)

Donald Trump is the Mr Magoo of American statecraft: blind as a bat but luckier than a leprechaun with a four-leafed clover tattooed on his forehead. In an orgy of indiscipline and self-indulgence, the US president scorched every sensible talking point his officials offered for the 22 June attack on Iran, codenamed Operation Midnight Hammer. At several earlier points, Trump almost undermined the operational secrecy of the mission itself. And yet, the mission worked anyway. One may now justifiably add a last line to Otto von Bismarck’s famous aphorism: “God protects drunks, fools, and the United States of America… particularly President Donald J. Trump.”

Which is to say that the US military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities succeeded to the extent it did despite Trump not because of him. To compensate for Trump’s Ray Bolger scarecrow-in-a-cornfield act, the White House and most of the upper echelon of the US government’s national-security establishment turned into an ensemble of spin whores, just as Trump’s economic team did after the “Liberation Day” tariff disaster. Leading the White House whitewash was press secretary Karoline Leavitt, whom one observer has aptly described as a “chirpy attack-bunny.” At one point, Vice-President J.D. Vance—who can probably still distinguish between a fact and an invented self-serving narrative in private—answered a reporter’s question about damage assessment with this: “Severely damaged versus obliterated—I’m not exactly sure what the difference is.”

But Vance really had no choice: All senior administration officials must routinely engage in this kind of mortifying ego-fluffery if they expect to have any future influence on the president. Trump, after all, judges the quality of the advice he receives on the basis of its deference, not its wisdom, which he is helpless to determine. The US President’s conduct before, during, and since the twelve-day Israel–Iran war provides vivid evidence of his encyclopaedic ignorance of the intelligence craft, the conduct of war, and the arts of diplomacy; his ego-driven delusion and mendacity; the process incoherence of his administration; and a general lack of concern with the consequences of his own decisions.

None of this will harm the president politically, of course. On the contrary, his good fortune—made possible by association with the competent professionalism of the Israeli and US militaries—will, at least temporarily, rescue his plummeting approval ratings, even as it opened cracks in Trump’s support coalition. By the time any major downsides of his decisions emerge, most of his core constituents will have long since forgotten any pesky facts concerning those decisions as Trump weaves his weird way onward.