The hidden costs of the Iran war

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President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again war with Iran is officially on again. (So recursive is this never-ending conflict, in fact, that I had to search my inbox to confirm I hadn’t already written that sentence!)

On Sunday, the US attacked rocket launchers Sunday on Iran’s Larak Island, claiming the strikes were necessary to prevent Iran from laying mines that could once again disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, meanwhile, responded by firing a volley of ballistic missiles at US sites in the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, where they were reportedly intercepted.

The latest skirmish comes after a month of relative peace and quiet, and six months after the war began. You’ll recall that Trump initially said it would last four to five weeks at the very longest.

But in the grand scheme of Trump’s Iran fictions, that optimistic timeline isn’t even the most flagrant. On Sunday night, the president also posted a video that purportedly showed Kharg Island, a central hub of Iran’s oil industry, “being blown to smithereens!!!” The video was, in fact, AI-generated.

The persistence of the war in Iran isn’t merely exhausting for those of us following along at home. As a group of high-ranking military commanders recently warned the Pentagon, the drawn-out conflict could also make America less safe by limiting the military’s ability to respond to threats in other parts of the world.

That unusual warning — first reported over the weekend by the Washington Post — suggested that the war in Iran is tying up ships and surveillance planes that the US needs elsewhere. Several top military leaders explicitly warned that the war had forced them to give up resources they needed to protect the US itself.

None of this means we’re defenseless, of course. But the war in Iran is taking up a lot of bandwidth. And should another conflict break out anywhere else on earth…the US and its allies could feel it.

One general warned the Pentagon that, without more resources, he could be forced to choose between protecting Israel and the US from ballistic missile attacks. And the Navy just moved its only dedicated aircraft carrier in the Pacific to the waters near Iran. “We are really robbing Peter to pay Paul,” one military expert told Vox in late February, even before we had any idea how long the war would last.

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