‘Everything After This Will Be Harder’: General Stanley McChrystal on Iran

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0:32This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:47I'm David French. I'm a columnist at The New York Times, and I'm also a veteran. When I was thinking about who I could talk to about Trump's strategy in the world, with an emphasis on the current conflict in Iran, there's just a list of two or three people in the entire United States who I think would be most interesting on this topic. And one of them is General Stan McChrystal. General McChrystal is the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He's the former head of Joint Special Operations Command. He served in Iraq when I was in Iraq. He has been called by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I have ever met.

1:32And he's got a lot of interesting things to say about this conflict, including observations about the origin of the conflict, the challenge American forces face, the nature of the enemy that the United States is confronting, whether Israel and the United States have similar interests and goals in this conflict. And then we're going to end with a discussion of leadership and service that I think that you will find very interesting. So without further ado, here's my conversation with General McChrystal.

2:07Well, General, thank you so much for joining us. All right, David, please call me Stan. Even though you're a former JAG officer, we got to set the table at the beginning. It's going to be hard for me. It's going to be hard for me. We served together in very different capacities. these. I was a JAG officer for an armored cavalry squadron in eastern Diyala province during 2007, 2008. You were orchestrating one of the most effective and efficient special operations missions our nation's ever seen that really helped turn the tide of the war. And I want to actually begin our discussion of current events there, because there is something that I have seen since this most recent conflict with Iran broke out, and that is the veterans perspective on this conflict, I think, is different than the perspective that a lot of the folks who didn't serve, especially in Iraq, have.

3:02And so even if someone is maybe objects to the way that this conflict began or has some questions about its prudence, there's a lot of feelings about Iran and Iran's role in the Iraq war and the losses and damage it inflicted upon us. And so when I was in Eastern Diala, we lost guys to explosively formed penetrators planted by Iranian-backed militias. So, General, if you could table set, what has been the recent American experience in our sort of long-running conflict with Iran? Yeah. I think if we go back to the American experience starting in 1979, I was a young special forces officer. And I remember that the American embassy in Tehran was seized and there were people chanting death to America.

3:51And that was upsetting. And that was only a few years after Vietnam. And so I think America was vulnerable emotionally. And then suddenly you had this country that had been our ally, at least in the minds of most Americans during the peacock regime of the Shah from 53 to 78. We felt comfortable with that. They were the bulwark of stability. And then suddenly in 79, we see the Ayatollah Khomeini and he doesn't want to negotiate. And then we watched a war break out between Iraq and Iran. And most of us were far enough away to say, wow, good. Somebody's taking on the Iranians. They don't like Americans, so it's somebody taking them on.

4:41And then in 1988, the U.S. Vincennes mistook an Iranian airliner for an attacking F-14 they thought it was, and they killed 290 civilians. So if you take that period, Iran seemed like a recalcitrant enemy that hated us for some reason that we couldn't really understand. And then we get into 2007 when you were in Dialla and I'm leading a counter-terrorist task force, we had to stand up an entirely new task force focused on the Shia militia that were supported by Iran. So the explosively formed projectiles and all of the things that Iran did to give them capability. and it became a bitter fight.

5:34So in the minds of someone like me and my force, of course, they were the enemy. They were killing us and we were killing them. And it looked as though they were also a threat, not just to the mission in Iraq, but the stability across the region. So it becomes an emotional, feels like our lifelong enemies. Now I'll stop there, but tell I think that's only part of the story. Well, I mean, of course, if you're going to say if that's only part of the story, we have to keep going because, you know, if you wind it down when, say, the surge started to wind down around 08, 2009, 2010, there was a real sense that we had won in many ways, that we had really turned the tide.

6:23By the time I left in late 08, I remember the statistics. When we got there, it was about a 25 % chance if you drove out of the front gate of our base. It's about a 25 % chance of enemy contact, whether it's an IED, sniper fire, rockets, mortars, whatever. By the time we left, it was less than 1 % chance. But the story doesn't end there, of course, in general. The story keeps going. And Iranian-supported militias have been a thorn in our side, really, in Iraq ever since. So let's pick it up after the surge. What happens next? Well, let's really pick it up before that, because I think it's important.

