A Four-Part Plan to Save Iran and Maybe Ourselves, Too

In my last essay, I reasoned why our present air-and-sea campaign against the Iranian Mullahs, the IRGC and the basij does not fit the Powell Doctrine. Therefore, it’s unlikely to produce the “regime change” that we, the Iranian people, and most of the Gulf need so desperately. At least it’s unlikely to do so without considerable agony for all concerned, including multiple repetitions of the current air and sea attacks. And even then it might not succeed, unless we and they get lucky.

Rational, serious people don’t depend on luck. They plan. As the punchline from an old-show business joke goes, “The harder he works, the luckier he gets.”

So here’s a plan that just might work. In the process, it might keep our own nation, once considered “the last, best hope of mankind,” from falling into the dustbin of history.

Part 1. Refining, Strengthening and Re-supplying our Conventional (Non-Nuclear) Military. As the current air and sea campaign in Iran shows, we Americans have the world’s strongest and most flexible conventional military. No other country has anything like it. China and Russia are both striving to build their conventional forces, but their bludgeons can never match our stilettos. Russia, in particular, is still using Iran’s drones.

Iran is a fine place to prove these points. The obvious—but so far unmet—goal of our campaign there is to “degrade” the regime by eliminating the bad guys with minimal “collateral damage.”

In general, that’s the best way to wage war for two reasons. First, the universal objective of war is (or should be) to change an “enemy’s” behavior, not to commit full or even partial genocide. (Genocide violates international law and is frowned on in polite society.) Second, selectively killing the bad guys leaves the rest of the “enemy’s” population and infrastructure untouched, ready to build a stronger, better, safer, and more peaceful society after the “war.”

We got close to this goal when we massacred a conclave of Iran’s Mullahs in a single strike. Unfortunately, we also apparently killed some of the Mullahs whom we favored for leadership. That’s a failure of intelligence or (our) leadership, of which more later.

I’m no historian. But I suspect that that sort of strike is extremely rare, if not non-existent, in human history, at least from our Imperial Age onward. More like it, instead of the Allies’ fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, let alone our own nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has to be the future of warfare if our species is to survive.

There are probably still fifty people inside Iran today, and easily fifty more from Iran’s vast global diaspora, who, if magically placed in safe leadership positions inside Iran, could turn the country into a modern, reliable state in less than five years. That should be the goal of our Iran operations, not turning Iran into Gaza or Southern Lebanon.

In order to effect a strategy like this we need more and better accurate weapons, as I argued a dozen years ago. We also need to replenish our supplies of such weapons—both aggressive and defensive—as we use them. Our stocks are reportedly getting low, so we must expand production. We need to make that a top national priority, damn the expense. (NATO does, too, but that’s another story.)

Part 2. Beefing up Our Intelligence. Killing the Mullahs we liked along with those we didn’t reflected a failure of intelligence, in both senses of that word. Even if (as seems probable) it derived from a fear of losing our one chance, it might have been avoided if we had had more confidence in our ability to pinpoint the bad guys another time.

I’m not now and never have been a spook. I believe spooks from our side and Russia’s tried to recruit me in connection with my Fulbright Fellowship in Moscow in 1993. In each case, I politely declined.

But two things are clear to me. First, if accurate weapons are going to save our species from repeating the tragic atrocities of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are going to have to focus on intelligence far more than on weapons of mass destruction. Second, as AI, drones and robots replace clashes of vast human armies in the field, just as they are now doing in Ukraine, many or most conflicts now resolved by armies will be fought primarily by spooks.

Our CIA’s general reputation is good. It reportedly ranks up there with Israel’s Mossad, Britain’s MI6, and Russia’s SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service, or Служба внешней разведки). But I think we’re losing the intelligence battle to Russia and maybe even China in part because their own imperial histories have helped them perfect intelligence operations for centuries before we became a nation.

So I think we need to replace the old military recruiting posters that say “Uncle Sam needs You!” with posters saying “Your CIA Needs You.”

We need to vastly expand our spooks’ number, quality and diversity (in both ethnicity and expertise). After all, spying today requires every sort of talent, from lying creatively, convincingly and spontaneously in the field to sitting at a computer screen cracking codes and penetrating (or setting up) vast networks of foreign “bots.” And though AI will undoubtedly have a big role in spying, it will be unlikely ever to replace human spooks as completely, let alone as quickly, as it will accountants, desk clerks and a lot of lawyers.

So I think our CIA should go on a full-court recruiting press, for the best and the brightest, ASAP. It goes without saying that our nation’s vast Iranian diaspora, reportedly numbering half a million people, should be both a rich field for recruiting and a signal advantage in our dealing with Iran.

Part 3: Beefing up our “Active Measures.” In general, spooks perform two tasks. They ferret out adversaries’ secrets by any and all necessary means. That kind of “spying” reflects the basic meaning of the word and is well known.

