Thread by @MMazarr

Thinking about War with Iran: a series of THREADS

1/11 As @ArmsControlWonk has made clear, Iran has taken careful, reversible steps out of JCPOA. But the action-reaction cycle could escalate quickly. Talk of US strikes--and larger war--could come fast.
nyti.ms/2p0cPky

2/11 If it does, we’ll rush to the brink of war—as in 2003—again short-circuiting serious public deliberation of what it would mean. Apart from being anti-democratic, that sets the table for strategic disaster. These threads are designed to think about what a war could look like

3/11 This first thread isn’t actually about the risks themselves. It’s about a more over-arching danger--a perilous threshold we could cross in coming months w/o real awareness. It's about our inability to take risks seriously, once that threshold has been crossed

4/11 History is pretty clear: Warnings about costs & risks often do little good once the slide to war is underway. Two examples of laundry-list warnings from Iraq: Rumsfeld’s “parade of horribles” memo …
library.rumsfeld.com/doclib/sp/310/…

5/11 … and the State Department’s “perfect storm” parallel. (There were many others, of course.)
carnegieendowment.org/pdf/back-chann…

6/11 My interviews with US officials showed that they brushed off warnings in 3 main ways:
1.Sure, lots can go wrong—but will it, really? No proof
2.We are certain we MUST act (urgency overriding risks)
3.We have a clever plan to sidestep these risks
publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/michael…

7/11 Meantime war backers screamed about imminent dangers, “conventional wisdom” closed ranks, media did shockingly little to investigate how the conflict would play out. (One exception—@JamesFallows prescient Atlantic article)
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

8/11 The great risk is that, at a certain point, the commitment to military action becomes a taken-for-granted necessity, immune to warnings or analysis. We need to avoid that moment with Iran (which is what the JCPOA was all about)—and we may be closer to it that we think

9/11 What makes this danger so sinister is that it's an unconscious process, an implicit threshold. It isn’t reflected in a formal “decision” at one clear moment. It’s just: One day the conventional wisdom looks around and says, “Yeah, war is now the only option”

10/11 It’s worth recalling Johnson and @domtierney’s brilliant + important essay on the “Rubicon theory of war”: Once that implicit threshold for war has been crossed, warnings can be pointless.
belfercenter.org/publication/ru…

11/11 Part of the answer is to understand the risk of stumbling across this implicit threshold + be fully intentional about a war decision. Also: assess risks now, spread them widely, internalize them before we lurch across that Rubicon. The next thread will document those risks