You May Already Have Won – or Lost – the Iran War

The plaintive observation, ascribed to the early Victorian British Prime Minister Viscount Melbourne about the acerbically self-confident historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, remains the motto of the thoughtfully skeptical man through the ages. Some of us still harbor doubt about the consequences of actions in a complex world. But we live in an era when instantaneous certitude about everything, an iron conviction in subjective judgment in the face of objective uncertainty, is the only guarantee of a hearing.