Something about the White House Correspondents Associate (WHCA) dinner shooting bothered me.  That is, it bothered me beyond the issue of someone trying – again – to murder public officials.  Of course, there were the obvious questions – how many conspiracy theories will evolve from it, why were thirteen members of the line of succession there, why was yet another young man possessed of the need to attack people with a gun, etc. But the one I found most curious was how did a shooting at the Hilton Hotel become a demand to expedite the construction of a ballroom at the White House?

Calls for immediate completion of the 90,000 square foot ballroom at the White House began as soon as the echo of the gun shot died.  The president needs a large ballroom to be safe for important large gatherings like the WHCA dinner, they said.  Why is the proposed ballroom a safer venue?  For one thing, it is within the grounds of the White House.  Security is tightly controlled from the perimeter fence all throughout the complex.  That applies to all of the rooms of the White House as well as the porticos, corridors, meeting rooms, guest rooms, and the existing formal dining rooms.  Unfortunately, the State Dining Room only holds 140 guests.  The East Room can also be used for formal dinners and it can hold about 260.  While larger, formal state events have been held outside in the Rose Garden or on the South Lawn, those are not ideal, especially in the age of drones.  The outdoor set ups hold between 200 and typically 400 although the South Lawn has been pushed as high as 1,300 for a more informal dinner honoring returning POWS from Vietnam. 

So a dining room inside the complex with a capacity for dining greater than 400 seems justified.  The president’s original proposal was for a ballroom to seat 650 which he increased later to 1000.  I’m still confused about why a ballroom with a capacity of 1000 attached to the White House is safer than one with capacity of, say, 650 as he originally announced or even 500.  Either would have adequate capacity for almost all state dinners and access to the bunker underneath with all the top-secret military security and protection from drones, bullets, RPGs and murder hornets.   The Correspondents’ dinner invited 2,600 guests. 

Wait!  What?  2,600 is 2.6 times the capacity of even the largest proposed WH ballroom!  The ballroom can’t handle the event that is being used to justify it!?  That seems to imply that either the originally proposed 650 or the current 1,000 would be adequate for security for events that are normally held at the White House.    

But what about the Hilton?  Is it so unsafe it can’t be used for larger presidential functions?  It has been used safely for many such occasions in addition to the WHCA dinner. The designers intended to attract White House events so it was built with a safe room and underground bunker.   After President Reagan was shot entering his limo on the street, the garage was upgraded.  There is now a secure underground garage with off-street access to accommodate the presidential motorcade with no need to leave the building.  It also allows multiple levels of security internally.  Light security in the lobby, tighter security in the paths to the event and lots of people with guns on the floor where the event is.  Note the attempted shooter was caught in the first security checkpoint beyond the lobby and was not on the same floor as the dignitaries.  Nor the president. 

The Hilton is not the White House though so it will not have the same tightly controlled perimeter.  No place will unless it is declared a National Special Security Event (NSSE).  Think Super Bowl, Olympics, G7 level of security where the Secret Service is completely in charge.  They take months to set up.  For a private hotel, that would mean it closes to customers at least weeks prior to the event.  The security perimeter would extend well beyond the hotel.  Despite the bloviating of some journalists and politicians of all stripes, not having an NSSE designation was not a fault but a practical impossibility. 

Modifications are not being done solely for the current president but for all future presidents.  They are being done to the White House which belongs to the United States, not the occupant.  Likewise, the dinner is not the president’s occasion.  It is the WHCA’s dinner and they invite the president, not the other way around. 

Corruption.  Rot.  Decay.  Degradation.  Putrescence. 

Words that describe a path from being whole and healthy to not being.  Americans hate corrupt government.  They also tolerate it.  It gives them something to complain about. They can say it’s hopeless to try to fix it.  Everyone does it so what’s the point?  Nothing I can do. Besides, it doesn’t really affect me. 

Many voters think corruption is background noise. It isn’t.

Many government contracts require competitive bids to ensure fair access to the work and a proper review of the contractor’s capabilities.  No-bid contracts, offered to only a single contractor, ignore those principles.  The work can be steered to friends of “important people” and bypass meaningful review.  More qualified and possibly more ethical contractors may be locked out because they are on the wrong side of a political dispute, thus wasting taxpayer dollars and creating risk.  Imagine driving over the bridge built with sub-par steel from a no-bid contract.  The people who managed the contract may have gotten richer but the steel isn’t any stronger. The bridge isn’t any safer. 

