Best Defense
Thomas E. Ricks' daily take on national security.

Are we already at war with Iran?

I suspect that we may be, in some way. Maybe a "shadow war." Someone clearly is killing Iranian nuclear scientists. Someone is messing with their centrifuges. They seem to be under cyberattack. Someone is helping ethnic Baluchi rebels down in the southeast. And of course there are the less hidden steps, such as sanctions. No, ...

By , a former contributing editor to Foreign Policy.
Wikimedia
Wikimedia
Wikimedia

I suspect that we may be, in some way. Maybe a "shadow war." Someone clearly is killing Iranian nuclear scientists. Someone is messing with their centrifuges. They seem to be under cyberattack. Someone is helping ethnic Baluchi rebels down in the southeast. And of course there are the less hidden steps, such as sanctions.

I suspect that we may be, in some way. Maybe a "shadow war." Someone clearly is killing Iranian nuclear scientists. Someone is messing with their centrifuges. They seem to be under cyberattack. Someone is helping ethnic Baluchi rebels down in the southeast. And of course there are the less hidden steps, such as sanctions.

No, it isn’t traditional war, and it doesn’t look like anything John Wayne would want to star in. But put it all together and I do wonder if we already are in some kind of war with Iran. 

If I were still a hard-working daily journalist laboring in the vineyard where the grapes of wrath are grown, I’d work on this issue full-time, covering it on the assumption that there is a war going on in the shadows. I’d try to cover it as it were a conflict, looking at the steps taken and the countermeasures, at the major players, at the assumptions about the other side. It would be tough to do but very interesting. And after a year or so I’d have the makings of a good book.

Thomas E. Ricks is a former contributing editor to Foreign Policy. Twitter: @tomricks1

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