But a second kind of spying is less well understood, at least by the general public. Perhaps partly for that reason, we don’t do much of it. At least we don’t do much of it effectively. The Russians are beating us all bloody in this arena, and China is following close behind.

The Russians call this kind of intelligence “active measures.” The phrase covers things like assassination, but it also covers planting lies in adversaries’ minds, as distinguished from keeping one’s own secrets. It includes things like preparing elaborate and convincingly “official” (but false) documents and plans for your own military and government, and planting them convincingly to deceive your enemies. (A famous example of this kind of active measure came in World War II, when the Brits set out a vast array of rubber tanks and planes to convince Nazi air surveillance that our D-day invasion of the Continent would come at Calais, rather than at Normandy, where it did.)

With the growth of the Internet, active measures today include much, much more. They encompass recruiting podcasters, “influencers” and vast armies of trolls and bots to delude, deceive and divide your enemy’s people. In the last decade or so, active measures have “gone public” in the sense that an enemy’s entire people, not just its military and civilian leaders, have become targets.

It goes without saying that democracies like ours are softer targets for such widespread active measures than the general populations of authoritarian societies. I will go to my grave believing that Vladimir Putin, who cut his teeth as a spook, managed to swing both of Trump’s presidential elections narrowly in Trump’s favor by nationwide, massive and even now only partly discovered active measures.

After all, in both cases Trump’s margin of victory was small. And we discovered at least one of Putin’s nests: a whole building full of trolls called the “Internet Service Agency” in St. Petersburg.

Think about that. The stupidest, most scatterbrained, most senile, most indecisive and most divisive president in our history, who threatens the very foundations of our democracy, was foisted on us, at least in part, by our strongest and most persistent enemy. And this enemy’s triumph was accomplished without firing a single shot. If Russia’s SVR has anything like our CIA’s field of stars (one for each agent killed in the line of duty) on its own main building, it would be a single, solitary gold medal.

The “beauty” of this victory, from Russia’s point of view, is that it reinforces itself. The more Democrats—or even non-partisan officers in our vast intelligence and military bureaucracy—point to these Russian active measures as real and effective, the more Republicans demur, object and temporize. Every attempt to locate or fix the problem, or even to identify it, increases the political division in our nation, as even sensible Republicans recoil against being labeled “traitors” or “dupes,” whether directly or by implication.

From Putin’s point of view, this strategy is brilliant. Like self-metastasizing cancer, our division feeds upon itself and grows ever stronger. It’s undoubtedly the most effective and subtle set of active measures in human history, and Vlad the Deceiver’s most stunning and impressive achievement.

For reasons just stated, we are unlikely ever to address this issue seriously until Trump dies or leaves office. But can’t we just try to turn the tables a bit right now? Can’t we build a vast army of trolls and bots to use the Internet (and maybe Musk’s Starlink) to inform Russia’s army and people—especially the racial and ethnic minorities now used so often as cannon fodder—how badly Putin’s war in Ukraine is going, and how the bodies of dead and maimed Russians are piling up obscenely?

Russian history teaches that tsars who lead their people into the meat grinders of losing wars can be, and have been, deposed. So wouldn’t active measures to show the Russian people what is really happening in Ukraine—maybe even a bit exaggerated—at least keep Putin occupied with homeside defense for a change? If nothing else, our own active measures would distract him from his active measures that have been so stunningly successful against us.

Part 4: Quelling our Deadly Naïveté. Our great nation could easily fall like Rome. It could happen this century, even in its first half. And it could happen without a catastrophic war, let alone a nuclear one.

Our fall could arise from our own division, coupled with our collective corruption, stupidity and inattention. Vladimir Putin understands this well. So he has devoted all his considerable intelligence to that end. (Xi Jinping is doing something similar, but with greater sensitivity to potential unintended consequences. When Rome fell, a lot of the rest of the world got hurt.)

If that happens, insightful historians will note our naïveté as a primary cause.

Here we are, a society whose massively successful and productive global businesses rely on “excellence” in hidden persuasion: advertising, promotion and public relations. In business and everyday life, we are absolute masters of those dark arts.

Our globe-leading, profit-making businesses exploit them every day. We rely on them to sell stuff, even stuff that we know is harmful, like PFAS-containing cosmetics and other consumer products, high-sat-fat and other unhealthy foods, cigarettes and tobacco products, and obsolete vehicles that run on gasoline in an increasingly electric age on a rapidly heating planet. All these things make profits for their purveyors but threaten our survival as individuals and even as a species.

We rely on the same dark arts in our internal politics. If you don’t believe me now, watch any thirty-second political ad. See if you can pick out the lies, half truths and false implications.

All these things reflect a simple, often wilful and conscious, disregard for truth. They also reflect an unproven, unprovable and fatally naïve faith that the truth will always come out in a “free marketplace of ideas.” When a speaker’s goal is persuasion, not accuracy, and the law allows him to lie at will, persuasion wins, whether the ultimate goal is profit or winning an election.

