YOU MAY ALREADY HAVE WON THE IRAN WAR / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL OP EDITORIAL

You May Already Have Won the Iran War

Or you may already have lost. Commentators on both sides refuse to admit how little they know.

By Gerard Baker

Smoke rises from the site of an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, March 30. Ibrahim Amro/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

“I wish I was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything.”

The plaintive observation, ascribed to the early Victorian British Prime Minister Viscount Melbourne about the acerbically self-confident historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, remains the motto of the thoughtfully skeptical man through the ages. 

Some of us still harbor doubt about the consequences of actions in a complex world. 

But we live in an era when instantaneous certitude about everything, an iron conviction in subjective judgment in the face of objective uncertainty, is the only guarantee of a hearing.

This is in part a corollary of the hyperpartisanship that characterizes our modern political conversation. 

If you believe that your side represents the only route to virtue and the other side the sure path to perdition, you’ve already taken a position of metaphysical certainty.

Such assuredness is acceptable from politicians. 

No one wants to hear a leader publicly fret over the range of possible outcomes of a course he’s chosen. 

But since the line between partisan engagement and independent observation has been blurred, similar devotion to the veracity of one’s own judgment is obligatory in the commentator class too.

So it comes as no surprise that less than a month into the latest war, almost everyone seems certain not only about the outcome of the war, but about what it means for decades to come.

Last week the Economist, a publication with a long and spotty track record of declarative certitude in the face of unpredictability, announced that the war was an American failure. 

“A month of bombing has achieved nothing,” its cover thundered.

The academy is on the same page. Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, insists the war is a “longtime disaster” and the “most catastrophic failure of air power we have ever seen.”

No fog of war for these seers. 

They have scrutinized the battlefield from the vantage points of St James’s, SW1, and Hyde Park, 60637, and, like ancient augurs, have divined the outcome: It’s over for the U.S. and Israel, with devastation rippling for years.

There is no less confidence on the other side. 

Torsten Slok, chief economist at the private-equity firm Apollo, dismissed the war’s alarming fallout in commodity, equity and bond markets, and said it would “ultimately result in 50 years of stability in oil markets, supply chains and geopolitics.”

Marc Thiessen, a speechwriter for President George W. Bush (whose administration isn’t especially noted for the accuracy of its observations) and now a columnist for the Washington Post, said on Fox News that President Trump’s war would go down as “possibly the greatest military campaign . . . since the American Revolution.” 

Move over, Dwight D. Eisenhower; step aside, Ulysses S. Grant.

Since rhetorical extremism in the pursuit of persuasion is all the rage, why stop there? 

Surely someone will soon make the case that Operation Epic Fury is the greatest triumph of arms since Henry V’s longbowmen routed the superior French numbers at Agincourt. 

Or, according to your taste, it already represents the most disastrous defeat for a major power since the Romans were out-generaled at Cannae by Hannibal.

I am not against bold opinion commentary, as you might have noticed, but this level of certainty about a war that is four weeks old and with plainly many more phases to come, is simply unsupportable. 

As we stand, the outcome isn’t knowable with any level of confidence; it surely rests on events at a tactical and strategic level in coming weeks and months that we can’t know.

It is evident that the U.S. and Israel have enjoyed extraordinary military success in eliminating much of Iran’s leadership and military capabilities. 

But Iran’s regime has succeeded at a political and economic level—first by simply surviving the onslaught to date and second by exercising its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz.

These are all limited and contingent successes. 

Again, their ultimate outcome is conditional on the extent to which the U.S. is able to break that stranglehold and either force out the regime or at least cow it into submission. 

And that in turn is conditional on a host of at this stage unknowable developments: the deployment of ground forces, the contribution of neighbors and others to the shipping challenge.

Some of us who acknowledge our uncertainty may be simply reflecting a larger uncertainty about the wisdom of this war in the first place.

In the same way, to declare now that it is already won or lost is merely to affirm one’s prior and continuing political and ideological prejudices, delivered to an audience that wants to hear nothing else.

Gerry Baker is Editor at Large of The Wall Street Journal. He writes a weekly column for the editorial page of The Journal each Tuesday on politics, economics and culture. Mr. Baker also writes a weekly column on US and global affairs for The Times of London every Friday.