The same distorted decision-making that led to the low-quality bridge extends to security.    When officials select staff and cyber-security systems based on loyalty to insiders, they risk choosing less qualified people and systems and leaving holes in the security infrastructure.  Failure to do a rigorous review of candidates opens the door to low quality products, foreign influence, blackmail, and incompetence.  Incompetent but loyal higher level security officials will hire incompetent but loyal lower-level officials as well.  When loyalty replaces competence, security degrades.  Now you and I are exposed to data breaches, medical privacy violations, theft of military and industrial secrets, and other failures if sub-par security systems are in place because they didn’t hire the best.

 Corruption is not only about money.  It is about staying in power. To stay in power, the regime wants to control what people know – or are allowed to know.  When the government restricts press freedoms, they get to shape what can be believed about their own actions with little fear of contradiction.  A free press prevents them from being the sole force shaping our understanding.  When the free and independent press weakens, we lose the ability to understand how the bridge contract was issued, how the security contractors were chosen, who knew about projects before they went out to bid.  We can no longer make choices about our news sources. We can’t challenge decisions if we don’t know how they were made nor even that they were made.  Accountability is gone.  Once the government has controlled the free press, it has a wide range of other corrupt practices it can engage in.

When corrupt acts are not punished, it sends a message that corruption is ok.  Corruption that is tolerated leads to public cynicism and disengagement.  Accountability weakens further as the public withdraws and pays less attention.  The corrupt officials grow bolder and more successful in their enterprises and attract more participants.  That encourages further corruption and the cycle continues and grows.  Cancer-like, untreated it grows and spreads. 

The moral basis of democratic society is our trust that the government will follow and enforce the law.  The checks and balances in our constitution are there to enforce that trust.  When the government squanders that trust, it does more than take money out of our pockets, prevent us from understanding governing decisions, and put our security at risk.  It takes the government away from us.  The framers intended for us to have a government of the people, not a government of privileged insiders, loyalists or self-dealers.  Once our voice in the government is compromised, it becomes more and more difficult to speak up again. 

Donald Trump is a danger to the world.  His actions threaten the stability of nations, the operation of international trade, and the conduct of foreign policy.  He works openly against the norms the world has lived by for the past 80 years as he threatens NATO, attacks international law, diminishes our relationships with allies, advances relationships with those who do not hold our best interests at heart.  Any action by a major power can have dire unintended consequences.  There is a great difference between consequences that are unintended and those that are foreseeable but unconsidered.  The war in Iran has already created foreseeable chaos from Israel and Lebanon to India and Japan, and the chaos continues without clear goals nor a clear end point. 

This war illustrates some of the characteristics that make Trump dangerous.  His administration has a predilection for speed.  ICE came to be so large and expensive because of the desire to remove an enormous number of undocumented people very fast despite lacking the infrastructure to do so.  It led to errors.  Trump uses speed when sticking with the process may prevent him getting what he wants.  Consider his DC architectural efforts where the speed of execution prevented any timely criticism. 

Trump also relies on people he is comfortable with but lack expertise in the areas where expertise is essential.  Outsiders can bring keen insights, but excluding appropriate experience from consequential decisions is reckless.  Kushner and Witkoff negotiated nuclear facility issues but failed to involve nuclear experts.  This left them open to deception, and to being considered unserious.  The original Iran nuclear deal involved many nuclear experts from multiple countries.  If Trump thought Kushner and Witkoff thought they could do it themselves, all three were naïve or were not serious.  Their conflicts of interest compounded this: they have large and growing investment interests in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Negotiators working on behalf of themselves cannot be trusted to resolve an international problem.

The administration’s apparent lack of knowledge and interest in the region is alarming. The military certainly had well considered plans for many military contingencies including the Strait of Hormuz.  They are logistical experts.  The decision makers – Hegseth and Trump – failed to take seriously Iran’s ability and resolve to fight back and to disrupt.   The evidence is compelling: the ground troops needed to secure nuclear material, the Strait, or ground targets were in North Carolina, Japan and California; their deployment didn’t begin until two weeks after the war started; minesweepers were in Singapore or Japan; no evident action to protect the Strait or prepare for shipping disruption; cheap drones were being fought with multi-million-dollar missiles; and there was apparent surprise at the cost of  asymmetric warfare. 

