The War With Iran Widens

0:00. Brian Lair on WNYC, Dixter Filkins is where the staff writer for the New Yorker the last 15 years. He previously had been the Los Angeles Times New Delhi bureau chief. He covered the Iraq War for three years and was part of a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times team for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He's also reported from New York, you know, that place. And Dixter Filkins' author of the book, The Forever War, which covers a timeline from the rise of the Taliban in the 90s through September 11th and the US Wars of Regime Change in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed. Very relevant right now, obviously, as people start to make that comparison and the Trump administration tries to refute it. Dixter, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC. Thank you very much for having me.

1:01Can I just jump right in on the No More Forever Wars issue and your book The Forever War? Maybe with your reporting history, you have a grasp on how Trump plans to define success in this case and hang the mission accomplished flag and bring our troops home without staying a long time or looking like it ends in kind of a draw. Do you? Well, I don't think we know the outcome yet. I mean, there are no American troops on the ground inside of Iran. But my sense is that what Trump wants to do and what Israel wants to do is degrade or eliminate their ability to project any kind of power outside of the country and also is degrade as much as they can their ability to shoot their own people in the streets as they did in mass in January. So at some point, at some point, and we don't know when that is, I think Trump will call it a day and say, I've done my best for you.

2:09It's now it's in your hands and that's a weird outcome, but I think it's probably the most likely. In your hands, Iranian people, and we'll get back to that, but I want to play a clip of Defense Secretary or Secretary of War as they now prefer. Pete Hegseth from his briefing yesterday and ask you about it from a Forever Wars or U.S. Quagmire standpoint. I think these 20 seconds, though that briefing went on for quite a while, I think these 20 seconds were basically the heart of it yesterday. And under a week, the two most powerful air forces in the world will have complete control of Iranian skies, uncontested air space. And Iran will be able to do nothing about it. B2s, B52s, B1s, predator drones, fighters controlling the skies, picking targets. So that's the way Hegseth put it. He said, and under a week, they've done this, and they're doing that.

3:09And I saw an analysis before his news conference, which maybe gives it more credibility, that says Hegseth's bravado aside, he's basically right. And the Forever War or Iraq Afghanistan analogy will end very soon, because maybe even by the end of this week, this analysis went, Iran will run out of missiles while the U.S. will not. And so maybe in a pretty short time, this will turn out to be very one-sided. The Americans and Israelis and Gulf State Arabs will be safe from Iranian retaliation, and Iran will be militarily defanged for a generation to come. Does that sound plausible to you? Then the narrative will be very different from what it is right now. Yeah, well, we're in the middle of the thing, so it's not wise to try to call it yet. But I think what Hegseth was referring to is that the United States and Israel basically wiped out Iranian air defenses, and what that means is that our planes can just go in there and hang around without really any danger that they're going to be shot down.

4:19That makes their jobs a lot easier, because they don't have to use really sophisticated missiles to kind of fire, and they can just drop what they call dumb bombs on their targets. But the problem that isn't quite solved yet is the drones and the ballistic missiles that Iran has been firing out of the country. But those launches are dropping substantially in numbers. From day one and day two, they've dropped a rock, because the US has taken out the launchers every day. So I think we're going to get to a point where that capability is gone, or pretty much gone. And then you're kind of left with this very, very degraded Iranian government with Republican guards, vicious, but kind of defanged, most likely to be still in charge. I think that's probably where we're going to end up. But it might not be too long for now. I mean, I think they're making a lot of progress.

5:24And we know they've given many and shifting reasons for the war. That's been one of the main topic of discussions here and in so much of journalism the last few days. New York Times columnist Frank Rooney wrote yesterday, those promoting and defending this war are spreading out a buffet of reasons and goals and asking us skeptics to pick the dish that most appeals to us. And I thought that was a good way, little snarky, but maybe accurate to put the PR strategy at this point. But do you have a take on the question, why did the US really decide to do this? Yeah, I think there are two reasons. I mean, one is that the Iranians had begun to produce ballistic missiles again. And essentially they were producing them at a faster rate than the United States is producing interceptors. The missiles that can intercept the Iranian ballistic missiles. So the the math was, you know, US production capability is pretty limited there. And so the math was not working in our favor. And then.

