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Can the U.S. Win the Iran War?
“Tell me how this ends,” a young General David Petraeus asked early in Gulf War II, after the Iraqi Army had largely been defeated. The United States is extraordinarily good at the first half of wars and far less capable in the second. So how does this one with Iran end?
Gulf War I was fought on mostly contrived circumstances. Saddam Hussein thrived in power in Iraq in part due to U.S. support; he certainly survived the 1980s Iraq-Iran War due to behind the scenes U.S. involvement. But by 1990 Saddam morphed into a bad guy invading Kuwait, and the U.S. went to war against him supposedly to free Kuwait. Later we added on something about supporting the Iraqi people, but the real reason the U.S. went to war was to recapture and protect the oilfields, especially of Saudi Arabia. The U.S. was fully dependent on that oil, but our government could not say so, so white-washed all that happened with public justifications that obscured more material interests. We “won” that war by only fighting the part that really mattered to U.S. foreign policy, first half of it, the oil part, and declaring victory.
It is still contested why the U.S. fought Gulf War II, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan following the events of 9/11. The stated goals shifted from counterterrorism to fake weapons of mass destruction to nation-building while broader ambitions of regional dominance remained in the shadows. Nation building proved a palatable sell to the American public. But the underlying reason for the war was hegemony, remaking the regional balance of power and surrounding Iran under what some came to call the Rumsfeld Doctrine. Ironically Iran did offer some sort of rapprochement in 2004 when it looked to them that America was going to be successful in both Iraq and Afghanistan and the entire U.S. military stood panting on Iran’s east and west borders. But that rapprochement did not happen, thanks to American hubris.
And now is Gulf War III. As before, the reasons on paper for this current war are unclear. Originally it was to free the Iranian people (sound familiar?) and then it was about nukes (remember that as a casus belli against Saddam?) but no one can really be sure. We picked up some ancillary reasons that did not exist a few months ago, specifically holding open the Strait of Hormuz and stopping Iranian harassment attacks against Israel and our Gulf allies. We also ended up with the job of assuring places we cooperate with economically like China, Japan, and India they don’t run out of oil.
You can walk this whole history back to the Carter Doctrine of 1980, which stated the U.S. would use force to protect American interests in the Middle East. Or 1979, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, when the U.S. lost the country as a military partner and oil supplier. Or even back to 1956, the Suez Crisis, which marked the handover of de facto power in the area from the decayed British and French Empires to the United States. Or perhaps 1945 when President Franklin D Roosevelt assured the safety of Saudi Arabia to secure access to its oil. Or maybe even Sykes-Picot in 1916.
But no matter what starting date you settle on, America’s strategy has been based on the idea that the Middle East is to be controlled by U.S. power. In various countries Washington selected then often abandoned dictators, supported nascent moves toward democracy only as long as they did not aim at overturning the broader status quo, fought wars large and small every 10-20 years as America’s domestic whims could be manipulated, sanctioned regimes, drew and discarded red lines, let the Russians in then kicked them out, etc. Yet the underlying assumption endured that with few exceptions nothing truly important happened without Washington’s say-so. Oil was once a powerful subtheme to all this but it is now down to pure power.
So the question hanging over the present U.S.-Iran war is whether we are witnessing the reassertion of American dominance or the continuation of its gradual displacement. The United States is still the meanest dog on the block. No nation can match our ability to destroy things, literally to erase a whole society off the face of the earth if we really wanted to. Even without our archipelago of bases worldwide, the U.S. can launch untouchable B-2s and other bombers from Missouri, bomb Tehran, and return them home safely. That is not the same as shaping what comes after, primacy. The way the Iran War plays out says in part whether the U.S. is indispensable in reacting to nascent nuclear states or directing events on the very largest scales possible as was envisioned in the post-WWII world. Hats off to those insightful men who saw the end of WWII as a chance to reshape the world as boldly as was done in 1776, but we have not been led by such men for many years.
So how does this end?
History says we’re still on the wrong path. We failed to fundamentally alter Iran’s behavior since 1979, despite sanctions and more sanctions, CIA hijinks as yet untold, aiming Iraq at them in the 1980s, and more. Gulf War I ended in a return to status quo for all the effort. The 2003 invasion shattered the Iraqi state, empowering Iran further. Afghanistan ended in a tail-between-the-legs evacuation. Libya demonstrated a) having an alliance with America means little; b) having a nuke is the only sure way to protect yourself in a world of hegemons and c) if the U.S. can’t win outright, it can turn you into a failed state if it wishes to.
If “winning” today means regime change, elimination of Iran’s regional influence, and an end to its nuclear ambitions, it is unlikely the U.S. can win. History has proven airpower and grave threats, basically 19th century gunboat diplomacy, cannot alone accomplish those goals. Decades of sanctions have not crippled the regime. Whatever internal dissent exists in Iran, it is unlikely to reach the point of regime change. Limited strikes (“mowing the lawn“) invite endless proxy retaliation and destabilizing acts. Iran has spent decades successfully resisting such pressure.
An alternative is a vicious military punishment, destruction on a scale that drives Iran away from regional power status. Even then the level of destruction would have to be fully crushing, something outside the bounds of American morality if directed against civilian targets, less so if the destruction is of Kharg Island or Iran’s floating oil reserves outside the Persian Gulf.
If war with Iran ends with a return to the status quo (Gulf open-ish, nukes delayed but not forever gone, Islamic government in power, etc.) it will send a clear message the U.S. failed again in its broader, historical strategy. Iran will be further empowered. Gulf states will be forced to diversify their diplomacy. Countries like China and India may be forced to expand their diplomatic efforts. Israel will steadily act more unilaterally. This all will happen slowly, carefully, evolutionarily, with much less of an immediate impact than MSNOW and The Atlantic will proclaim. Washington will hopefully back away from the illusion the United States can engineer political outcomes in societies it only partially understands, a lesson it should have learned from the Vietnam War.
