If your head is spinning over what is happening with our war/ceasefire with Iran and what is next, you are not alone. All of us are trying to get our heads around what is happening and the way ahead. Here is my hot take about today on CNN AC360 with Anderson Cooper and my colleague, Alyssa Farah Griffin.
Let me add a couple of points to what is said in the clip.
First, boy, are things murky. I am pretty confident that the Intelligence Community knows a lot more about what is going on inside Iran than we do on the outside, and it was good to see CIA Director Ratcliffe was at the WH meetings today to discuss the way forward.
➤ Nonetheless, reports suggest that we are collectively having trouble understanding who is making decisions. Sure, there are factions in Iran, and I lean toward the idea that these are between IRGC factions, not so much political leaders (who never have had much agency and surely have less now that Iran is on a war footing) vs IRGC. The difference now is that we do not know who is adjudicating these factions and making the ultimate decision. That matters more than who is fighting whom. And this lack of a clear decider could be the reason for the lack of cohesion.
➤ Second, I can’t emphasize this enough, we continue to misread the Iranian regime. We think that being uncertain is good, we think that conventional military degradation means degradation of their resilience, we think threats of more military strikes will cause so much fear they will capitulate, we think the result from our military pounding means they will capitulate, we think that they will trade economic benefits for core red lines related to their sovereignty/resistance to the West/ideology/regime survival. None of these assumptions is correct. That’s a problem.
➤ Compounding this problem is that the Iranians seem to understand us a lot better than we understand them. Just look at their trolling and Lego videos. Wow. We just saw a game of chicken over these negotiations. The Iranians surely think they won this round: no bombing, we are more desperate. That may not be true, but it is almost certainly their impression.
