“The attack on RAF Akrotiri was not in response to any decision that we have taken”? How stupid does Keir Starmer think we are? As Patrick Porter writes:
The United States, in combination with Israel, is bombing Iran from the sea and air, while inciting rebels to rise and overthrow the regime in Tehran. Tehran retaliates with missile volleys far and wide. As of the time of writing, the bombing has killed the “supreme leader” Ali Khamenei. This is war and in war much is uncertain, unknown and volatile, a simple point that is still easily neglected. We argue about this in the dark.
Here’s a first-cut argument for why it is imprudent. But note three cautions. First, it is important to avoid cocksureness, especially at this early hour of the conflict. Too many observers are penning over-certain hot takes, drowning fact in talk.
Second, sceptics should make their case with a little of the restraint and gravitas we want from others, instead of assuming a monopoly on virtue. If war is inadvisable, that necessarily entails the continued oppression of Iranians. Bluntly, to oppose this war is to put the national interest, and wider interests, above the interests of those under the theocrats’ whip, even if we suspect a successful war even in humanitarian terms would be a cure worse than the disease. Declaring the war “illegal” is not the clinching, argument-settling move that some opponents think it is. Since there is no international sovereign above the state, and therefore no sovereign authority to enforce it, “legality” ultimately rests on the veto of self-interested powers. International laws may embody generally respectable principles. But whether Russia, China, France or indeed Donald Trump’s United States would support a military action is not an exhaustive test of its rightness or prudence. What’s more, no-one is infallible. This author for a time supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003, as did some livelier minds. Today, there will be responsible, reasonable, conscientious people who judge this war is worth the risks. Alas, they are not the ones driving the train.
Third, this is a prudential case, not a statement of sympathy with the murderous clerics and enforcers who run Iran. They, after all, sponsored Hamas, who carried out a pogrom on Israel, the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, leading to Israel’s atrocious razing of Gaza. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sponsors violent mayhem abroad, including two antisemitic terror attacks on Australia, my land of birth. Indeed, it was the attack by Hamas that helped get the region here.
However, is Operation Epic Fury wise? Respectfully, I want to suggest it isn’t.
Let’s say the war works, and the regime falls. This time it will be different, or so we hear from the architects and admirers of the policy. Well, many things are possible. It just could work out as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu foresees, that a historical moment in time is opening that will see Iran decisively eliminated as an adversary. It may be that air strikes help inspire and reinforce a domestic revolution and that the mullahs fold. It is not impossible that liberated Iran evolves like the liberated East European states of 1989. The study of international politics remains a deeply imprecise craft, despite all our efforts to the contrary, and sometimes things happen that just plain surprise us.
The odds are steep, however. Any scepticism should be grounded both in our awareness of the general, historical hazards of regime change wars, as well as the peculiarities of this case. Toppling regimes and spearheading revolutions tends to create destructive upheaval, via winners and losers, that spawns more war, not peace, replaces one despotic regime with multiple despotic forces, and multiplies security threats. In this case, to judge from experienced Iran watchers, there isn’t a cohesive enough opposition and shadow government ready to step in and command the allegiances of enough Iranians. A state collapse, therefore, will more likely unleash chaos in a fractured nation of ninety million people, awash with sectarian forces and astride bloody and volatile borders, a brutal aftermath that will demand more, not less, effort and attention. And those making the humanitarian argument for the current campaign would have some reckoning to do.
That dark victory might also be a bad outcome for Israel. The Middle East isn’t a place of discrete, bilateral rivalries, but a region of many moving parts, and brutal ironies. A weakened Iranian regime Israel can manage and live with, and periodically disrupt. To take it off the board is to remove a counterweight to other menacing forces, like Sunni Islamist jihadis. Eliminating threats, as opposed to containing them, can result in the empowerment of those they helped check. Recall that after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Iran extended its power.
To be sure, this time the U.S. isn’t mounting a land invasion of Iran. Nor has it made a public pseudo-legal case. It has not spent a year building domestic and international support. Donald Trump’s military adventure is a good deal more improvised and casual, throwing the rock in the pond without preparing the political ground. And we don’t know the future, and can’t be confident that the ruthless theocrats in Tehran will share Saddam Hussein’s fate.
One thing is similar, however. There is more than a whiff of the hubristic swagger of 2003 that augurs badly for any war. The U.S. leader — and some war hawks in his column — seem intoxicated by a sense of power. They are sure of decisive victory. Overnight, Trump declares that he is ending Iran’s forever war against America for the past forty-seven years, a mission about to be accomplished. Trump and his Vulcans are full of moralism: what is virtuous (Iranian liberation) is also what is strategically sound. They assume a harmony of interests between America, Israel and the peoples they offer to liberate. Because they are on the right side of history, the deadly, implacable adversary will also quickly fold when struck. The aftermath, and the internal state of the liberated country, will then to America’s favour. As with 2003, initially successful earlier campaigns reinforce their optimism, whether the toppling of the Taliban in the autumn of 2001 like the lightning strike on Venezuela in January this year. Allies and partners and informants on the ground, also invested in throttling their local enemy, help persuade them a great victory is theirs for the taking. For these reasons, they think it will be easy, a matter of weeks. Trump, who campaigned initially on the promise he would end futile wars of “blood and sand”, completes his betrayal of Americans who wanted an end to all that.
