‘I Lose Sleep Over What We Don’t Know’

Many presidents’ agendas and legacies are shaped more by current events and unexpected challenges than by the policies and promises of their campaigns. This has been the case for President Trump in many respects — especially in foreign policy. But in a world where America’s adversaries have been emboldened by the perceived weakness and vulnerabilities of our past, action may have been not only necessary, but inevitable. No one has a firmer grasp on the implications of inaction toward Iran, a nation that has quickly become the pressing threat of our time after nearly 50 years of conflict and menacing regional influence, than Mark Dubowitz, Chief Executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Dubowitz talks with The Daily Wire’s Ben Domenech about the state of the Middle East, the role of intelligence and influencers in the Information Wars, and the real threat that keeps him up at night.

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Ben Domenech: I want to start with this: looking back at everything that’s gone on over this past year in terms of the fluctuations and the political responses to the decisions that have been made by the United States, by Israel, and by other actors in the region, how do you view the current state of the Middle East at this point in terms of risks, what do you anticipate happening in the immediate future, and how much have things changed over the course of this year?

Mark Dubowitz: The Middle East is never a happy place or a stable place. It hasn’t been for probably centuries. But I think today the United States is in a stronger position because we’ve done severe damage to one of our most deadly enemies, the Islamic Republic of Iran. And this is a regime that’s obviously been at war with us for 47 years. It’s killed and maimed and kidnapped and tortured thousands of Americans, not to mention being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners and others around the world.

President Trump’s decision to launch a counterattack against the Islamic Republic to finally push back against the regime after more than four decades, I think, has certainly provided us with more space to advance American interests. And we certainly have done what I think President Trump set out to do, which is to severely weaken this enemy.

And this enemy is severely weakened, but obviously not yet crippled and not yet completely down for the count.

BD: The decision to undertake this and the timing that occurred in terms of the president pulling this trigger was one that, from the get-go, I think made some of his allies within his political coalition nervous, including perhaps even the vice president. That’s my own opinion, obviously, not one necessarily you have to share. And their nervousness seems to have been, at least in America, born out of the fact that many Republicans now blame the current economic situation, or essentially the fact that they’re not further along in terms of a recovery, on the decision the president made. He’s stuck by it.

I wonder what your response would be to those Republican politicians who are looking to their domestic priorities, concerned about their own careers. And are you surprised at all that the president himself seems to have really dug in his heels even against criticism that seemed to grow within his own ranks?

MD: I’m a political pundit or analyst, but certainly my understanding is from American history, presidential history — at least modern American history — that presidents often lose Congress in their last two years, which is why presidents often pivot to focus on foreign policy and their overall legacy in the remaining two years. So it was highly likely Republicans were going to lose certainly the House, maybe the House and Senate, regardless of whether President Trump made a decision to launch this counterattack against the Islamic Republic. I think the costs of the war are not insignificant, and no one wants to minimize them. Obviously, there’ve been more than 20 U.S. casualties. Our aircraft fleets have taken damage. I think we’ve lost about 800 or so aircraft and drones, but I think about half of those are drones, which represents about 0.6% of our 13,000-strong fleet. Obviously, there’s been damage to bases in the Middle East, and it’s had an economic impact that has translated into higher oil prices, gasoline prices, and inflation than it otherwise would’ve been.

But I think the president can make a good case that the economy is in strong shape. I think GDP growth is strong, the stock market is strong, unemployment is low, and inflation is lower than it was under President Biden. So I think the president was right and understood that having Iran with nuclear weapons and a massive missile shield under which it could build those nuclear weapons would represent a more severe threat to the United States, to our economy — to the global economy — than rolling the dice and taking this risk of launching a counterattack. And I think the counterattack has gone much better than many experts expected. Today, the United States military, under the leadership of Admiral Brad Cooper, has taken back from the Iranians — and the United States, with Israel as a very capable partner — has done severe damage to Iran’s nuclear program, its missile program, defense industrial base, military — and it’s now tipped the Iranian economy into a massive crisis.

