The Washington Post has done an exemplary job this week exposing the lies that the American public has been getting from Donald Trump and his administration over the progress and success of his war of choice with Iran. Yesterday we learned that Iran's attacks on the U.S. military have been a lot more destructive than previously known. Today we learned that America's attacks on Iran have been a lot less destructive than all the boasting and bragging Trump and the Pentagon have been feeding us. Because apparently we haven't actually achieved anywhere near the level of success that has been claimed, from the earliest days of the war onward.
Here's how this new article begins:
A confidential CIA analysis delivered to administration policymakers this week concludes that Iran can survive the U.S. naval blockade for at least three to four months before facing more severe economic hardship, four people familiar with the document said, a finding that appears to raise new questions about President Donald Trump's optimism on ending the war.
The analysis by the U.S. intelligence community, whose secret assessments on Iran have often been more sober than the administration's public statements, also found that Tehran retains significant ballistic missile capabilities despite weeks of intense U.S. and Israeli bombardment, three of the people familiar with it said.
Iran retains about 75 percent of its prewar inventories of mobile launchers and about 70 percent of its prewar stockpiles of missiles, a U.S. official said. The official said there is evidence that the regime has been able to recover and reopen almost all of its underground storage facilities, repair some damaged missiles and even assemble some new missiles that were nearly complete when the war began.
Trump painted a rosier picture in Oval Office remarks on Wednesday, saying of Iran: "Their missiles are mostly decimated, they have probably 18, 19 percent, but not a lot by comparison to what they had."
Later, the article provides a baseline number:
On the matter of Iranian weapons, the confidential intelligence assessment says that Iran's inventory of missiles and mobile launchers remains formidable.
Iran is thought to have had roughly 2,500 ballistic missiles before the war began, as well as thousands more unarmed drones [*]. Iran has used those weapons to launch retaliatory strikes against U.S. allies in the Gulf as well as U.S. military sites across the region. A Post visual investigation found that Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites in the Middle East, a level of destruction far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government.
The timeline for when Iran can again start producing ballistic missiles in substantial quantities has shortened, one of the U.S. officials said.
So by using some basic math, that means the U.S. intelligence community now thinks Iran still has around 1,750 ballistic missiles left. That's a lot of missiles, and it runs directly counter to all the "we've obliterated them all" happy-talk from Trump and other administration war cheerleaders.
In fact, it raises a very serious question of attrition: does the U.S. even have enough interceptor missiles left to defend against that arsenal? The American military apparently has a policy of launching two interceptors at each incoming missile (in case one of them fails), so that would mean we'd need 3,500 such interceptors to defend our interests in the region, just against Iranian missiles alone. It's doubtful we still have that many, and even if we do it would be doubtful that we'd commit them all (because if we ran out we'd leave the American military wide open to such attacks all over the world).
That's a pretty dire situation to contemplate, obviously. And it's not just missiles we have to worry about. The article also points out: "In early April, the U.S. intelligence community assessed that more than half of Iran's missile launchers were still intact and that it had thousands of one-way attack drones in its arsenal." That makes the problem of supply shortages of interceptor missiles even more dire.
Perhaps this is why Donald Trump has seemed a lot more eager to reach a deal to end this war than the Iranians. He's been blustering and threatening for weeks that he's on the brink of restarting the bombing campaign (and perhaps even worse), but he has never followed through on any of these threats. If the danger to American troops and military stockpiles is a lot more severe than the public has been led to believe, this would go a long way towards explaining this reluctance.
Trump has also been overstating the effects of his blockade of Iranian ports as well, it seems:
[T]he CIA estimate says Iran can survive the U.S. blockade for 90 to 120 days -- and maybe longer -- before facing more severe economic hardship, the four people familiar with it said.
. . .
One of the U.S. officials who spoke to The Washington Post said they thought Iran's capacity to endure prolonged economic hardship is far greater than even the CIA estimate. "The leadership has gotten more radical, determined and increasingly confident they can outlast U.S. political will and sustain domestic repression to check any resistance" inside Iran, the official said. "Comparatively, you see similar regimes lasting years under sustained embargoes and airpower-only wars."
If this is true, then Iran not only has time on their side but also holds more "cards" (as Trump likes to frame the issue) militarily than Trump. It's not just U.S. forces who may be running low on interceptors, it is also Israel and our allies in the region, meaning a restart to the sustained missile and drone attacks by Iran might start to cause a lot more damage than they already have, as the militaries are forced to reprioritize which targets are worth defending with their remaining interceptors.
Americans don't like being lied to by their leaders when they are at war. Unfortunately, presidents have been doing just that, to various degrees, stretching all the way back to Vietnam. Sometimes the lies are more minor and innocuous, but sometimes they are such a blatant denial of reality that they wind up with disastrous consequences, both in domestic support for the war and on the battlefield. And with both of the Post's big revelations this week, you have to wonder what else we're being lied to about as well.
[*] [Program Note: Later in the day, the Washington Post ran a correction to the article cited here. Here is their correction notice, in full:
An earlier version of this article said that Iran still possesses thousands of unarmed drones. The drones are unmanned, not unarmed.]
-- Chris Weigant
Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant
