The myth of the ‘miscalculation’: Why the war on Iran was no accident
First published at Ali Keshtkar’s Substack.
When wars begin, the narratives that explain them tend to emerge almost as quickly as the wars themselves. These are narratives designed to offer rational justification, to a questioning public, for why a war started, who won, and who lost. Rarely in the history of warfare is it acknowledged that wars are the product of deliberate decisions, of power projects, of the internal logic and rationality that governs them. Instead, they are consistently explained in ways that strip them of their own internal logic and reduce them to human error: the fallibility of individuals. Errors attributed, on one hand, to the psychological disorders and mental illness of the human agents involved, conditions that allegedly caused them to deny the rational logic governing war, and on the other hand, to failures of analysis and calculation: miscalculation, faulty intelligence, or weakness of political judgement.
This pattern, the reduction of decision-making structures to individual human error, appears to be a well-established convention in the tradition of Western political analysis, and it serves several important functions. First, it reduces war to individual decisions in order to absolve structures of power from responsibility. The agent of the war becomes Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu, not the entire power structure of the United States and Israel. Second, it provides moral justification for rival political factions, transforming political and strategic disagreements within the governing establishment into a moral narrative of “the rational versus the reckless.” Rather than being analysed as competing positions within a shared structure of power, these disagreements are narrated as ethical conflicts between individuals, in order to preserve public confidence in the system itself. Third, and most importantly, it obscures the strategic rationality of war. While genuine disagreements exist within power structures, about timing, method, and risk, the option of war itself was already present on the horizon of decision-making long before the first bomb fell. What is ultimately presented in official narratives as a confrontation between the prudent and the impulsive is, in reality, a dispute within a shared rationality: a disagreement about how to exercise power, not about whether to exercise it.
The New York Times’ recent report, “How Trump Took U.S to War with Iran,” published on April 6, falls squarely within this framework. Drawn from extensive interviews with officials speaking on condition of anonymity, and previewing a forthcoming book titled Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, the piece reconstructs a series of highly classified Situation Room meetings in which President Trump weighed his options before authorising what would become a major US-Israeli military assault on Iran. The report attempts to demonstrate how Trump was ultimately swept along by Netanyahu’s hard sell, how internal warnings were dismissed, and how a fateful decision was made despite serious misgivings among senior advisers.
But what if the “miscalculation” narrative is itself part of the problem?
The war was already in motion
The NYT’s narrative centres on a classified Situation Room meeting on February 11, in which Netanyahu presented Trump with a sweeping case for joint military action. But to treat that meeting as the origin point of this war is to misread the timeline entirely.
By mid-January, the contours of the conflict were already visible. On January 13, as protests intensified inside Iran, Trump publicly urged Iranians to “keep protesting, help is on the way,” and later warned that those responsible for killing and torturing demonstrators would “pay a very heavy price.” Within days, he announced that a US carrier strike group, led by the USS Abraham Lincoln, was heading to the Middle East. A second carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, followed in early February. On February 13, two days after the Situation Room presentation, Trump declared that regime change in Iran would be "the best thing that could happen.” The following day, US officials told Reuters that the military was preparing for a sustained, multi-week campaign targeting not just nuclear facilities but Iran’s broader governmental and security infrastructure.
By February 24, in his State of the Union address, Trump described Iran as “the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism,” alleged it had resumed efforts to build a nuclear weapon, and warned that its missiles could already reach Europe and American overseas bases, “and soon the United States itself.”
This is not the picture of a president manoeuvred into war by a persuasive foreign leader in a single meeting. It is the picture of a war that had been gestating for weeks, with military assets pre-positioned, public opinion being prepared, and diplomatic channels being tested, and ultimately used, as a countdown mechanism.
The official story: War as error
Within this broader context, the NYT’s account of the Situation Room deliberations deserves careful scrutiny, not because its details are inaccurate, but because of the interpretive framework it imposes upon them.
According to the report, Netanyahu’s February 11 presentation outlined four objectives: killing Supreme Leader Khamenei; dismantling Iran’s capacity to project military power; triggering a popular uprising; and achieving regime change, with a secular figure, including, in a video shown to Trump, exiled shah’s son Reza Pahlavi, installed to govern. Netanyahu assured the room that Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed within weeks, that the regime would be too weakened to close the Strait of Hormuz, and that Mossad could help foment street protests sufficient to accelerate the regime’s collapse.