7:03We have a tendency in America to view things in very short periods, our year in Iraq, or in my case, five years in Iraq. Right. Yeah. But we tend to come in and say, we are going to fight the war to end all wars, at least It's in our minds. Right. But it really starts in 1953 when the US and British intelligence services overthrew the constitutionally elected prime minister and put back into power the peacock regime of the shop. They oppressed the people tremendously, particularly through Savak, the secret police. So when the Iranian revolution erupts in 1978, we may be surprised. The Iranian people are not surprised.

7:50Right. And when they suddenly say death to America, most Americans will say, what's your problem? Why are you angry at us? And then, of course, we spoke earlier about the Iran-Iraq war, which was for eight years, it was this brutal bloodletting. And so Iran survives this eight-year extraordinary experience, twice as long as the First World War. And it sets a mark upon the Iranian population that we shouldn't forget to this day because the baby boomers are veterans of that experience. And the clerics get a lot of support from them. So then after 2002, when George W. Bush names Iran to the axis of evil, reportedly to their surprise, you start to continue this set of grievances.

8:51So I try to remind people, whenever we think of what's happening now, if we don't understand that journey to this point, we don't understand the attitudes that are going to drive decisions people make. So I'm so glad we have dived into this from the Iranian perspective, because I think understanding the Iranian perspective really helps us maybe understand how the rest of this war might go. What kind of staying power, for example, the Iranians might have. And there have been comparisons, for example, to the lightning quick raid to get Maduro out of Venezuela. that was there some expectation that you could do something very rapid, very fast, decapitation strike, and really alter the behavior and composition of the regime in a substantial way.

9:39And my perception of that from the beginning was that that was a bit of a vain hope, because you have a very different composition of the enemy when you're talking about, say, a South American strongman versus an Islamic revolutionary regime, that the level of commitment that exists within the regime is just something it's theological. Sometimes it's apocalyptic. When we were in Iraq taking on Shia militias, the level of their commitment was such that, you know, for example, the medics who were treating wounded Shia fighters would sometimes report that the Shia fighters, even gravely wounded, would try to bite them or harm them in some way, even though they were gravely wounded.

10:22That was the level of commitment. So we hear a lot about that the Iranian people are ready to rise up, that they're ready to overthrow this government. But at the same time, we have seen extreme levels of commitment, even to the point of a million plus casualties. How are you judging sort of the state of the Iranian opposition at this moment? Is it brittle? Is it fragile? Or are you seeing that 47 year long commitment continuing? Yeah. I really want to go two lines on this. The first is that question. I don't know because the Iranian opposition is not really evident. We saw in 2009 they came in the streets and they were sort of beaten back into submission and then reportedly thousands of Iranians protesting were killed by the regime in recent months.

11:11But I couldn't name the opposition leader. I couldn't tell you the liberation front of Iran. And I know that the Shah's son is going around, but I don't think he's a legitimate alternative. I think that we can't gauge the actual strength of the desire of Iranian people to change. And of course, a war will often cause people to coalesce around their government, to coalesce around. In your really well-written article today, you said something I really believe in. You said, I'm an American. I want our side to win. I feel the same way. Even though I disagree with many of the things my government's doing, I'm unequivocal on this side.

11:59And that may be the case. The other thing I want to talk about, though, is because you brought up the Maduro raid, there are three great seductions that happen to American administrations and to military. The first is the idea of covert action. And a new president comes in and he's told by the intelligence community, we can create this great effect and it will be covert. No one will ever know who did it and it'll just be a good outcome. And in my experience, it never stays covert and it rarely works. But it's seductive because it seems like an easy approach to a naughty problem. The second seduction is, which I lived as a part of, is the surgical special operations raid.

