The drought on analysis of our war with Iran continues. This Wall Street Journal column from Walter Russell Mead is typical of what I’m seeing. In the column Dr. Mead divides the possible outcomes into three categories: the U.S. loses, the U.S. wins, or something in between. That taxonomy is logically exhaustive but analytically empty. Every war ends in one of those states. What is missing is any discussion of the mechanisms that would produce one outcome rather than another: Iranian escalation capacity, American political endurance, the vulnerability of Gulf shipping, or the stability of the Iranian regime. Without identifying the drivers of the conflict, the analysis amounts to little more than labeling the possible endings:

The war looks set to end in one of three ways. One would be a clear and damaging American defeat. If a mix of global pressure and domestic opposition forces the Trump administration to end the conflict before full trade is restored through the Gulf, a battered Iran will emerge having demonstrated its ability to close the Gulf against everything the world’s greatest military power can throw at it. America’s power and prestige, not to mention Mr. Trump’s, would struggle to recover from such a fiasco.

Alternatively, the Americans could reopen the Gulf as a new Iranian government more focused on developing the country than on dominating its neighbors emerges. This would be a major victory for the Trump administration.

Most likely is an in-between scenario in which the U.S. largely clears the Gulf but the current regime survives. Operation Epic Fury would in that case be remembered as the Mother of All Lawnmowers, solving nothing fundamental but preserving a fragile balance of power in a vital part of the world.

Well, yes. Even a casually informed reader could have said that six months or six years ago. It is an exhaustive list of possibilities, but it tells us nothing about which is likely or why.

This post is a response to multiple comments about the durability of the present Iranian government. Contrary to what some of my readers have said, the history of Iran is less one of stability than of change. Without turning this post into a thesis on Iranian history, Iran’s history is of one government replacing another. Individual dynasties and empires have ruled Iran for periods of slightly less than 500 years to slightly less than 50 years. Iranian regimes often appear stable for long periods but collapse suddenly and completely. Sometimes these changes of government were due to internal forces; in others governments were removed by external invaders.

The present Khomeinist government replaced the Pahlavi dynasty a little less than fifty years ago.

Over the last 2,500 years Iran has been ruled by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Persians, Seljuk Turks, Mongols, Persians again. Afghans, and finally, Persians again from 1789 to the present, first the Qajar dynasty, then the Pahlavi.

The Persians themselves were migrants to the plateau, arriving in the second millennium BCE and displacing earlier populations. In that respect Iran is no different from anywhere else: over long enough time horizons, everyone is from somewhere else.

I wanted to call attention to this report in the Washington Post by John Hudson and Warren P. Strobel. Apparently, just a week before the onset of U.S. hostilities against Iran, the federal government’s National Intelligence Council (NIC) produced a report casting serious doubt on the likelihood that U.S. action could produce regime change:

A classified report by the National Intelligence Council found that even a large-scale assault on Iran launched by the United States would be unlikely to oust the Islamic republic’s entrenched military and clerical establishment, a sobering assessment as the Trump administration raises the specter of an extended military campaign that officials say has “only just begun.”

The findings, confirmed to The Washington Post by three people familiar with the report’s contents, raise doubts about President Donald Trump’s declared plan to “clean out” Iran’s leadership structure and install a ruler of his choosing.

The real issue is not whether Iran can be damaged militarily. Clearly, it can. The issue is whether external military pressure can produce regime collapse. The intelligence community’s answer appears to be “no.”

The WaPo goes on to explain the NIC:

The National Intelligence Council, or NIC, is composed of veteran analysts who produce classified assessments meant to represent the collective wisdom of Washington’s 18 intelligence agencies.

The Administration’s response to questions about the NIC’s report was:

“President Trump and the administration have clearly outlined their goals with regard to Operation Epic Fury: destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and production capacity, demolish their navy, end their ability to arm proxies, and prevent them from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement. “The Iranian regime is being absolutely crushed.”

and this quote amplifies the question:

“There’s no other force within Iran that can confront the remaining power that the regime has,” said Maloney, of the Brookings Institution. “Even if they’re not able to project that power very effectively against their neighbors, they can certainly dominate inside the country.”

That shouldn’t be surprising in the least. The purpose of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is not to project power against their neighbors but to dominate Iran, i.e. to prevent exactly what our present war intends to produce. There is no united opposition to the regime in Iran. Whether the various dissident groups including ethnic dissidents like the Kurds or Balochis either singly or in cooperation with each would be able to oust the regime is an open question. These groups include monarchists, liberal reformers, various regional and ethnic separationalist movements, and student or labor movements. In some instances these groups are as opposed to each other as they are to the regime.