Overnight, US intelligence analysts assessed Netanyahu’s pitch. The following day, CIA Director John Ratcliffe briefed Trump’s inner circle. His verdict on Parts 3 and 4, the popular uprising and regime change scenarios, was unambiguous: he described them as “farcical.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, more bluntly, translated this as “bullshit.” General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told the president that this was "standard operating procedure for the Israelis, they oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed." Vice President JD Vance, the most consistent voice of opposition throughout the deliberations, warned that a regime-change war would cause regional chaos, devastate America’s munitions stockpiles, already strained by years of support for Ukraine and Israel, and fracture Trump’s own political coalition.
The implied message of the NYT’s account is clear: this war could have been avoided, if better judgement had prevailed.
‘Mistake’ as narrative, not explanation
This framing, however, carries a fundamental problem, one the NYT does not address. The United States does not suffer from a shortage of intelligence. It possesses one of the most sophisticated intelligence systems in the world: surveillance satellites, extensive human networks, and the layered analytical capacity of institutions like the Pentagon and the CIA. Senior intelligence and military officials, as the NYT itself reports, had already assessed the regime-change scenarios as detached from reality before the president even entered the room.
The warnings were there. The objections were articulated clearly, at the highest levels. And the decision moved toward war regardless.
The NYT’s own reporting makes this plain. Ratcliffe described the Iranians’ rejection of an offer of free nuclear fuel for the life of their programme as “playing games.” Rubio told the final Situation Room meeting on February 26: “If our goal is regime change or an uprising, we shouldn’t do it. But if the goal is to destroy Iran’s missile program, that’s a goal we can achieve.” Vance told Trump directly: “You know I think this is a bad idea, but if you want to do it, I’ll support you.” Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth was more straightforward still: “We’ll have to take care of the Iranians eventually, so we might as well do it now.” And the president, having heard all of this, gave the order aboard Air Force One on February 27, 22 minutes before General Caine’s deadline: “Operation Epic Fury is approved. No aborts. Good luck.”
This is not the record of a decision-making process that went wrong. It is the record of a decision-making process that produced exactly the outcome it was structured to produce. To understand this outcome, we need to move beyond the language of “error” and toward an analysis of the logic of power.
The NYT notes that Trump’s hawkish instincts on Iran long predated Netanyahu’s February presentation, that the two leaders’ views had been closely aligned across two administrations, “more so than even some of the president’s key advisers recognised.” Trump, the report observes, regarded Iran as a “uniquely dangerous adversary" and was willing to take considerable risks to prevent it acquiring nuclear weapons or threatening US and Israeli interests. He was also, a detail the report mentions but does not dwell on, emboldened by the January commando raid that captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro without American casualties, and by what he regarded as the tepid Iranian response to the June 2025 bombing of its nuclear facilities.
Hegemonic powers have historically been prone to a structural form of overconfidence, a systemic belief in their capacity to reshape political realities quickly and decisively. This is not merely individual arrogance. It is embedded in institutions, doctrines, and historical experience. The assumption that a complex society like Iran could be brought to the point of collapse within weeks is not an intelligence conclusion. It is an ideological projection.
Within this framework, wars do not begin despite uncertainty, they begin from within it. They are instruments for reasserting power, demonstrating capability, and reordering the geopolitical landscape, particularly when that landscape is perceived to be shifting in unfavorable directions.
The NYT frames the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv as one in which the United States was effectively sold a bill of goods by an overselling ally. But rather than “deception,” what the record reveals is more accurately described as alignment of interests. Israeli security imperatives and US hegemonic calculations are not identical, but they substantially overlap. The optimistic scenarios Netanyahu presented, the popular uprising, the regime’s rapid disintegration, did not need to be literally believed to serve their political function. They provided a narrative through which decisions already tilted toward confrontation could be publicly justified. As General Caine himself observed, the Israelis “know they need us, and that’s why they’re hard-selling.”
The insistence on “miscalculation” ultimately obscures the true nature of the decision that was made. This war was not the product of intelligence failures, strategic naivety, or an impulsive president misled by an overbearing ally. It was the product of a specific kind of rationality, formed within structures of power, reinforced by institutional culture, and directed by the imperative of maintaining regional and global dominance.
This is not to say that internal disagreements were without significance. Vance’s opposition was genuine and persistent. Caine’s repeated warnings about munitions depletion and the unpredictability of Iranian retaliation were substantive. But the structure within which these voices operated continuously reproduced war as an available option, and, at this particular historical moment, as an attractive one. As the NYT’s own account makes clear, the most consequential decision was not made in the Situation Room on February 26. It was made over the preceding weeks, as carrier groups moved into position, as diplomatic channels were deliberately tested to their breaking point, and as a president who had long regarded the Islamic Republic as a problem to be solved looked at the calendar and decided the time had come.
If we continue to call such outcomes “mistakes,” we run the risk of drawing entirely the wrong lessons from them. Not: how do we prevent war? But: how do we justify it more convincingly next time?
