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.
At OTB Steven L. Taylor fisks Tom Friedman’s column.
Haven’t been online much in recent weeks/months.
Here’s my quick analysis:
Most everything this administration is saying or said is pretextual. I think the reality is that we’re going after Iranian capabilities to ensure – regardless of who is in charge in Iran after this – that Iran won’t be a regional threat for many years. That’s the goal – destroy Iran’s military and as much of its ballistic missile and nuclear industrial base as possible. Everything else is window dressing or contingent.
There is an old rule of thumb in the intelligence world: Threat = Intent + Capability. The Islamic Republic and its erstwhile allies in the “Axis of Resistance” have proven that changing the intentions of adversaries, especially those with religious and ethnically motivated genocidal goals, rarely works. In the case of Hamas and Hezbollah, even after killing many/most of their fighters and almost the entirety of their leadership, their motivation to reconstitute and continue to battle the Jews and infidels remains. They have met the definition of insanity over and over again since 1948 – the delusion that if they just keep attacking Israel, eventually they will win.
Similarly, we are not winning over foes like ISIS, AQ, and many other hostile fundamentalist movements with dialogue and reason, we have – and continue to – go after their capabilities to harm the US and our allies. Iran is now in that bucket.
Iran is a target now because it has been the head of the Axis of Resistance snake, and is similarly unwilling to reform its foreign policy and the ideology that underpins the regime. Leaving aside moral and legal considerations, this is the most opportune time from a practical standpoint to wreck Iran’s ability to threaten neighbors and play footsie with nuclear weapons. It’s opportune timing because Iran has seriously strategically blundered on a massive scale and shown itself to be weak and unable to deter or defend itself. So we are in the process of destroying Iran’s military capacity and its leadership structure. What comes after is a secondary consideration, regardless of what this administration claims (and there’s a reason why its claims are all over the map and inconsistent). We and the Israelis are going after the capability side of the threat equation. So I see this primarily as a punitive expedition with that goal, not as an actual regime-change operation.
But if the regime is weakened enough, there will probably be a civil war, and it’s extremely unlikely secular, democratic forces would emerge triumphant. That almost never happens. The victor in a civil war is usually whoever has the most guns, not who has the best ideas. Iran could also end up in a state of perpetual conflict like Libya, Syria, or Somalia.
So even though I join many in cheering the destruction of a hostile regime that has been at de facto war with the US for more than a generation, and has a lot of US blood on its hands, I’m very aware that the future is likely going to be a dark and violent one for Iran. I hope I’m wrong, but internal conflict born from war in this region rarely turns out well.
Andy- That makes sense from the POV of Israel. Not so much for the US. They dont have much capability to harm us except when we have troops in the ME and even then mostly when we are engaged in active warfare. They have little ability to affect us in the US and I cant think of many/any examples of their even trying. So we are doing this mostly to help Israel. I dont really see Israel as an especially good ally so I cant say I am happy about this as a motive. I dont see this as being very effective unless we commit to doing this every 5-10 years and if they had wanted to have a nukes they could have easily had one by now. If they keep facing massive attacks I suspect they get serious about it.
Steve
I suspect that there is no single reason for the war in Iran. Some that I think are factors include:
Trump wanted to show he was tough (red line)
Improve our bargaining position with Iran
Weaken Iran
Israelis think they need it for survival
regime change
weaken Iran
weaken China
Mix ‘n match.
“That makes sense from the POV of Israel. Not so much for the US. They dont have much capability to harm us except when we have troops in the ME and even then mostly when we are engaged in active warfare. ”
Libya didn’t have much capability to harm us either, and we took them out. The irony is that the Obama administration prosecuted that war in a similar manner including not bothering getting authorization from Congress, and even declaring that the War Powers Act didn’t apply because it was a “time-limited, scope-limited military operation.” We did it to help our European allies who couldn’t do it alone, didn’t think much about the aftermath, which was state failure and civil war, and today practically no one hears anything about Libya or gives the slightest fuck.