And so there’s a much weaker enemy, an enemy that has really been built to operate with impunity over multiple administrations dating back to 1979. So was it worth the price? I mean, I’m not a Republican running for Congress, maybe not for them. Maybe they will lose their jobs. Maybe it was inevitable they’d lose their jobs anyway. But I think for U.S. national security, it has been worth it. And I just want readers to imagine a scenario where the president hadn’t acted, and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was still alive, and he was still moving forward with his nuclear weapons program and intercontinental ballistic missile program threatened the United States, a massive missile shield to protect that nuclear program, a strong economy and a regional network of terror proxies responsible for killing and maiming Americans over the years that was still powerful and still deadly.

That was the trajectory we were on before President Trump made his decision to counterattack.

BD: In terms of the awareness that people had of the ballistic missile shield that you mentioned that Iran had built and the degree to which that it was capable of far-flung reaching out and affecting, impacting nations with whom we are closely allied, did it surprise you at all that when it became clear how far they could truly reach, something that we’ve been warned about but hadn’t necessarily been proven yet, that the reaction from those European nations in particular who basically all learned that yes, it’s true, they can target all of you if they wanted to with this type of program. Are you surprised at all that their reaction was what it was, as opposed to perhaps becoming more in favor of what the president and Israel were doing?

MD: I’m not surprised. These European countries have been appeasing the Islamic Republic for almost five decades. None of them have the military capabilities to really push back in any meaningful way. The reality is, when you look at the problem of Iran, the only country that has meaningful capabilities that can work with the United States is Israel. Nobody in the Gulf can; nobody in Europe can, for reasons that we can discuss. But these countries do not have that ability in terms of power projection. Now, do they have other abilities? Absolutely. I mean, could they impose punishing sanctions? Could they use their diplomatic leverage to isolate the Islamic Republic? Could they have sent support to the U.S. Navy in the Gulf in terms of moving ships through? I mean, to be fair, the Emirates did, but very few other countries either had the capacity or the willingness to do so.

So there’s more they could do, but when you’ve underfunded your militaries and when you don’t have the ability to actually fight in any meaningful way, then your default position becomes appeasement. And I think that, unfortunately, has been the default position of the Europeans for many years. Now, to be fair, the Europeans, particularly the French — to some extent, the Brits and the Germans — are deeply concerned about Iran’s nuclear weapons program and have been active in trying to stop it through diplomacy and through sanctions. So I think we share that concern with our European and Gulf allies, but ultimately it’s only the United States and Israel who can ever actually stop that program. And I think we’ve seen pretty remarkable abilities, both of the U.S. military and the Israeli military, to reach deep inside the Islamic Republic and do severe damage to a program that, as CIA director John Ratcliffe noted before the June war of last year, that nuclear program was on the one yard line and the Iranians were capable of moving forward with more than 20 bombs worth of weaponized uranium in an active weapons group who could have produced multiple nuclear weapons and fixed those to those long range missiles that you referenced and ultimately to an ICBM which could reach the continental United States.

BD: The attitude that some people have toward intelligence services, and not just our own, but those around the world, is one of real skepticism coming out of not just, I would say, intelligence failures stretching back to the Iraq War, but also, I would say, their level of decreased confidence in the expert class or however you want to describe it, that has been continuing to grow and only increase in recent years for a lot of things unrelated to the Middle East or Iran. When it comes to the way that you view those services and perhaps not having a clear idea of all of Iran’s capabilities, or perhaps just putting on a bold face in public about how much damage they did in the early days or what they were going to be able to rely on — are you more confident now that we have a full picture of what the situation is in terms of Iran’s capabilities, that we truly know what they have, where they have it, what we need to be worried about, and what’s been truly obliterated at this stage versus where we were before this started?

