I guess Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post is trying to impress on the reader that Iran possesses the capability to cause America pain even in a “limited war,” whatever that means. That’s helpful as far it goes. I don’t want people thinking we can treat Iran like Grenada or Panama and do whatever we want to them without suffering any consequences.
There are people in this country, some of whom are in the Situation Room advising the president, who would be willing to essentially lose a war with Iran in the same sense that we lost the war in Iraq, if only it resulted in regime change. It’s unlikely that these people would risk their own lives on such a project or the lives of their children, but they’ll gladly sacrifice your life or the lives of your children.
Regime change is what this is all about, and I’d like to see regime change in Iran, too. I’m not a fan of sectarian or religious government in any place at any time, and I think the people of Iran deserve much better leadership. I had no use for Saddam Hussein either. I was no fan of Manuel Noriega or Moammar Gaddafi. The Saudi Royal family is a blot on humanity’s record. North Korea is a deplorable hellhole thanks to its political leaders. Vladimir Putin is a murderous gangster. China has an oppressive and corrupt government. I’d love to see all of that change for the better. I’d love if our country wasn’t being led by a rapist.
But these things are mainly beyond our power to control, and I don’t know how many times we have to have our own hubris bite us in the ass before we learn some humility about the limits of our power to improve the world.
I don’t want articles about how Iran can punch back in a limited war. I want articles about what an actual war with Iran would look like. What would it take to push the mullahs out of power? What kind of weapons would be required to subdue Iran’s ability to resist? What kind of occupying army would be required, and what would they be expected to do, and for how long?
I want to know how it is supposed to come out. Is a newly “free” Iran going to be any less interested in pursuing a nuclear capability? Are they going to be any less disposed to project their power in Iraq and Syria and Lebanon? Are they going to be any better disposed to hostile Sunni powers that oppress their Shi’a minority populations? Are they really going to be friendlier to Israel? These things are tied up in their national security and identity, and are not just explained by the religious fanaticism of their present government.
We didn’t ask these kinds of questions about Iraq, and we can see where that led. Preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapons program makes sense. What the Trump administration is doing doesn’t make sense. What the American people need to be discussing is where this is headed, not whether or not we can tolerate some blowback and casualties and economic disruption in retaliation to “a limited war.”
War with Iran will be a war to remove the regime, just as the war with Iraq was never about disarmament but entirely about removing Saddam Hussein and his henchman from power. Once we (or they) start it, we’ll feel compelled to finish it. And it won’t be as easy as “beating” Iraq. It’s a much bigger country with a bigger and better military, more challenging terrain, and fewer natural allies we can exploit. In Iraq, we were essentially liberating the majority Shi’a population (and the Kurds) from a hostile and tyannical Sunni oppressor, which at least bought us some limited good will. In Iran, we’d be relying entirely on the secular population to throw chocolates and flowers, and that is not going to be a common reaction at all.
We’ll also be more of a pariah on the international stage in this case, and we weren’t exactly winning any popularity awards for the invasion of Iraq. The American people will be less supportive from the get-go, and less willing to sustain losses and costs.
And that’s not even getting into the leadership team we have in place. We don’t even have a Secretary of Defense at the moment, and our president has less credibility than the ayatollahs.
I’m glad Trump called off the attack on Iran, but I wouldn’t count on this reprieve lasting for long. If we’re going to prevent this from happening, we’re going to need a lot more than warnings about the costs of “a limited war.”
I don’t think they want regime change at all, at least not in the sense you mean. They would be perfectly content for the Ayatollahs to lead from a pile of rubble, in their minds it would be a perfect example of what happens when a country humiliates America.
You’re making a massive mistake, and buying into the typical American self image…..that we are here to make things better for the countries we destroy. That there is some policy goal we are after with Iran…..a better governed population.
That’s not it at all……Bolton and his cohort want revenge for a perceived humiliation from the over throw of the Shah….and the mark that left on (in their minds) American self image, not to mention the blight on sainted Reagan’s reputation, by him trading arms for hostages. It’s personal, it’s always been personal. The ‘policy’, such as it is, is strictly there as an excuse to bomb, to get them to beg, to make them suffer, as Bolton has emotionally suffered, carrying his humiliation for all these years. That’s why they change the policy, if it’s not atom bombs, then they cannot have missiles, or an economy. Every time you see a smiling Iranian at a wedding, or celebrating a birth, you see “look at this vibrant culture, how can we bomb such a country?”. They see something completely different, and think “we need to wipe that smug look off that orientals face, and remove every single source of happiness from every family in that country”.