12:50And that is probably epitomized by the Maduro raid. And I would argue that we demonstrated extraordinary competence that night, but not much changed. I don't think that we actually demonstrated the ability to change the facts on the ground to any extent, which gets to the third great seduction, and that's air power. And we all love air power. In World War II, we went into the war with the Duhay theories that air power, the bomber will always get through and therefore air power will be dominant. And it was certainly very, very contributory, but it was never dominant. When we got into Vietnam, which was the classic case, and we developed a strategy that said for North Vietnam, we will have a re-estat and an escalation strategy, and we will raise the pressure on them until we hit the point at which they're willing to quit.

13:55It's not worth it anymore. What we didn't perceive is like the Shia wounded that your medics ran into, there was no point for North Vietnam. They were asymmetrically committed to the outcome. And so we've entered Iraq in 2003 with shock and awe. And then we spent a decade there fighting after it. I think that we fell for the seduction that if we bomb key targets, that we will produce the outcome we want. But the outcome's in the minds of the people. And unless you're going to kill all the people, you may not affect that outcome. So we may be at a point, you use the word in your article, quagmire, but we may be in a point where we've run into a country that has an extraordinary capacity to be bombed.

14:52Right. General, let me make the case to you that has been made to me about air power in this current war. And that is, David, everything that you've walked through from the daylight bombing raids in 1943 to the air war over Kuwait during Desert Storm, all of those things, we just weren't as capable then as we are now. We have loitering drones. We have high visibility over the battlefield. We have, in connection with the Israelis, we have deep penetration into the Iranian regime. This time it is different. This time we have more capability. What's your response to that argument? Yeah, since I've retired from the military, I've been involved in some investing and I love that line, this time it's different.

15:44And I go, okay. I agree, the capability is so much more. And I have to keep an open mind that it is possible that the dynamic has changed so much that we finally hit a tipping point where it will be decisive. But I'm not seeing that and I don't feel that. And the other part that I would bring out is we thought really early in Afghanistan that the people on the ground who we were targeting would be awed and intimidated by the bombing and that they would respect our capability. In many ways, what we found, particularly with the tribal members, they were disdainful of it. They knew you could bomb them, but they said, if you're not willing to get down on the ground, look me in the eye and fight me mano a mano, then you are not morally on my level.

16:42And I think that we can't forget that people fight because of their passions. It's not a geopolitical calculation that's going to drive what Iran does eventually. It will be what's in their hearts. And so this idea of decapitating the regime, and we've got this current leader where we killed his father and we killed his wife. We apparently banged him up pretty good. and then we say, well, that will make him more willing to negotiate. It wouldn't have that effect on me. No, and it's 100 % opposite of my own experience in dealing with Al-Qaeda. So, you know, one of the things that I, you just sort of see this when you've been in the military and you're out of the military.

17:31One thing I'm very grateful for is that the military is still the most highly respected public institution in the United States. And I think there are a lot of good reasons for that. But it has also sort of led to a sense that we're supermen, that the military can accomplish almost the impossible. And so we look at a situation like the Strait of Hormuz is closed, and we think, we can open that. Of course we can open that. So just give us some perspective on, as a practical, realistic matter, why is it hard? Why would it be hard to force open the Strait of Hormuz, or would it be hard? Yeah. Yeah.

18:10It would be hard to keep it open. And so it is like what we found in Iraq. We could bomb Iraq pretty easily. We could even take Baghdad with relative ease. We could get rid of the existing government. But once we wanted to change the reality on the ground, who actually controlled things, how things worked, now you're not at 30 ,000 feet, you're at six feet and you're the same height as your potential opponent. And I tell people about this war, if you like this war, enjoy this first part because this is the best part. Because everything after this will be harder because it will be more equal. Even though we will abomb them, we'll have to get down to a level like in the Strait of Hormuz where we've got ships potentially facing mines or even autonomous the surface and under surface aircraft, all the different threats that they can bring out just to make it lousy.