MD: I lose sleep over what we don’t know. Between U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies, I think we have as good a picture of an enemy state as possible. If you compare it to our intelligence penetration of other U.S. adversaries like China, Russia, or North Korea, I think we’re much better positioned with respect to Iran than these others, but that doesn’t mean we have a complete picture. It doesn’t mean that the Iranians don’t potentially have some covert nuclear weapons program buried under a mountain that we’re unaware of. It doesn’t mean that we have a full picture of their ballistic missile inventories and production capability. I think it’s a very hard target. It’s a very big country. There are lots of places where you can store missiles and where you can potentially implement a covert nuclear breakout. But you’ve got the two best intelligence agencies on the planet, America and Israel, who have focused enormous resources on this problem set for many years.

So again, one should never be too confident or diluted into thinking that this is not a regime that is going to do everything possible to reconstitute whatever it’s lost and that it’s looking for every opportunity to develop nuclear weapons and the ICBMs to carry them. So measured confidence, but I think everybody should be losing sleep who’s in the business of trying to stop this deadly regime.

BD: One of the aspects of this that became clear relatively quickly, I think, even for those who haven’t been paying attention to it for a while, is in the aftermath of the slaughter of thousands upon thousands of people, you can pick your preferred number and the bits and pieces of information that we’re getting out of Iran, it was striking to me how unlike so many of the other conflicts that the United States had participated in, everything that was coming out of there in terms of the experience of the Iranian people was basically either very minimal — non-existent in terms of its breakthrough to Western media — or some form of limited information that really prevented the American citizenry, in my view, from having a clear picture of what was going on over there and perhaps something that would’ve made Americans much more supportive of this in terms of the potential effect it could have for the people who were there in terms of seeing what’s going on internally within the nation.

How much of a difference do you think that would’ve made if Iran basically was not a black box, just completely hemmed off from the rest of the world, in terms of that information’s ability to get out for people around the world to see what’s really going on there?

MD: I think you’re right. On one hand, I think the regime was very adept at shutting down its own information space and then using our open information space to run very effective influence operations into the United States and around the world. But I’m a bit cynical about this because I think that was aided and abetted by many mainstream news organizations who are either indifferent to what was happening or it didn’t fit their kind of ideological — pre-established — narrative.

That this was, again, the sort of combination of the disdain for Trump and the disdain for Netanyahu that’s so prevalent in liberal media today, that they just didn’t want to report on what was really happening inside Iran — that this was a brutal regime massacring tens of thousands of Iranians and a regime that was deadly and dangerous, not only to its own people, but to the region and to the United States. Particularly if you have to then push a narrative that maybe President Trump and the Israelis are actually winning. That’s so counter-narrative to their own ideological assumptions that it’s going to take a pretty forward-leaning and brave editor in some of these places to actually report on that. And the Iranians were very adept at taking advantage of that information space, both in the West and in shutting down their own information space.

So it was difficult to learn the scale of the slaughter. Though I have to say, brave Iranians were getting videos out, and any enterprising reporter who cared could have found enough evidence and enough images to have reported fairly on what was taking place. But I think there was callous indifference and, in some cases, a real willingness to put their own ideological agendas over the suffering of Iranians and the threat the regime actually represented to America.

BD: Is there any way to break that in an era when information flows so freely around the world, or at least people have the built-in assumption that it does? Is there any way to create a scenario where people are, at least going forward, better able to get information out and more able to receive it even if the media is compromised on this point?

MD: I think there is. We have the benefit now because of social media, because there are so many potential sources of news and the ability to get out images, and it’s broken the stranglehold the mainstream media has on the flow of information. So yes, I think the opportunity is there, and we certainly see our enemies do it so well. They’re running a cognitive war against the West to deepen the fractures and fissures inside our own democracies. We’re not only seemingly unable to defend against that, but we’re also unwilling to go on offense and run a comparable cognitive war against them. Now, it’s difficult because you’re running them against dictatorships that have the ability to shut down the internet and control the flow of information, but increasingly it’s even difficult for these dictatorships.

