A monitor displays President Donald Trump's update on the war in Iran at the White House on Wednesday.JASON HENDARDY/The New York Times
One of the two historic missions the United States is conducting has been planned with precision, its course set for years, its goals discrete and defined, its ending determined with care. The other has been hastily assembled, its course improvised, its goals constantly changing, its date of completion undetermined.
The Artemis II mission, featuring a space capsule named Integrity, and the Iran war, cloaked in deliberate deception and ruse de guerre with missiles of its own, are the two faces of the United States today.
They were illuminated in dramatic fashion in a period of roughly two hours Wednesday: the roar of the SLS booster sending four astronauts into the heavens followed by President Donald Trump’s threat to send resisting and recalcitrant Iranians “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”
Both undertakings – one launched by a long-ago president who challenged the country to dare to reach beyond the Earth despite the dangers, the other set in motion by a contemporary president who minimized the dangers of his venture by dismissing it as a mere “excursion”– were shaped by technology, suffused with daring and fuelled with bravery.
NASA launched four astronauts on the first crewed lunar voyage in more than half a century on Artemis II. Canadian crewmember Jeremy Hansen called it a mission for all humanity via radio in the lead up to the launch.
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One was a symbol of national purpose, the other of national security. One satisfied an ancient dream, the other was calculated to avoid a modern nightmare.
One has an exit plan – actually several of them, with specific names such as the emergency egress system and the launch abort system – while the other does not, or at least none that Mr. Trump set out in his speech, or that his military and diplomatic strategists have unveiled, or that members of his inner circle have leaked.
While the Cold War Soviet space program operated in secret, the United States boasted that its original moon program was, in keeping with its professed ethos of openness, conducted in public (unlike its clandestine activities in Congo, Cuba and Laos conducted during the same period). Roughly 3,400 journalists from 56 countries witnessed the launch of Apollo 11 in 1969.
Though war requires secrecy and misdirection, it ordinarily is accompanied by clearly expressed – though sometimes misleading – military, economic or geopolitical aims.
Artemis II is now in space. What happens next?
Hopes fade for swift end to war with Iran after Trump says military operations would intensify
The 47th President hasn’t set out the development of his war aims beyond speaking of the fight against a “fanatical regime” capable of “heinous acts” – the “most violent and thuggish regime on Earth”– and being “necessary for the security of “America.”
Much of the same language could have been applied to North Vietnam in 1965, but at least Lyndon Johnson, invoking clear if not tragically flawed logic, saw Hanoi as a vanguard of Communist expansion throughout Southeast Asia and beyond.
To be sure, war aims can change. Abraham Lincoln, for example, saw the Civil War as a conflict to preserve the Union in 1861, but by 1863 he viewed it as an effort to eliminate slavery. The 16th president made that transformation clear in the Gettysburg Address when he spoke of “a new birth of freedom,” an unmistakable signal that the conflict had become about the country’s sordid legacy of human bondage.
The Artemis II mission achieves liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Wednesday.Joe Skipper/Reuters
Now, a country that is capable of simultaneously launching a symbolic rocket toward the moon and launching deadly rockets toward Iran is expressing pride in the former and confusion about the latter. One of the country’s missions consumed six tonnes of propellant every second at launch, according to NASA. The other pushed gasoline prices to US$4.08 the same day, according to the American Automobile Association.
These sorts of juxtapositions and contradictions – some relevant, some merely fanciful but poignant nonetheless – seem to multiply with the days, partially because war sometimes involves or requires strategic statements that really are deliberate misstatements. Mr. Trump said Iran’s weapons factories and rocket launchers were “being blown to pieces.” A day later, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps said that wasn’t nearly the case, and that the U.S. and Israel “know nothing about our vast and strategic capabilities.”
Who knows?
Seldom has the fog of war been so thick. Indeed, the haze is almost impenetrable – a paradoxical circumstance given the public display of American military mastery and the constant profusion of images of destruction. Nor is there clarity on the diplomatic front.
Is Mr. Trump, who once channeled Ulysses Grant and Franklin Roosevelt in speaking about “unconditional surrender,” willing to trade a ceasefire for the opening of the Strait of Hormuz? Is he preparing to open the Strait with an assault, or does he think that what he regards as the feckless leaders (and the purported American allies) in Western Europe, along with the United Arab Emirates, should do it? Is the uranium Iran is determined to transform into a weapons-grade global menace being processed, or is it mere “dust” that is beyond excavation or, at least, as Mr. Trump said, “would take months to get near?”
These questions remain open as the pounding of Iran continues apace and as Artemis II streaks toward the moon.
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” John F. Kennedy said in his 1962 Rice University speech.
The war in Iran may look easy, but ending it is hard. And explaining the war may be even harder.