The belief that a devoted and religiously adherent government would back down easily is perhaps the most revealing failure of all.  The Taliban endured 20 of American occupation and was immediately back in power when we left.

Today, as a result of an impatient administration that downplays expertise and experience of its military and foreign policy professionals, we have a war that gets stickier with more far-flung effects by the day.  We cannot foresee the exact outcome but there are some educated guesses.  Here is one possible scenario. 

By the end of the war, however that is determined, Iran will not have a serious nuclear enrichment program, whether or not they had one before the war.  Its manufacturing capacity will be degraded.  Our airpower campaign was successful. Neighboring countries will have been attacked directly for harboring Americans bases.  By that time, Iran will likely be much weakened but not a failed state.  Militias split off from the IRGC, Basij, army, Kurds, Balochs, and other regional groups will control at least parts of the country.  The central government will nominally survive but in a weakened state, with a strong IRGC remnant and undiminished hatred toward Israel.  Lacking the arsenal to threatened Israel seriously, it will turn inward to maintain control of Iranian civilians.  Because Iranian influence over Hezbollah and scattered militias will have fragmented, intelligence will be harder to gather, and Israel and America will face greater danger from terrorist acts.

The Balochi insurgency in Pakistan will have gained confidence and spread into Balochi areas of Iran. The Kurdish independence movement will have reignited, uniting Turkish and Iranian Kurds and straining Turkey.  The Strait of Hormuz will be be managed by some form of protectorate under the US or UN or other.  It will be constantly under threat and harassed by militant groups that may not answer to Tehran. American and Gulf companies will try to invest in energy, but instability will dampen progress.

Iran will not be broke though.  The US will have removed more sanctions in return for opening Hormuz. 

Pakistan will be stressed by managing Balochi insurgents, Afghani terrorists, and its ongoing conflict with India.  India will face domestic political problems over cooking gas supply disruptions caused by Hormuz’s closure.  The rest of southeast Asia will have similar issues preparing for possible future shortages.  Russia, with American sanctions removed to keep oil prices down, will funnel new income into weapons from Iran and China to sustain its war against Ukraine and prepare for future “special military operations”. NATO will have discounted any near-term American support.  Serious discussions are being held about trading oil in Yuan instead of dollars. 

But Trump will have declared victory.  Hormuz is open-ish. 

So, having solved the Iranian nuclear bomb/missile/freedom/terrorism/oil traffic/whatever problem, we move on.  Cuba!  You’re next!  You are welcome.  Even though you have not shown any gratitude yet. 

The state of the world in the aftermath of Trump’s dangerous “excursion” to Iran is a significant increase in instability, diminished trust in the USA, continued aggression by Israel in Lebanon, continued harassment of Israel by local Iranian militias, thrashing in the world’s energy markets, and unintended and unpredictable consequences in East Asia.  This is the danger posed by an arrogant and impatient administration that eschews expertise and experience and has the world’s most powerful military.

This essay will also be published in Substack

On February 28th, I published a list of stated objectives for Trump’s war in Iran.  They included prohibiting nuclear weapons production, missile production, general peace and stability in the middle east and destroying the navy.  Various administration officials also include, from time to time regime change to free the people of Iran and preemptive self defense. 

The rest of this essay looks at the question of how will we know that these objectives have been met and therefore the war is over?

Goal: Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.  Fair enough. It is a bad idea to let them develop one.  It is a bad idea to allow any other nation to develop a nuclear weapon and we are not the only nation interested in that goal.  What is required for Iran never to have a nuclear weapon? 

1.         Their production capacity must be destroyed or limited to what is necessary for civilian use.  We claimed that we obliterated it in June by bombing.  Since we are at war again to destroy it, we must assume bombing alone is not sufficient. 

2.        We can bomb the external sites we know of and make it impossible to use the current entrances.  But we can’t know there are not other entrances nor whether the bombing was fully effective nor that Iranian government did not create new sites since we last inspected. 