You might think I’m about to bash our First Amendment. But I’m not. It has a key limitation embedded in its very first word: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press[.]” (emphasis added).

Judicial decisions have extended this prohibition to all branches of the federal government and to the states. But the requirement for “state action”—meaning action by any form of government—is embedded in the Amendment’s prohibition as much your skull is embedded in your head. Only government cannot stop lies or determine what is “truth.”

Our species had had enough of that during the Middle Ages, when all-powerful monarchies and (in the “West”) an all-powerful Church specified what was true and right. As most college students know, the Catholic Church even tried to suppress the Galieo’s heliocentric theory of our Solar System and his underlying observations, which signaled the arrival of modern science.

But the English common law, which we inherited, had ways of dealing with lies outside of government. It lets both private individuals and businesses sue for lies that harm them. These laws, many now codified, still apply. They exist in every state. They have since our nation was founded. Generically, they prohibit “defamation,” including libel (written) and slander (oral), in both private life and (as trade libel) in the business sphere.

Yet today these laws that discourage lies do not work on the Internet, the most powerful means of communication ever invented. There, injured parties cannot sue for lies, at least not effectively. They can sue the nerds or foreign spooks behind the bots and private networks, if they can find them, and if the nerds have enough money to make suing worthwhile. But they cannot sue the platforms that spread the lies nationwide and worldwide, because federal law gives those platforms immunity.

Vladimir Putin knows this. So does Xi Jinping. So do all the thousands (or millions!) of spooks, trolls, podcasters, “influencers” and others that they employ, in organizations far bigger and more dispersed than Russia’s old “Internet Service Agency” in St. Petersburg.

They all know that the platforms that promote lies—and that amplify them endlessly by algorithms based on individual Internet users’ personal preferences—can’t be sued for any such lies at all. Why? Because a single sentence in our so-called “Communications Decency Act of 1996” immunized the platforms entirely for spreading lies and garbage that they themselves don’t originate.

That single sentence became Section 230(c)(1) of that statute. It was added by a so-called “midnight amendment,” without hearings or debate, at the behest of the internet platforms and their “tech bros.”

Their theory was that the Internet was so new it needed immunity from legal liability to grow. Now, thirty years later, when the Internet dominates every aspect of our lives, including politics, the likes of X, Meta, Instagram and Tik-Tok get off scot free for spreading the most vicious lies and even profiting by amplifying them electronically for viewers most susceptible to believing them. We now live in Orwell’s world on steroids.

What could possibly go wrong in a nation where tech bros can become billionaires by helping spread the most vicious lies to their most gullible believers as a business, without a hint of liability for doing so? Section 230(c)(1), which is still on the books, made Putin’s most fevered wet dreams come true.

If ever a great society ever shot itself in the foot for the corrupt benefit of a few, it’s us and our US media world today. And every day—every minute—Section 230(c)(1) stays on the books, Putin wins and Xi grows stronger.

I’ve railed against this utter, self-defeating stupidity, to no avail, several times (here, here, and here). But it’s never too late to stop being stupid. If we really want to keep Putin from winning the information wars so easily, and stop letting our billionaires get even richer by helping him inadvertently, we have to repeal that single sentence. Only then will the single most important laws that penalize lies in a free society get back to work.

And as for our tech bros, recent advances in technology deprive them of excuses. Even after the Internet had grown far beyond its “nascent” status and consequent need for protection, they claimed that distinguishing lies from truth and arguable truth would be too hard and too expensive. But AI has now made that excuse untenable.

AI is a technology that most of the main Internet platforms themselves develop and/or control. If they wanted, they could, without great hardship or expense, distinguish third-party lies from truth by using AI to fact-check third-party posts, the same way I checked facts and names before publishing this post. With a bit more programming, they could even automate the process, at least far enough to let human reviewers vet the more dubious or ambiguous claims. If our tech bros can’t or won’t do that, when the technology to do so is now universally available and capable of automation, they should be held liable for all the human consequences of their failures. I have no doubt that that’s precisely what a good, old British common-law judge would hold.

* * * So there you have it. A simple four part plan: (1) continue improving our accurate weapons, for even greater accuracy, and replenish their stockpiles; (2) beef up our intelligence corps to come closer to parity with our adversaries in knowing what they are doing; (3) enter the twenty-first century at last, knowing that, in the nuclear age, “active measures” are a moral (and far less destructive) substitute for all-out war; and (4) change our laws so that lies spread by our rivals and adversaries to divide, weaken and destroy us are not further spread, without financial consequence, by billionaire tech bros for their own benefit.

While this might seem revolutionary to some, it’s a modest, common-sense plan that could help us win in Iran and redress the gross imbalance of “soft” power that now promises to make China and Russia the leading nations in a dark new century after our fall.