Yesterday I lamented the lack of serious commentary on the war in Iran. Although I found a number of such articles today, most followed the pattern I outlined yesterday. The one exception was this post at War on the Rocks by Albert B. Wolf. In the post Dr. Wolf urges the Administration in no uncertain terms not to arm the Kurds to rise up against the regime in Iran or, presumably, to arm other ethnic groups in the same fashion.

The Trump administration should abandon any plans to arm Iranian Kurdish forces before the first fighter crosses the Iraqi-Iranian border. Not refine it. Not sequence it more carefully. Drop it entirely. The operation will not topple the Iranian regime, will inflame the Persian nationalism that is the Islamic Republic’s most reliable reserve fuel, and — most damagingly — will hand Tehran a coalition-fracturing tool it did not have to build. There is no version of this gambit that serves American strategic interests.

The article goes on to defend that view. His argument rests on three claims: that Kurdish insurgency will not topple the regime, that it will strengthen Persian nationalism inside Iran, and that it will fracture the regional coalition by alarming neighbors such as Turkey and Pakistan.

I have one question for Dr. Wolf. What is it in the Trump Administration’s actions to date that convince you it is engaging in the long-term thinking you are advocating rather than focusing on the problems it would cause for the regime today? Dr. Wolf’s argument assumes that Washington is weighing long-term regional consequences against short-term tactical gains. But the administration’s behavior to date suggests something closer to opportunism: maximizing immediate pressure on the regime with little regard for downstream effects.

The real challenge is whether Iran’s is a regime that can be destabilized internally, or is Iran a civilization-state whose population will rally against external meddling?

I have been greatly disappointed by the dearth of critical analysis of the ongoing war with Iran. Although I have found a small number of generally interesting analyses, e.g. this post at The Diplomat by Youlon Nie on how the war disrupts China’s long-standing foreign policy thrust or this post at RealClearDefense by Ian Hill on how the war strengthens Russia’s position. Unfortunately, both of those articles have serious deficiencies. Dr. Nie’s analysis is interesting but doesn’t address the economic implications for China which seem immediate and grave to me. Although Mr. Hill’s analysis of the implications of the war for Russia seem sound to me and he gestures towards the implications for the war in Ukraine, he doesn’t actually examine them.

It may be that there are other worthwhile but paywalled pieces that I can’t access.

Beyond that most of what I’m seeing depends simply on the domestic political views of the author, i.e. if the author is anti-Trump, the piece opposes the war; if the author is pro-Trump, the piece supports it. I have searched the major media outlets, major policy journals, and think tank publications and found remarkably little strategic analysis.

What I find is silence.

What are the economic consequences for China? How does the war reshape Russia’s strategic position and the Ukraine war? Is regime change achievable without a ground occupation? How will the war affect America’s standing in the world?

I am neither reflexively pro-Trump nor anti-Trump. I can support good policies but will oppose bad ones. War against Iran seems like a very bad policy to me.

The arguments I have seen in favor of it tend to be consequentialist in nature. They emphasize how bad the existing Iranian regime is, a judgment with which I concur. They then make the leap that, if you oppose removing the regime by force, you either support the regime or are indifferent to the suffering of the Iranian people. Such arguments depend on the war producing regime change in Iran and I have seen no one argue convincingly that can be accomplished via air and naval power.

President Trump’s exhortation of the Iranian people which I will summarize as “We’ll remove the regime; you replace it” suffers from the weakness of going against the thrust of human history.

I have seen a few assertions that there is an active alternative “waiting in the wings” but they seem far-fetched to me. Didn’t we hear things like this about Afghanistan and Iraq in the early days of the wars there?

So, that’s where things stand as I see it. I’m confident that the U. S. can achieve every military objective with alacrity. Whether it can achieve the foreign policy objective of regime change is something else again.

If you can refer me to any good, well-argued, evidence-based pieces on the war, please leave links in comments.

My reactions to poll results reported by James Freeman in the Wall Street Journal varied from incredulity to interest. The particular poll he was reporting on was a Harvard-Harris poll and the specific issues to which he drew attention were towards the economy. For example:

The new survey asks, “What do you think is a better economic system – capitalism or socialism?” Capitalism wins by a 59% to 41% margin, which is better than some recent findings but still not the complete repudiation that Marxism deserves. The most disturbing aspect is that socialism wins among Democrats, 54% to 46%.