None of the countries where we kinetically intervened in the Balkans could hurt us. Most of our interventions since WW2 were against countries that were never more than tangential threats – maybe all of them.
For this war with Iran, Israel isn’t the only beneficiary – so are all the Gulf states, who are now even more on board after Iran has attacked them. And we in the US have a long history of hostility with Iran, it’s not like we are only doing this for Israel. It’s been Iran that chose to make us and Israel enemies for the last 45-odd years, a centerpiece of their identity and foreign policy.
I’m not sure why you think Israel is a bad ally – bad as compared to what? Egypt? Saudi? Jordan?, UAE? Turkey?
I question as to the capability. Even without an attack; Iran would likely have spent a decade or more dealing with its internal domestic issues before being able to engage in adventurism abroad.
As to the war; it probably cannot go for very long. Patriot interceptors, tomahawk missiles are not in infinite supply — considering Ukraine and Asia Pacific needs. It’s easy to start a war; it’s very hard to end the fighting through.
Andy:
I complained about it at the time and have complained about it multiple times since.
Also, at the time my view was that we were pursuing British and French objectives rather than our own and said as much. This seems to be a similar situation which is likely to produce a similar outcome—we’re furthering foreign policy goals other than our own. It has become a very bad habit.
CuriousOnlooker:
When viewed through a strictly subjective (expectationalist) consequentialist prism whether the U. S. can continue to support Ukraine or respond to a crisis in the Asia-Pacific is irrelevant.
The reality is that of the 250 or so armed conflicts since 1945 the US has started over 200 of them. Moreover, the US has almost always attacked countries that were at peace with it and its allies, hostile no doubt, but they weren’t shooting at us.
We are the Evil Empire. The regime in Washington is unelected (fraud doesn’t count) and illegitimate and, most importantly, controlled by a foreign power that is hostile to the American people, namely Israel.
Israel itself is illegitimate, the last and last existing European colonial project. It is the universal aggressor in the region, seeking the destruction of all its neighbors, because of a few verses in an Iron Age book of fables and fake history, the Yahweh land grant of everything between the Euphrates and the Nile. Washington and Tel Aviv are full of people who believe that nonsense, and who are willing to murder millions to achieve it.
It is to weep.
I don’t agree that Israel is illegitimate or, at least, no more so than any other country. However, I agree that the “historical” books of the Bible were written in large part to defend a claim to the land—little wonder that it does.
The first actual historical records of the Hebrews were as a client people of the Persians. My speculation is that the ancient Persian Empire settled them in the ancient land of Israel in part to pacify it.
The problem, of course, is that although there have been Bedouins there from time immemorial (BTW Israel’s Bedouins side with the Jews not the Palestinians) any Arab claim to the land there is equally weak and based on their own holy book.
DNA studies have suggested that the people with the oldest claim to the land are the Maronites of Lebanon and the Malekhites of Syria.
Andy- Its Hatfield and McCoys. We helped overthrow Mossadegh and put the shah in power. Dave thinks our role was minimal but historians disagree on how much we helped but what’s not disuputed is that we did help some.
I think Israel is a bad ally for a number of reasons. They are a rich country but we still give them money due to the influence of their lobbying effects. We get little out of the alliance. They interfere/have interfered in our internal politics well beyond any other ally of which I can think including sending a spy here. Recently you have Israel’s frequently re-elected, most popular PM actively engaging in supporting the GOP in elections. Also, I cant recall any instance when Israel has deployed personnel to aid the US, unlike an awful lot of our NATO allies.
So to recap, they depend upon us just like our NATO allies but unlike our NATO allies they dont put their people in harm’s way to help us. They interfere with our internal politics more than any other ally. What do we get out of the alliance? Maybe some intelligence? But most of that seems centered on threats to Israel. Where were they on 9/11? For that matter where were they for 10/7?
Steve
My usual diction is that I don’t think that Israel is an ally. I think they’re a client and a pretty lousy client at that.