The Iranian case is a perfect example of how brave Iranians broke through this information stranglehold and the shutdown of the internet, and still got out images. It’s a question of: Is the West prepared to win? And are we prepared to understand that even if we win in the military domain, if we lose the cognitive domain, ultimately these enemies will wear us out and undermine whatever military gains we’re able to achieve.

BD: As a Christian, I don’t like to edit the Bible, but I believe that when they said the poor will always be with you, they left out the pod bros will always be with you. What is your attitude toward the Obama era, Obama-Biden era, foreign policy podcast bros, whatever you want to call them, and their attitude toward this war? Sometimes I’ve seen some of the things that they’ve posted, and it strikes me as infuriating because I don’t think that they’ve learned anything, but I wonder what your response has been to what they’ve been pushing out there in terms of commentary.

MD: I disagree with it vehemently. I’ve been debating these people for decades. I think probably just stepping back from these individuals, but just sort of looking at American society today, I think it’s increasingly difficult for the United States to defend our country and to weaken our enemies when everything has been so politicized inside America. I feel like people are rooting for America to lose because they don’t like the president. I mean, I absolutely oppose President Obama’s Middle East policy. I thought his nuclear deal with Iran was fatally flawed. I thought it was going to lead to a pathway to nuclear weapons. I thought he left us much weaker after eight years than we had been, but I never wanted President Obama and America to lose to our adversaries.

I have some misgivings about President Trump. I disagree with him on some issues, but I want President Trump and America to win against our adversaries. I think there used to be an expression that partisanship stops at the water’s edge. Well, that’s no longer even remotely close to being true. And I think today everything is politicized, every issue, including our national security. And you find people who either intentionally or inadvertently are rooting for the enemy over America. And that’s just a gift to our enemies.

BD: I’m at risk of saying that’s more predominantly on one side; I would just point out that I did not see any Republicans or conservatives rejoicing after Abby Gate, but it infuriates me to see that too.

You talked a couple of times about the degree to which Americans are being targeted by these influence operations. That’s certainly something I’ve seen as well. For the average American online who’s perhaps maybe a little too online, as so many are, what’s one thing you’d like them to start paying attention to when it comes to the things that they’re reading or the information that they’re consuming that should put up their antenna about whether someone’s trying to influence them to take an anti-American position?

MD: I think there are a number of indicators. First is the sort of overall recognition that your feed is being controlled by an algorithm. So if your feed is serving up an overwhelming amount of information that’s just always on one side, then you should know automatically that you’re being controlled by the algorithm. And so breaking free of this algorithmic control over your mind, over the information that you see, is so necessary. You’ve just got to get beyond that because these algorithms, by the way, in some cases are being controlled by our adversaries. If you’re on TikTok and you’re getting videos served up to you, those videos — that algorithm is being controlled by the Ministry of State Security of the Chinese Communist Party. It’s as simple as that. It’s akin to World War II, when families gathered around the radio after dinner to hear news from Europe.

Imagine if every radio set in America was controlled by Joseph Goebbels and the Ministry of Propaganda of the Nazi Party. That’s what’s going on right now with TikTok. So it’s algorithmic control and algorithmic bias, in some cases actually controlled by our adversaries.

Also recognize the hundreds of billions of dollars that countries are spending on this and just be educated about what the Qataris are doing, for example, as they spread Islamist Muslim Brotherhood propaganda around the world, not only through social media, but through normal traditional media, through the education system, really in all aspects of our economy and all our institutions. Be educated about who Qatar is and what their ideology is. And then I think it’s really important to understand that some of the biggest influencers on both the Left and the Right — people like Tucker Carlson today — that their popularity is in part being driven by foreign funding, by foreign bots, or foreign-directed bots.

I just saw an interesting statistic. I think the Ukrainians just blew up a Russian data center, which led to a sharp drop-off in viewership for people like Carlson and others in this case on the sort of far-Right. But certainly as true on the radical Left. So just a much better understanding of the information you’re consuming is not being provided to you by fair-minded people, and it’s being, in many cases, directed by America’s enemies.