The problem is that as phrased the question measures symbolic affiliation more than concrete policy preference. It’s not even particularly good as a Rorschach test. And this one:

Here’s another question in the new poll:

Do you think America should be run mostly as a free enterprise country or under socialism?

When asked this way, freedom wins by 76% to 24% and even Democrats vote for free enterprise over socialism by a healthy 68% to 32% margin.

is not much better. The key problem is that like most developed countries we don’t have either “free enterprise” or “socialism”. We have a mixed economy. Every developed economy has private property, markets, government regulations, transfer payments, and a provision for public goods. The real questions are how much redistribution should there be, how much regulation, and how much provision of goods by the state. Unfortunately, those questions were not asked. As stated the questions above were primarily symbolic declarations of affiliation.

Americans do not live in a capitalist or socialist system in the abstract. They live in a highly developed mixed economy with extensive redistribution and regulation layered onto private markets. Asking them to choose between ideological labels tells us less about their policy preferences than about the emotional associations those labels carry.

This question gets closer to the heart of the matter:

Here’s another Harvard-Harris question:

Do you think people should be able to buy and own their own [houses] or should the state own their houses?

A full 91% of respondents say people should have the right to buy and own their own houses.

According to the poll most Americans oppose government-run grocery stores, too.

The question I wished they had asked but didn’t was:

Should the government require individuals with extremely large property holdings to transfer some of their property to others to reduce inequality?

That would have been revealing.

The most interesting result is not what Americans think about socialism. It’s how dramatically their answers shift based on wording. Nearly every economic or political question was divided along party lines with Democrats on one side and Republicans/independents on the other. An exception to that was voter ID: a supermajority of self-identified Democrats supported it.

In an earlier post I outlined some possible scenarios for the outcome of our war with Iran. The list wasn’t exhaustive. Here’s another possibility.

Consider the map above. It lists the ethnic minorities in Iran. As you can see ethnic Persians make up just under half of Iranians. The balance are divided among Azeris, Kurds, Lur, Arabs, Baluchis, and others. Many if not most of these groups have active independence movements of varying degrees of militancy and coherence. If the war degrades the Iranian military, IRGC, and basiji militias sufficiently, ethnic fracture is a distinct possibility.

Those sections in Iran’s southwest labelled “Arabs” and “Lur” are where much of Iran’s oil is located.

The scale of disaster of this “fracture scenario” for Iran’s Persian population is hard to overestimate. Not only would they be materially denied oil revenue but the portion of Iran in which they remained would be nearly landlocked. Loss of Khuzestan would severely degrade revenue and strategic depth even if maritime access remained. Imagine a highly urbanized Afghanistan with a strong historic national identity, high literacy rate, and a deep bureaucratic tradition.

The “fracture scenario” is what I think of when I read reports like this one from al Arabiya English, noting President Trump’s meetings with Iranian dissident groups:

US President Donald Trump is open to supporting groups inside Iran willing to take up arms to overthrow the regime, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing US officials.

According to the report, Trump spoke on Sunday with Kurdish leaders and continues to engage other local actors who could exploit the Iranian regime’s current weakness.

“The Kurds have a sizable force along the Iraq-Iran border, and Israel has bombed positions in western Iran, leading to speculation that it is paving a path for a Kurdish advance,” the Journal reported.

Trump’s call with Kurdish leaders was first reported by Axios.

Officials told the Journal that Trump has not made a final decision on whether to provide arms, training or intelligence support to anti-regime groups.

Here’s my question: is U.S. policy drifting toward regime fracture as an implicit objective rather than regime behavior change? I have other questions:

• Who would control whatever nuclear assets remain? Presumably, the Persians but that’s not obvious.
• At what point would Russia or China intervene?
• The Kurdish Iranian section would presumably attempt to federate with Iraqi Kurdistan. How would the Turks react to that?
• What effect would all of this have on energy markets?

I must have read a dozen different opinion pieces on the war with Iran and know little more than I did when I last posted. Rather than dwelling on the things I didn’t like or agree with in these opinions, I’ll consider only the passages in them with which I agreed.

Thomas Friedman, New York Times

As this column has noted before, in the Middle East the opposite of autocracy is not necessarily democracy. Often it is “disorder.” Because when Middle East dictatorships are decapitated, one of two things happens. They either implode, like Libya did, or they explode, like Syria did.

Persians are only around 60 percent of Iran’s population. The other 40 percent is a mosaic of minorities, mainly Azeris, Kurds, Lurs, Arabs and Baloch. Each has links with lands outside of Iran, especially Azeris with Azerbaijan and Kurds with Kurdistan. Prolonged chaos in Tehran could lead any of them to split off and for Iran to, in effect, explode.

