You are the president, now decide – do we attack Iran?

Haaretz

A new web-based game, Tell Me How It Ends, developed by The Truman National Security Project, reminds gamers what dilemmas and consequences an American attack on Iran could foster.

While playing the game, it is hard not to get the sense that its creators are members of the camp supporting an American attack on Iran's nuclear program.

The game stresses that an attack on Iran would have dire consequences, which must be considered before a decision is made.

"At the start of the Iraq war in 2003, when General David Petraeus said, 'Tell me how this ends,' he was expressing the reality that wars are easy to start, but the end game is often far from clear," The game creators explained what the rationale behind the game and its name. "Iraq turned out to be the second longest war in America’s history; Afghanistan has been the longest. General Petraeus’ simple question is one that every leader should ask before committing U.S. troops to battle."

The video opening the game also stresses the war's toll in human life. Instead of a patriotic display of force featuring jets taking off into the horizon, the video game creators chose to start the game off with a short video featuring Justin Ford, a veteran of the Iraq War, who pleads with the gamer-president to consider how the war will end before rushing into it next time. The Truman National Security Project says that the institute plans to air this video as a commercial during the upcoming presidential debate.

Tell Me How It Ends continues in the long tradition of conflict management games, one of the most notable of which was Conflict, way back in the 1990s. Conflict put the gamer in the chair of Israeli prime minister with the task of toppling down its neighboring nations. Another game that received a fair share of attention during the last decade was peacemaker, developed by ImpactGames. This game also had the gamer play the role of Israeli premier but this time peace not war was the desired objective.

Tell Me How It Ends has the gamer far away from the war front. He doesn't experience the conflict with Iran from a cockpit of a fighter jet in the Persian sky but rather the game play all takes place from the eyes of an American president watching news reports and listening to briefings by senior advisors, while throughout the game the rising price of oil and the mounting military expenses are prominently displayed.

The gamer is asked to make decisions. As usual, there is no right or wrong decision. On the contrary, the game strongly hints that setting red lines and thus reducing the president's freedom to act flexibly is dangerous. The game starts after the presidents red line, announced during the presidential elections has already been crossed – Iran has managed to enrich uranium to the level of 20 percent. In the real world, the United States had recently refused to set such an ultimatum despite the adamant insistence by Benjamin Netanyahu that they do. The game places the president-gamer at a point-of-no-return – after the diplomatic route has failed to lead to a desired outcome and the U.S. is on the brink of war. The choice is yours: go at it on your own or build an international coalition.

From this point, no matter what course of action is chosen things only deteriorate; a wave of terrorist attacks against American targets is unleashed, a massive rocket attack is fired at Israel, and the Iranians try to close off the all important Straits of Hormuz. The choices faced by the president continue to be limited and in two separate games I tried – one ending in the occupation of Iran, the other with the stabilization of the region after war – the consequences were dire including high gas prices and hundreds casualties.

In one version of the future given by the game, the U.S. occupies Iran for no less than eight years. In the other, the game makes it clear that a successful attack doesn't lead to peace and that Iran will do whatever it can to resume its nuclear program, so that preserving the gains of the attack requires an additional second attack three to four years later, that is if the attack is successful, a prospect that is far from certain.