19:13And they're not all coming after US warships. They don't have to. They only have to shoot a civilian tanker or a cargo vessel once a week. And then people go, well, I don't know what day they're going to strike somebody, so I'm not going to let my ships go now. And so they can have an effect with a fairly low level of effectiveness. And the insurers won't insure the ships in that circumstance. The financial risk becomes unacceptable, which renders it virtually impossible to transit the strait because nobody's doing that with no insurance, with total financial exposure. So, General, when we're talking about the risks of the current war, there's been such an emphasis on the economic risk.

20:05In other words, that if the Strait of Hormuz remained closed or nearly closed, that we're going to talk about higher gas prices, rippling economic problems across the globe. We've been hearing about budgetary risks. The administration is seeking$200 billion or more. But there's also another risk, which is above these, the risk to the human lives of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines who are out there. And so how are you seeing the risk here to human life? What kind of escalating risk could we be facing to our own service members in this conflict? Yeah, I think it's great to bring up because we've fortunately suffered few casualties to date, but every casualty has a family and carries a loss.

20:55and we need to remember that. But if the war were to drag on, and for example, if it gets grittier, if we get forces on the ground, whether they're inside Iran or in neighboring areas, casualties will go up. Frustration will go up. Now, we have a volunteer military now, so it's largely limited to people who self-selected in. But the reality is there is part of our society that goes in the military, and there's a lot of our society that does not. And there starts to be a divide that comes from that and a resentment. And those are dynamics that you don't see early in a war, but over time come home.

21:36So, General, one thing that concerns me is this sort of civilian-military divide, that we do have only a very small percentage of people who serve. The greatest, I believe it's still the case, that the greatest indicator of service for you is that you had a family member serve. So it's a small, self-perpetuating part of our culture. And I'm not sure that's necessarily healthy for us over the long term that we essentially have a soldier caste or a warrior class that defends this democracy, but is increasingly separate from the rest of our society and culture. One of the questions I have is, do you see that yourself also?

22:17And do you think that that could result potentially in a too great a willingness to use force? Obviously, we have an extremely respected military, very trusted military. But do you see warning signs in that kind of divide? Well, I do on several ways. One, I agree with you. It's not healthy to have a military caste grow up, even though it's been largely professional and apolitical and all the good things. But if you think about it, the propensity to go to war, at the end of the day, people who are professional soldiers, they have a reason to want conflict. I mean, the reality is it gives you a chance to work your craft and promotions.

22:58I mean, so they wouldn't even really think about it directly, but you become incentivized for the kinds of military actions that give that opportunity. Plus, it increases defense budgets and whatnot. And then the other great danger is the more insulated the force is, the more potential for politicization, particularly you have in the current environment where there have been generals fired simply because they don't fit in politically to the current administration. you start to shape that military and it starts to maybe align with a certain political leaning. When I was in the service, you never knew what your peers felt politically.

23:44You never talked about it. And I think that that's under pressure. And so I think the danger of having this separate entity is that after a while, it starts to think of itself as we've seen in some countries sort of at the guardians of the republic or of the nation. Right. So let's even get a little bit bigger picture for a moment. How do you see this conflict fitting in with a more global grand American strategy? Or does it fit in with a particular grand American strategy? Because we've had a lot of debates over the 10 years of the Trump era. Is he isolationist? And I think that that has sort of, people have turned the page on that.

24:27Is he a guy who is interested in spheres of influence? Where are you seeing the Trump sort of, for lack of a better term, grand strategy in Trump 2.0? Yeah, I think the first thing we saw that was obvious is the America first idea economically. The tariffs were designed to encourage on-shoring, things like that. The direct confrontation economically with China, same thing. But then you step back from that and you say, okay, what really provides security in a world that's interconnected? We can onshore things, but the reality, it's still interconnected and it's going to stay that way. We're not going to undo that.

