Rubio Makes the Best Case for the War and It's Still Bad

A mediocre man offers a steelman

Marco Rubio is the odd man out in this administration because he is neither insane nor an explosive idiot. That’s why he’s often off-message, like when he portrayed the Maduro operation as an effort to liberate Venezuela only to have Trump repeatedly say “NO, WE’RE PLUNDERING OIL!!!” Rubio faces a similar problem with the Iran War, frequently being pushed in front of cameras to pretend that Trump’s latest brain leak is deft maneuvering from a Sun Tzu-level strategist instead of chaotic flailing from a man with the mind of an Alzheimer’s-ridden child.

And that’s probably why Rubio recently took matters into his own hands and recorded a short video laying out his rationale for this war. Though I watched this video fully expecting Trump to burst through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man and yell “WE’RE TAKING THE OIL!!!”, that didn’t happen — Rubio was able to make his case in full. Here it is:

IMHO, this is not a crazy argument. It is just, in my opinion, an extremely bad argument.

But before I get rolling, let me nitpick: Why are there still mistakes in this? I was a low-level speechwriter, I wrote for the Junior Undersecretary Of Who Gives A Shit, but I would not have let this go out like this. I count three distinct stumbles¹ — nobody could convince Rubio to do another take (or is this an A Burns for All Seasons situation?)? And why are his hands awkwardly hidden underneath the table — he looks like a pervert at a strip club. Was this video produced by the same mastermind who awkwardly handed Rubio a water bottle mid-speech? Even the “normal” parts of this administration are weird.

But about the substance of his case: Rubio opens with an argument that is correct but nearly a quarter-century old. Iran did hide their nuclear program, and only a simpleton would believe that Iran’s leadership only aspires to build peaceful energy (and I did google “Rashida Tlaib Iran nuclear energy” — not even she thinks that!). But Iran’s nuclear program was first exposed in 2002. The top song on the radio when we first learned what Rubio is telling us was “How You Remind Me” by Nickelback, and also: Radio still existed. The first part of Rubio’s argument is convincing but only to people who went into a coma right around the time that Kelly Clarkson won the first American Idol.

Rubio also commits a gigantic howler when he says: “It is clear that they’ve been offered every opportunity to have a nuclear program that allows them to have energy, not weapons, and every single time they have turned them down.” Maybe this speech was written by someone who went into a coma in 2002! Because there was very famously a deal in 2015 in which Iran limited itself to nuclear energy in exchange for sanctions relief, and the deal was working until Rubio’s boss ripped it up in 2018. There were people like me — and also people who are literally me — who said at the time that pulling out of the deal was a big mistake. I guess Rubio is tacitly admitting that we were right by deciding that the best argument against the Iran Deal at this point is “What deal? It never happened.”

But there’s a logic in what Rubio is saying: Iran wants a nuclear weapon. They know that the US and Israel will go to war to prevent them from getting that weapon. So, Iran is building up their conventional arsenal to deter that war. I don’t know anyone who disputes those facts — the point of disagreement is over the effectiveness of Iran’s missiles and drones. And to buy Rubio’s logic, you need to believe that Iran’s weapons are garbage today but will be invincible tomorrow.

Recent events have shown that Iran military is much weaker than many people believed. Israel — and sometimes the US — have spent two years killing Iranian generals, bombing Iran’s nuclear sites, and generally smacking Iran around like a kid at an unlicensed daycare. Iran has launched missiles and drones in response, but the damage has been relatively minor even though Iran has been preparing for this conflict for decades. And we know that Iran’s weapons weren’t a deterrent because — you may have noticed — they did not deter us; we are at war with Iran.

But Rubio says Iran was “on the verge” of having “so many missiles, so many drones” that “no one could do anything about their nuclear weapons program.” Do you buy that? Does it seem likely that after decades of building a conventional weapons threat that has recently been shown to be low-quality, Iran was about to turn into the Spartans at Thermopylae? How is that possible — do they have a wave of weapons-building talent in the high minors that they’re about to call up? Rubio has also kvetched (if that’s something a Cuban guy can do) about Iran building missiles that could threaten Europe — if true, then why is Europe so chill about that threat? And when did this administration suddenly start caring about Europe — doesn’t that contradict Trump’s Europe Can Lick My Scrotum Doctrine? Rubio’s argument is essentially that Iran was about to cast a magic spell that would turn their military from so-weak-that-the-risk-to-us-is-low today to so-strong-that-the-risk-is-intolerable tomorrow.

Rubio and others have argued that the situation is analogous to the situation with North Korea. North Korea has artillery and other conventional weapons pointed at Seoul, an even-bigger-than-you-realized megalopolis (26 million people!) just 22 miles from the border. Estimates of how many people North Korea could kill in the event of war are often in the hundreds of thousands. This certainly played a role in President Clinton’s decision in 1994 not to strike North Korea after their nuclear program was revealed. So, Rubio is identifying a pattern that contains a logic: It is possible for conventional weapons to protect a nuclear program.

But the obvious difference is the effectiveness of the conventional weapons. North Korea’s primary conventional threat is artillery, i.e. big-ass World War I-looking guns pointed at the sky. Those are easy to make and easy to hide; we couldn’t knock them out quickly if we went to war. Tel Aviv is nearly a thousand miles from Tehran — Iran can’t hit it with artillery. Israel is, of course, currently in its third missile exchange with Iran in the last two years, and so far missiles in this conflict have killed 19 Israelis, and that number includes missiles fired from Lebanon. The number of American civilians killed by Iranian missiles is extremely zero. Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray, and the right lesson to draw from that is that stingrays are dangerous, not that all animals are equally dangerous. We are essentially fighting a preventive war against a clownfish because we can’t tell the difference between a clownfish and a stingray.

Except that I don’t think that’s what we’re doing — I think that’s what Rubio wishes we were doing. The answer to “why did Trump do this” is surely unknownable — that’s like asking why the wind blows. It’s likely that someone — possibly Rubio, possibly Netanyahu — told Trump about Iran’s conventional weapons threat at some point. But I also think that Trump thought he could topple the regime quickly, and he thought he could strongarm Iran into a better deal than Obama got, and he also knew that the strike on Iran’s nuclear program last year didn’t finish the job. And that’s why Trump has offered a billion divergent rationales that Rubio is trying to sanewash in this logical-but-weak video. There is no why to Trump’s actions — his actions simply exist. And trying to put a sane spin on Trump’s flailing is actually one of the least-sane things a person could do.

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1. At 0:20, he says “have it” when he should just say “have”, at 0:35 there is another stray “it”, and he stutters at 0:55.