George Will, Washington Post

Iran’s protesters dramatically underscored the regime’s barbarism, so those who today regret the regime’s demise reveal their barbarism.

Editors, Wall Street Journal

All of this reveals the risks of ending the bombing campaign before Mr. Trump’s stated war aims are achieved. Mr. Trump has said he will respond to continued Iran retaliation with more bombing, but he also told Axios that he is open to “off-ramps” if the regime seeks to resume diplomacy. What precisely those ramps are isn’t clear, but he told The Atlantic on Sunday that Iran’s new leaders “want to talk, and I have agreed to talk.” The regime may promise more seeming concessions to entice Mr. Trump to stop the bombing and give it a lifeline.

This would raise the risk of ending before Iran’s navy and its missile stocks, launchers and productive capacity are destroyed. It would also leave most of the IRGC and its basij enforcers intact. As long as these remain in control, the regime will be able to shoot to kill protesters and cow any domestic uprising.

Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh, WSJ

Mossad now has an Iran regime-change department; it probably has already discovered that killing the Islamic Republic’s leadership is a hell of a lot easier than helping Iranians overcome security services that have shown they are willing to kill thousands to stay in power.

Ali Shamkhani, head of Iran’s National Defense Council, was recently asked whether he regrets not developing the bomb in the 1990s, when he was defense minister. “I wish I had,” he said. “Today it is evident that Iran should have developed this capability itself.” Shamkhani was killed Saturday, and he surely speaks for those left behind.

Sen. Tim Kaine, WSJ

The U.S. and Iran have both constructed narratives whereby the other is the aggressor in this longstanding conflict. More war isn’t the answer. If it were, the past 70 years would have produced a better outcome than what we see today.

George Friedman, Geopolitical Futures

More will come to light, of course, but it seems clear to me that the purpose of the attack was regime change. Regime change is not easy. Destroying a government requires more than random assassinations; it requires the destruction of the physical infrastructure of how a government functions – office buildings, communications capabilities, computers that contain information on citizens, and so on. Decapitation and regime change require disabling the government from functioning and, at times, permitting chaos (dangerous if the public favored the government’s ideology and policies). A new version of the old government might emerge, as could a regime even more hostile to the U.S. and Israel.

John Limbert, Responsible Statecraft

Few people, Iranian or non-Iranian, will mourn the downfall of the Islamic Republic. Most will welcome an Iranian government that treats all its citizens decently and which does not threaten other countries, near and far. Bombing Iran’s military sites and eliminating top officials, however, will not bring such a happy outcome. The Islamic Republic, in its dismal 47-year history, has shown unexpected resilience. It has survived assassinations, sanctions, war, and incompetence. It has a cadre of supporters among some Iranians who are willing to slaughter their compatriots rather than give up their privileges and face retribution for 47 years of abuse.

The entirety of the symposium at RS, linked above, is worth reading.

I could fisk each of those pieces and about a dozen more but it isn’t really worth the trouble.

I watched the “talking heads” programs on broadcast news this morning with rapt attention, eager for insights into what’s going on in Iran. I will post links to transcript of them as they become available. What stood out most to my eye was that President Trump’s supporters were uniformly arguing in favor of preventive war, a subject on which I posted. In short, I think it’s wrong and is bad policy.

However, I wanted to call specific attention to a remark by, I believe, a Republican senator who declaimed confidently that “the requirement for imminence is a fallacy created by the Obama Administration”. Far from being a creation of the Obama Administration, imminence as a requirement for anticipatory or pre-emptive self-defense has been a keystone of American foreign policy for nearly 200 years.

It dates back to the “Caroline affair” in 1837. In December 1837 a group of Canadian militiamen set fire to the steamboat Caroline in New York and sent it over Niagara Falls, killing a black American watchmaker, Amos Durfee. That triggered a reprisal and diplomatic incident that unfolded over several years.

During the diplomatic contretemps letters by U. S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster to British representative Lord Ashburton articulated the conditions under which one country may attack another in anticipation of attack:

those exceptions should be confined to cases in which the necessity of that self-defense is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation

That remains remains the classic statement of anticipatory self-defense in customary international law to this day and has heretofore been American policy.

It highlights a persistent complaint of mine here, that those who do not know history are doomed to say tomfool things about it.

The senator’s abrupt dismissal of a requirement for imminence is a de facto argument for preventive war. The existence of nuclear weapons does not repeal the distinction between imminent attack and speculative future capability as I have already argued in my post on preventive war linked above.