It would be reckless, however, to mount policy on these expectations. The U.S. has embarked on this venture on two linked assumptions: of Iranian regime fragility, and American and Israeli strength. America is stronger, but not so strong that it can readily handle this campaign and its aftermath, while also seeking dominance in other theatres it prioritises. Its own western hemisphere and north-east Asia matter more, or so its declaratory documents tell us. Conversely, Iran’s regime is weaker, but possibly stronger at performing its most important job, surviving.
U.S. resources in important ways are not abundant, but rather scarce and strained. The defensive anti-air munitions it fields to protect its forward deployed forces and its allies are hard-won assets that take much time and capital to replace. THAAD and Patriot batteries are (or will be) needed in other theatres of conflict and confrontation, from Ukraine to South Korea to Taiwan. Intercepting Iranian missiles depletes those capabilities. In a direct and literal way, the campaign is already consuming American power. Moreover, now that the U.S. has abandoned the “two war” standard, whereby it looked to be capable of meeting two regional contingencies at once, sustaining a deployed force on a war footing is hard when there are other theatres where America stands sentry. Iran does not have the coffers or the cutting-edge military technology of America, true. But it can concentrate the forces it does have in one place and time, and with its survival at stake, can apply maximum resolve. America’s greater strength is more spread out. And because its interests at stake are less intense, its resolve is lower. God is not always on the side of those with the biggest battalions — or squadrons.
Yet, with limited means, suited better for more bounded campaigns, the U.S. insists on an expansive end: not just weakening or containment but the overthrow of the regime. The limited means — airpower in conjunction with revolt — has a poor record of success in achieving maximal goals. Libya is one unusual case of it working, but then there were stronger armed rebels in sufficient force on the ground. Demanding regime change, Washington refuses to induce it via the only reliable measure, a land invasion. If regime change is deemed not worth an invasion, and therefore not worth bleeding for, its importance and value to Washington is limited. America is reluctant to pay the necessary price to dislodge this sworn enemy. Tehran knows of its reluctance. Knowing it has the balance of resolve in its favour will embolden the regime to hold on as hard as it can. If that is so, the campaign will not realise its goal. Precious resources will be wasted. Iran will start rebuilding, and the argument in Iran for pursuing the bomb to secure the Islamic Republic will be strengthened. And the parties will return to blows again. To will the end but not the means is strategically illiterate.
There are good reasons to expect standoff strikes plus incitement of revolt not to work, on the probabilities at least. One of the great unknowns of such wars is the state of collective psychology: we can’t confidently know in advance of the political will of ordinary Iranians to risk all and rise up. Many will know -from Hungary in 1956 or Iraq in 1991 – that a sympathetic superpower might abandon them, having initially encouraged resistance. What’s more, the Iranian regime may be more dug in than hoped, even though the network of proxies abroad from Lebanon to Syria has been rolled back for some time to come, its “ring of fire” reduced to ashes. The Iranian regime is more deeply rooted, more institutionally embedded in its society, than other types of regimes, like personalistic dictatorships, and comparative studies suggest that such regimes tend to be resilient. If all this is so, the decapitation of the Supreme Leader will not precipitate across-the-board regime change. For those who want this war to project strength and increase American prestige, this is bad news. The U.S. may then pull back claiming victory of sorts, but so will Iran, cultivating an image of defiance.
Amongst those with a sneaking suspicion of Trumpian bravado, there has been some excited speculation that the assassination overnight, as with the seizure of Nicolas Maduro in January, will serve as a powerful deterrent against western adversaries. They will now know, the argument goes, that Washington is poised to strike anywhere. Adversaries will be deterred if they know America will shoot on suspicion.
Yet history suggests that destroying adversaries, especially those in charge of lower-tier powers, either directly or as a result of a campaign does not reliably incentivise others to behave as the superpower demands. At times, it has the opposite effect. The fall of Serbian tyrant Slobodan Milosevic did not deter the jihadist orchestrator Osama bin Laden. The hanging of Iraqi Ba’athist dictator Saddam Hussein and the killing of bin Laden did not induce North Korea to refrain from proliferating, nor did it deter Russia’s imperialist president Dmitry Medvedev’s strike on Georgia. The graphic execution of Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi execution did not make Syria’s Bashar al-Assad moderate his policies. Donald Trump’s first-term killing of Iran’s Quds commander Qasem Soleimani did not get Iran to restrain itself abroad or at home. Murderous rulers tend to read these episodes not as lessons in the need to capitulate, but in the need for strength. At times, terminating unaccountable individuals who make war on one’s state is a defensible move in securing oneself from them. But the argument for performative violence is overrated. We don’t have to weep over the corpse of Khamenei to recognise that even superpowers can’t assassinate their way to global stability.
Seven years ago, my friend Michael Mazarr, a seasoned Washington DC security mind, wrote a history of the dogmas, hubris and groupthink that plunged the United States into the Iraq war of 2003, a conflict whose costs outstripped the gains, made terrorism worse, wasted valuable resources, led to mass flight, rampant crime, communal bloodshed, the further regional proliferation of militant jihadism, and helped lay the basis for Trump’s populist revolt in America itself. Mazarr’s book ends poignantly. As he packs up to leave an interview with a senior official of the Bush II administration, his source stops him and says: “You know, it will happen again. We’ll do it again.”
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