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Four Questions About The Iran War That Deserve Clear, Consistent Answers

We’re more than a week into the Iran war and yet we have no clear or consistent objectives, no theory of victory.

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Why can’t the Trump administration give the American people straight answers about the Iran war? We’re now more than a week into Operation Epic Fury, and every day that passes seems to bring new questions that Trump and his top officials can’t answer consistently and coherently.

Questions like, what is our goal in Iran? Why did we launch this war now? What is our theory of victory, and how will we know when we have achieved it? These four questions in particular deserve answers. So far, we haven’t got them.

At a press conference on Monday, Trump declared the war would be over “very soon,” after saying last week that the war would likely continue for four to five more weeks. Earlier, he told CBS News that the Iran war is “very complete, pretty much.” But almost in the same breath as “very soon,” Trump said the U.S. could “go further.” “We could call it a tremendous success right now, or we could go further, and we’re going to go further,” he said.

The administration’s inability to be clear and consistent on these major questions is a huge problem — whether you support the war or not. In fact, if you support the war you should be particularly unsettled by Trump’s shifting goals and justifications, because it undermines support for a conflict that’s already unpopular with a majority of Americans.

This isn’t nitpicking. In a democratic republic like ours, it matters how our leaders communicate about something as serious and deadly as war, especially when we’re the ones who launched it. The American people should reasonably expect their government to make a good faith effort to persuade them of the need for military action abroad, or at least make a case for it.

To the extent the Trump administration has tried to make its case, it has gone about it haphazardly. Last week, for example, Trump demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” a goal that suggests a much longer and more costly campaign than what the administration had previously indicated, possibly involving a ground........

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