Can We or Can’t We Win?

Today there is a cacophony of voices offering advice on the war in Iran: I find the advice not only conflicting but substituting feigned context for actual context. The Iranian Revolution’s seizure of American diplomats in 1979 was not merely an American grievance. It was a direct challenge to the entire diplomatic system embodied in the Vienna Convention. The Carter administration treated it primarily as a bilateral hostage crisis. Everything that followed has been the accumulated cost of that failure.

Here are several examples of the commentary I have seen:

Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post, “Iran is an imperial trap. America walked right in.”

After recounting Britain’s position and actions in the 19th century Mr. Zakaria observes:

The primary, indispensable role of the U.S. is to anchor the global system against the revisionist ambitions of Beijing and Moscow. China is not getting bogged down in Middle Eastern quagmires; it is relentlessly investing in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, solar and wind power, batteries and robots — the technologies that will determine the balance of global power. Russia remains fiercely committed to disrupting European security and undermining Western democracies through hybrid political-military warfare that has proved hard to detect and even harder to defeat. But while Moscow and Beijing challenge the basic architecture of America’s world order, Washington is preparing, once again, to spend blood and treasure policing the Middle East and trying to pick the leaders of one of its countries.

David Ignatius, Washington Post, “Iran’s Islamic Republic 2.0 is coming — and it won’t be pretty”

The TL;DR version of Mr. Ignatius’s column is that a) the U. S. can’t win the war; and b) if the Iranian regime falls it will be replaced by an IRGC regime that is far worse than the present theocracy.

If there’s one lesson America and Israel should have learned in recent decades, it’s that military success doesn’t usually translate to political victory — in Gaza, Afghanistan or, now, Iran. The adversary keeps coming back. The Israelis have learned that they have to keep “mowing the grass,” the harsh phrase they use for the cycle of recurring violence. America, after avoiding an all-out clash with Iran for 47 years, may now be caught in a similar cycle.

The Iran war will be a tactical triumph in the short run, and all the encomiums about America’s unmatched military power will remain true. If the conflict ends tomorrow, Iran will have lost nearly all its nuclear facilities and scientists, most of its missiles and missile launchers, most of its weapons factories, most of its navy, and much of the command and control for its military, intelligence and security forces.

But the regime survives. It has taken America’s best punch, and it’s still standing. Tiers of senior military, intelligence and political leaders are dead, but they have been replaced by others. There’s no sign of a popular uprising. The cadres of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hide among piles of rubble, but they haven’t been eliminated.

This will be the Islamic Republic 2.0. For the foreseeable future, it will be an IRGC state, working in a corrupt but pragmatic alliance with Iran’s business interests.

Editors, Wall Street Journal, “Will Trump ‘Fight to Win’ in Iran?”

The regime’s strategy in response is now clear: Target the production of oil in the Persian Gulf and its flow through the Strait of Hormuz. If it can raise the price of oil high enough for long enough, it believes it can force Mr. Trump to call off the bombing campaign.

Iran’s advantage—its only one—is that it can employ asymmetric means to impose that economic pain. Drones are cheap to produce and hard to intercept when they swarm a target. Mines can be laid cheaply, and do great damage to U.S. ships if undetected. The U.S. hasn’t been as prepared to counter these threats as it has been against Iranian missiles. Any ideas, Secretary Hegseth?

In short: escalate if necessary, but do not allow Iran to impose costs that force an American retreat.

Caitlin Talmadge, Foreign Affairs, “The Hormuz Minefield”

Of the pieces linked here this is by far the best. In the piece Dr. Talmadge outline the significance and challenges of preventing the Iranian regime from obstructing traffic through the Straits of Hormuz. Here’s her excellent paragraph on the history of mine warfare:

Historically, even relatively small numbers of mines have had outsize effects. For example, in 1972, the United States stopped all traffic in and out of North Vietnam’s Haiphong harbor when it dropped just 36 mines. In 1991, the Iraqis were able to discourage a U.S. amphibious invasion by laying only 1,000 mines off the Kuwaiti coast—two of which later hit but did not sink U.S. warships. And in 1950 the North Koreans delayed the U.S. landing at Wonsan by laying only 3,000 mines across 50 square miles.

observing:

These episodes suggest that even a relatively modest Iranian mine-laying campaign could inhibit tankers from entering the strait, as Iranian missile and drone threats have already appeared to do over the past week. Mines are unlikely to actually sink tankers, which are buoyant and compartmentalized. Yet threats to the crews are real and already seem to be playing a major role in inhibiting traffic in the strait—even without the placement of mines.

One factor that all of these opinion pieces fail to acknowledge is that the risks they are identifying that Iran poses have been present since the Shah was removed. They are not new. They cannot simultaneously be tolerable and intolerable.

I thought the Carter Administration erred in not insisting that the United Nations Security Council take action against the threat that the Iranian Revolution posed to international diplomacy. We held a position of strength. “Nice United Nations you’ve got here. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.”

Iran has been capable of threatening shipping in the Gulf, sponsoring proxy warfare, and obstructing diplomacy since the revolution in 1979. For nearly half a century the United States and its allies have chosen to tolerate those risks rather than resolve them. If they are now intolerable, that implies a very different strategic objective than merely degrading Iran’s capabilities.

There are no mulligans in international affairs. The challenge to the U. S. in prosecuting the war in Iran is not whether we are capable of striking and eliminating our designated targets from the air or in the sea. It is whether we have the stomach to identify the outcome we wish and achieve it. That will require more than assurances of victory from President Trump.