We are not at the end of a war that Trump began, but in the midst of something bigger. America must now look past blame and towards how it will adapt to the encroaching next chapter in the Middle East. The pressing question is not really if the United States can win this war. It is whether it can recognize that the kind of victory it seeks is no longer practically available.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Negotiating a New (Sykes-Picot) Contract for the Middle East
It’s time to renegotiate the contract that put this whole thing together.
The “whole thing” is the Middle East, and the “contract” is the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The world those documents created no longer exists except on yellowed maps, and the issues left unsettled, primarily the Sunni-Shi’ite divide and a Kurdish homeland, have now come home begging. War is not fixing this; diplomacy might.
Chances LostIn November 2014, I wrote the only solution to Islamic State, and mess of greater Iraq, was to use American/Coalition peacekeepers to create a stable, tri-state solution to the Sunni-Shi’ite-Kurd divide.
However, in the intervening 15 months the problems swept in Turkey and Russia, and perhaps soon the Saudis. The United States, Iraq, Islamic State, and Iran never left. Only a massive diplomatic effort, involving all parties now on the playing field, including Islamic State, has any potential of ending the bloodshed and refugee crisis. That means a redivision of the region along current ethnic, tribal, religious and political lines.
A new Sykes-Picot Agreement if you will.
Sykes-Picot Agreement
The old Sykes-Picot divided up most of the Arab lands that had been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire in 1916. The Agreement was enforced by the superpowers of that moment, Britain and France with buy-in from the Russians. The immediate goal was colonialism, not independent states, but the unspoken end point was a form of stability. Following the massive realignment of the balance of power that was World War I, the lines were literally drawn for the next eight decades. The lines themselves did not cause all the problems per se; the lines codified the problems on the ground.
The other important event of the era was that the idea of creating a “Kurdistan” was crossed off the post-World War I “to do” list. The 1920 Treaty of Sevres at first left an opening for a referendum on whether the Kurds wanted to remain part of what remained of the Ottoman Empire or become independent. Problem one: the referendum did not include plans for the Kurds in what became Syria and Iraq. Problem two: the referendum never happened, a victim of the so-called Turkish War of Independence. The result: some 20 million Kurds scattered across parts of modern Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria.
Modern HistoryZoom to some more modern history. In March 2003, when the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq, Libya was stable, ruled by the same strongman for 42 years; in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak had been in power since 1983; Syria had been run by the Assad family since 1971; Saddam Hussein had essentially been in charge of Iraq since 1969, and the Turks and Kurds had an uneasy but functional ceasefire.
From a geopolitical perspective, here’s what you have right now: The invasion of Iraq blew open the power struggle among the Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds. Forces unleashed led to some of the Arab Spring-driven chaos in Syria, and drew Iran into the Iraqi conflict.
Shi’ite militia and Iraqi government threats and attacks on Iraqi Sunnis opened the door for Islamic State to step in as a protector. The struggle metastasized into Syria. The Kurds, aided by the U.S. military, are seeking to create new transnational borders out of their current confederacy by displacing Islamic State and Turkish forces. The Turks are looking to repel that, and perhaps seize some territory to tidy up their own borders. Russia has re-entered the region as a military force. The Saudis may yet send troops into Syria. Iran is already there via proxy forces. Assad still holds territory in Syria, as does Islamic State. There are many local players as well.
In short, many forces are redrawing the borders, as violently as their weapons allow, creating massive human suffering, to include refugee flows into Europe that no one seem sure how to handle.
A New Struggle
The struggle has shifted from a semi-ideological one (Islamic extremism) that could not be bombed away to one of seizing and holding territory. The effort now ongoing to bomb that problem away has resulted primarily in repeatedly destroying cities like Ramadi, Kobane, Homs and soon Mosul in order to save them.
With the realignment of borders a process that can only be delayed — at great cost in every definition of that word — the answer is only to negotiate a conclusion. That conclusion will be ugly and distasteful, though if it is any help, it will be distasteful to everyone participated. It will need to be enforced by military power (we’ll call them peacekeepers) that is coordinated by the U.S., Russia and Iran, with each speaking for, and controlling, its proxies. The U.S. is basically doing something like that with Jordan, forming a military dam against the mess in Syria, and Israel has done it for years.
It will mean giving Islamic State a seat at the table, as the British were forced to do with the Irish Republican Army, to resolve “troubles.”
Out of the negotiations will have to emerge a Kurdistan, with some land from Turkey and the former-Syria. Assad will stay in power as a Russian proxy. Iran’s hold on Shi’ite Iraq will be stronger. A Sunni homeland state, to include what Islamic State will morph into, will need to be assured, with a strict hands-off policy by Baghdad. At the same time, that Sunni homeland offers the first real framework to contain Islamic State.
The World’s PolicemanAmerican efforts will shift from fanning the flames (purloined HUMVEES are as ubiquitous as iPads in the region) to putting out fires. You want to be the world’s policeman? This is the neighborhood to prove it, because this now needs cops of a sort, not warfighters. There is no quick fix. There isn’t really a medium-term fix. Four America presidents have bombed the region, and Obama‘s successor will be number five.
Yes, I hate it too. And of course I understand the difficulties of an imperfect resolution. But solution is no longer a viable term I am afraid.
After you’ve soiled the bed, you do your best to clean it up. The process will be messy. But it is too late for elegant solutions. So with the Middle East.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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