6:29So that was disturbing. And then and then you had this moment of opportunity when basically the whole leadership of Iran met in Ali hominized the supreme leaders compound. And they had the intelligence and they decided to take the shot. And so I think that's why it started on the day that it did. But but I but I think what I think the reason why Trump decided to go to war is because when when he did is because of that first problem, which is that which is that the the equation was just going to was going to tilt and further tilt away from the United States, the favor of the United States and Israel basically. So let's do it now rather than later when it will be a lot more difficult. I think I think that's the calculation, you know, whether whether you read or not. So if they accomplished that goal with respect to the missiles, does that stop Iran from fueling proxy wars around the region, you know, like even October 7, 2023.

7:34Hamas seen by many people as possible because Iran funds Hamas to the extent that it does same thing with Hezbollah. Same thing with other groups whose targets might not even be Israel, but some of the Gulf states. Does this stop that in the scenario that you're laying out that that might be the US version of victory? I think so and not so so you know just for your listeners who don't spend a lot of time on this stuff, the the Ryan's essentially built an empire across the Middle East with what they called the Shiite crescent and even if some of those groups like Hamas were not Shiite. But so we're talking about Hamas, who they who they funded, Hezbollah, very, very powerful army and Lebanon, which they built and trained and directed us the Assad regime in Syria. All those are being all those are either gone like Assad lives in Russia now or they've been really, really substantially degraded. So I think the first effect of all this is going to be the ability of Iran to project power outside of its own country.

8:46But I think it's going to drop to at least for the time being it's going to drop to zero because they're not going to have the money or the material or anything. They're going to barely have a government if that. And so I think the question which is which is very uncertain now can't really be answered is what capacity is the Iranian government going to have inside of Iran. And I need to suppress suppress the wrong people if we get another uprising like nation-wide uprising hundreds of thousands of people in the streets again like we had in January. What's going to happen then and that I think that's the biggest question of all. And that brings me to a question about getting Iranians involved as we've heard Trump do since Saturday when he said rise up take back your country. This is your best shot. The U.S. is reportedly asking Kurdish fighters in western Iran and Kurds in Iraq to move into western Iran to try to take over at least that part of the country.

9:56Do you have a sense of why that kind of ground operation might matter militarily if the goal is to destroy the missile capability and the nuclear program. Because I'll ask you about when this miserably failed with the deaths of so many Kurds back in the first Bush administration. But do you have a sense of why they may be asking Kurds to even crush the border from Iraq to fight on the ground in Iran right now? No, but I wouldn't hold your breath for that to have any consequence. I just don't think anything like that is really serious and it's a doubt it's going to work. Iran is a country of 90 million people, it's huge, it's Persians, it's Kurds, it's Azeris, it's Baluches, it's a big and diverse country. And I don't think a handful of Kurds are going to take over. But the important thing to remember, the most important thing to remember is this is a regime that has very, very little public support.

11:04And we've seen that over the years starting in 1999 when you had the first big uprising against the regime again in 2009. And they came in rapid succession, but basically the trigger for what's happening now, the original trigger, in January where the regime probably killed nobody knows. But the estimates are around 30,000 civilians, most of them in the streets, to put down a nationwide very popular rebellion. This is not a popular government. And so I think when President Trump says, we'll bring the Kurds and whatever, I think it's in the context of this is an embattled and very deeply unpopular regime. But he's putting it in the hands of the Iranian people and saying at some point he's going to say, OK, I've done my part. Now it's up to you. Yeah. So, and my guest, if you're just joining us as Dexter, Philkins, New Yorker, Staff Rider, an author of the book, The Forever War.

12:09Bringing in the Kurds reminds me of another part of our military history that relates to asking the people themselves to rise up and change the regime. And so maybe you have a take from your time covering Iraq. After the First Gulf War, what we call the First Gulf War, 1991, the George H.W. Bush War, after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Bush decided against aiming for a regime change in Iraq, largely betting that he didn't want Americans getting killed in a bloody ground war marching to Baghdad to get Saddam Hussein. Instead, he asked the Kurds and others to rise up. This is all reminding me of that and take the government themselves. And the result, as you know, was a bloodbath of Kurdish fighters who didn't have the forces to topple the regime or fight their military. So now the BBC reported just last hour that Kurdish leaders are saying they will not do this unless Americans lead the way.