3.        If we can’t know, and bombing based on recent history was insufficient, we will have to send in inspectors.  That means a ground invasion with troops, nuclear technical specialists, specialized equipment to inspect and remove materials that are hazardous to handle and may be damaged and radioactive. 

4.        To prevent resurrection of the nuclear development, we need continuous inspections.  That requires an agreement that should at a minimum include the other participants of the JCPOA.

5.        Achieving a new agreement may also require a new government or at least new leaders who are open to the idea of shelving their nuclear ambitions. 

Goal:  Stop Iran’s missile development.  We do not want them to have ICBMs.  The only purpose an ICBM could have is delivering bombs to nations far away.  That likely means the US today but could be Europe, China, Russia, Pakistan or others at some point in the future.  Again, limiting the nations that have this capacity probably makes the world safer. The requirements are much the same as those for the bomb except there may not be as much need for an international inspection program.  However, it would make sense to combine a missile and bomb inspection program into one. 

Goal:  Trump frequently states that destroying the navy is a military objective and is essentially complete. 

1.        There are two Iranian navies.  The conventional force (Islamic Republic of Iran Navy) operates military vessels including submarines and surface ships plus drones.  It defends the Iranian coast and conducts long range patrols. 

2.        The IRGC navy is an insurgency group that ferries supplies and equipment to Hezbollah, Hamas and others.  It operates swarms of boats that can attack quickly in large numbers, are inexpensive and fast. The IRGC navy is a bigger threat to the US navy than the conventional Iranian navy.  It is capable of closing the Strait of Hormuz through the fear of attacks that are very hard to fight off. 

3.        While US forces can easily destroy the conventional navy, the more dangerous one is the IRGC.  Destroying it solely with air power is likely impossible. 

4.        It will also take ground troops and specialists to find and destroy the fleets of speedboats, mines, drones, and explosives used in asymmetric naval warfare and to  blockade the Strait of Hormuz.  As we learned in Viet Nam (and Afghanistan and Iraq), fighting an insurgent guerrilla army with a conventional army is very costly and difficult.

Goal:  Iran must stop exporting terrorism and instability throughout the region.  This might also be regime change to free the people depending on who is talking.  They have the same requirements. 

1.        The IRGC must be disempowered.  They need to be under control of a government that is not dedicated to the destruction of Israel.  IRGC is dedicated to protecting Islam.  The regular army, Artesh, is dedicated to protecting the country.  IRGC is half the size of Artesh but gets more money and attention. There is tension between the two organizations.  The strain of the war will exacerbate it.  Artesh might be a weak link but it is not apparent that anyone is trying to exploit it. 

2.        Iran definitely cannot have nuclear weapons if they do not cease exporting terrorism. Having a nuclear capability and also being a sponsor of terror campaigns is not tenable for anyone in the region.   

3.        There needs to be new leadership and perhaps a new government structure.  If the structure remains the same, the leaders must be replaced by some that accept the existence of Israel, reject the IRGC and accept peace as a goal. 

4.        The identity of at least ten percent of the country is tightly wrapped up in their IRGC or Basij identity and the destruction of Israel and America.  Their objection to America is largely based on our presence in the middle east.  That was also Osama bin Laden’s objection that led to 9/11.  This issue will not go away easily nor quickly  

 To follow through on any these objectives requires ground support.  The president’s view seems to be if we bomb all the surface targets to pieces, we win.  And if they don’t capitulate, we will just bomb some more.  It does not seem to recognize that fully achieving any of these goals requires ground operations unless Iran gives up.  It also dramatically underestimated Iran’s capacity to keep fighting an insurgent war.  Surely thoughts of Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq and even Viet Nam should remind all of us that when a nation is attacked by outsiders, it becomes quite resilient.   

Nothing so far indicates the US is planning anything approaching the scale of work required to accomplish any of the stated objectives.  So here we are, 12 days into the war, with well over $16 billion spent, the Strait of Hormuz and Kharg Island burning, fertilizer and gas prices skyrocketing world over, military supplies dwindling, Russia openly helping Iran and profiting immensely for it, while the president is simultaneously declaring victory, an end to the war and saying we need to finish it but it will be over when “he feels it in his bones”.  But maybe that is just his bone spurs acting up. 

This will also be published in my Substack.