25:08Well, in my view, it is credibility in the world. It is alliances. It is relationships you can trust on. It is the rule of law writ large, international norms and rules and things like that. And I think President Trump took most of those on and said they're unfair to America. You allies don't carry your weight or any number of things. And so he weakened institutions. He challenged norms. He, in many cases, eliminated relationships that we had under the idea that that was going to advantage the strongest dog left on the block, which would be us. And I think that's proven not to be true. You can't be that strong to do that.

26:04I think the recent adventurism, I'll call it, I think it comes from this idea that there was a fair amount of success in threatening people early. I could threaten Canada. I could threaten Greenland. And there was no cost to it. Now, there was no military action taken, but there was no cost to it. And then shooting at the drug boats in the Caribbean was sort of a muscular way to do something. I don't think it had any effect, but to do something. The Maduro raid, I think, crossed a point in which the president got seduced by one of the things I mentioned, the idea that you can do something on the cheap if you're clever enough and you can pull it off.

26:59The thing about special operations missions is they are high risk. And we say, well, they're high risk, but they always work. No, they don't. That's what makes them high risk. So I think he got emboldened by that. And then I think that the other dynamic was, of course, Israel. The October 7th attacks created a dynamic in Israel and then the operations in Gaza. And then there has been a dynamic driven by Prime Minister Netanyahu largely, to expand Israel's security, expand Israel's power, expand all of the things that he would like and to do away with the boogeyman, which was Iran. Those became just absolutely defining objectives that President Trump had always been in sympathy with.

27:53And now I think he sort of got caught up in the current of, you know, it starts moving that way. Well, you know, there was a phrase used before October 7th, mowing the lawn or mowing the grass, where essentially, periodically you have conflict with Hamas or Hezbollah and you knock them back, you knock them back on their heels and it takes them months or years to recover. And you just can sort of cycle, rinse, repeat, and just keep doing that. But I think October 7th, in my view, should have blown up that idea that they had, quote unquote, mowed the grass time and time again. And then Hamas, far from being cowed, was plotting this horrific, horrific, purely evil massacre.

28:38And so that creates a situation. You have threatening enemies. You have enemies who wish you harm, but you have no real capacity. You have an enormous capacity to damage them, but you have no real capacity to eliminate them, to destroy them. It's a serious strategic dilemma. It is. And we've seen it around the world. You see it in the West Bank now. You see the reality that all of the resentment you create through what you do now, at some point comes back to you. I think that for everyone we kill in bombing Iran, they have a brother, sister, father, mother, and they are unlikely to go, oh yeah, it's okay.

29:22You killed my father, but yeah, it was geopolitical necessity on your part. That's not the way we respond. And so sometimes it's necessary. I don't deny that some wars are just and required, but no wars that I'm familiar with are neat, clean, or produce the kind of outcome we actually want. They produce this messy thing that might be better than before the war, but it's not a lot better. Right. So let's move on to some other issues. So one of the things that I'm often asked about is leadership and leadership within the military. And you have been described as one of the finest leaders of men in combat in the modern American military.

30:09And what we are seeing right now in the current Secretary of Defense is a very, an enormous amount of bravado of, you know, sort of a, we are lethal. We will kill you. We will destroy you. You've got the, you know, the bench pressing and the pushups and all of the everything. And I get a lot of questions, how does this land with soldiers? And my perspective, it has been, well, with some soldiers that land, they really like it. You know, they like it when a senior leader will get their hands dirty. They like it when a senior leader is fit and that they can share, like they can do the same things that the guys on the line do.

30:52But at the same time, in my experience, bravado is not necessarily really appreciated. It's a more of a show, don't tell culture in the military. You've led men in combat for much of your life. Talk to me a bit about sort of that line between sort of bravado and cool, calm professionalism. How do you see all of that? I'm disappointed by the current atmosphere that is communicated from the top. I had the honor and opportunity to serve with some of the most elite forces, people who really did. some extraordinary things, but they didn't beat their chest about it. And they weren't braggadocious and they didn't talk about, yeah, we love killing people.