13:10Is this another case of the sorry history of the US and the Middle East hanging over the mission today? I don't think so. I think this is different, actually, because I think what Trump has said and what he's trying to do is pretty much the opposite of that, because he watched, as we all did, the Iranian regime massacre their own people in January, which they've done many, many times to stand power. And he said, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to send help any, you know, he turned the two aircraft carriers around and sent them into the Gulf where they are now. And I think, so I think what, you know, that it's hard as you point out to pinpoint the exact objective of this operation. But one of the effects clear clearly of this military operation is going to be to substantially degrade the ability of the Iranian government to suppress its own people.

14:12And that, that to me is the bottom line. So how does it do that, though, because you don't need missiles and a nuclear program to shoot demonstrators in the street, you just need kind of regular guns in the military. That's right. So how does that do that? Well, if you look at the bombing targets, they're, they're, they're, they're hitting everything from Iranian Republican guard barracks. And those are the elite forces. There's like 150,000 of them. And then you have a militia kind of untrained guys with guns called the besiege. And that's about 400,000 people. They're hitting, they're hitting all that stuff, all of it. And all over the country, they're, they're, they're bombing police stations in the country. And so I think that they, they clearly are trying to set the conditions or a rebellion to succeed for, for if, if January, if the rebellion that happened in January happened again, they're trying to set the conditions to make it more likely that that rebellion would succeed.

15:13And I, I think that's pretty clear. They are trying to substantially degrade the ability of, they're trying to, they're trying to do a couple of things. One is to degrade the ability of the Iranians to project power outside of the country, but also inside the country. And so again, at some point, and I don't know where, when that point is going to come, but, but Trump is going to say, all right, let's assume the government's still standing. I think he's going to say, okay, look, we've done a lot. We've killed a lot of these guys and we've, we've diminished their power substantially. It's, it's up to you now. Now, that, that's a, what's Iran going to look like then? What's the government going to look like then? Is it still going to be standing? Is it going to have any power at all? Is it just going to be kind of a pathetic, wrong state? We don't know, we don't know yet, because we don't know how long this is going to go on and it's going to be Trump's call. I want to ask you one more question that has a historical context and then we're at a time.

16:13The issue of American service member deaths in a kind of big historical context that I think Hegseth has an agenda about and, and maybe Trump too. What people call Vietnam War Syndrome, that ever since the failed Vietnam War, which the US lost and never convinced the American people of the need for, it's been politically difficult to send US troops into battle to die. Now some American service members are dying. The fact that the Iraq war repeated the pattern of Americans dying for what exactly nobody knew has only reinforced it. And that's why they've relied in Trump's terms, so heavily on air power alone in theory in these military actions. But I think Hegseth, who fashions himself a fierce warrior and wants to reclaim that image for the United States more, wants to take a shot at trying to make war with US troops on the ground and particularly US deaths acceptable again as a way to lean into US power.

17:15I'm just curious, if you with all the war reporting you've done over the years, have any impression like that too, or if you think it matters to anything. No, I think it matters, but I would disagree with that analysis. I think first, the idea that Americans are reluctant to send troops abroad after Vietnam. I think that was disproven by Afghanistan and Iraq. They stayed there for years. They died by the thousands before there was any really, you know, huge numbers of Americans saying, please bring them home. I think Trump made clear in the campaign that he didn't want to get into forever wars and particularly in the Middle East. He made that very clear and I don't think I can't imagine at any point that Trump would commit ground forces to fight in Iran. It's inconceivable to me. Maybe I'm wrong.

18:15I think the other, I mean, it's what you said. I think that the United States is trying to conduct this operation and ideally to conduct regime change in Iran, but only with air power, which is basically invulnerable at this point. I don't think that's likely to work, but I would be genuinely shocked if President Trump decided to send American troops into Iran. I guess where he may be sorely tested in that respect is if he starts to look like a loser in any way and he's so insistent on looking like a winner. But I guess we will find out or maybe we won't have to find out. Dexter Wilkins, staff writer for the New Yorker. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you, sir. Thanks for having me. Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the kind of content we know the world needs. Since then, New York Public Radio's rigorous journalism has gone on to win a Peabody Award and a Dupont Columbia Award among others.

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