They want to destroy Iran. Bomb every bridge, every electrical grid, burst every oil pipe. They want burning wells, with the smoke spreading cancer and environmental Armageddon to even the safest basement. They want sectarian roadblocks at every neighborhood, and clan militia patrolling the streets. They will stop all medical shipments into the country, then wreck the food sources, then remove every source of safe water, then plug the sewer system, so the children need to drink out of the same gutters the shit runs down.
They want to make it all unlivable, disease ridden, with zero infrastructure. Then those people, in a sign of peaceful intent, will create an international body to rule Iran, lead by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel to help rebuild it.
If you’re looking for ‘policy’, regime change is not even in their minds.
.
As always, we have to destroy the village in order to save it.
Since regime change is effectively impossible via the military means TrumpAmerica possesses, Israel would be satisfied if Iran were bombed back to the stone age, ala Lebanon. So that’s where this is headed. Boots on the ground are completely beyond the Pentagon’s means, and sadists like Netanyahoo, Der Trumper, von Bolton and Pomposeo simply want to see degradation and destruction anyway.
This is some vivid writing but I don’t ultimately agree with it.
1. It jumps from a global description of what we do as a country to what a few people like Bolton would like to do, which is a distinction you ought to do more to maintain.
2. It misses something key. In the last years of the Shah, we sent the Bay of Pigs/Laos Heroin operators to Tehran and had them set up the biggest military assistance program in our nation’s history. This was their big payday. This was the apogee of American regional hegemony. It was nirvana. Iranians were the good guys. Our friends. Our allies. A great and noble culture.
These lunatics feel like that was all stolen from them. It’s why they hated Carter so much. It’s why they had all these lingering relationships they could exploit during the Iran-Contra affair. They believe they can get Shangri-La back again and make big money and be heroes.
This obviously isn’t a goal of the Saudis or the Israelis, so there is a split among the warmongers about who they want to serve and how they hope to get paid.
I don’t know, that response sounds very much like you agree with me.
Yes, exactly! These lunatics do feel like something was stolen from them! And the lunatics are in charge!
And no regime change will make it square. Only cooking sparrows on coat hangers under ruined bridges for decades will pay off the debt.
.
Assuming but by no means conceding (to quote a lawyer I know) your point that only the prospect of Iranians “cooking sparrows on coat hangers under ruined bridges for decades” would satisfy Bolton and his ilk, isn’t that all the more reason to take Martin’s point seriously?
*Iran has roughly the same population as Germany. It has more people than France, Italy, or Great Britain. What would it require in blood and treasure for the US to defeat and occupy any one of those nations? (Iran’s population is more than double that of Iraq or Afghanistan.)
*Iran is roughly the (geographic) size of Mongolia, Sudan, Libya, or Peru. How many US troops would it take to occupy and “pacify” any of those nations? (Iran is over twice the size of Afghanistan and nearly four times the size of Iraq.)
*Iran’s GDP is roughly the same as Thailand, Austria, or Norway. When’s the last time the US successfully waged war against a nation of similar wealth?
The “lunatics” were in charge in 2001. One reason they were able to lead the US into senselessly destructive, counterproductive and endless wars is that they weren’t forced to answer the important questions in advance. It would help if journalists, editors, legislators, policy experts, etc. didn’t make the same mistake again.
That is a heck of a write up. To accomplish it Bolton and friends need other friends to pursue a kind of genocide both in and out of the military. Are nuclear weapons allowed in this genocide? If you once do that the world and much of our own country will not support it. That likely means a failure, even if Putin and China stay out, which is questionable. If they jump into at less than all out killing, you will need boots on the ground. Even that will not be supported easily. Regime change seems the best objective and even that will not work for long with too many deaths. Even Trump is not comfortable with that if you believe his latest rhetoric. I doubt that level of hate can succeed but I agree Bolton and friends may try. Obama brought us an agreement to limit immediate nuclear weapons in Iran’s hands. Trump, as usual, screwed it up and loosed Bolton and friends on us.
Even this is optimistic. We won’t win a war with Iran, we will lose it. We’ll retreat with our tail between our legs, just as we did in Vietnam, and probably with the Iranian regime still intact. And I hate to think about the damage that will happen to the U.S.
Can we even say that we “won” Iraq? Sure, Saddam Hussein is gone. But the debt we took on to fight that war was a grievous wound, not to mention the poison to our body politic. Iran will be 20 times harder, both because they are a larger country, mountainous and almost impossible to conquer, but also because–in contrast to Saddam Hussein–the regime there has a least some legitimacy. Iraq was, in some ways, a made-up country. Iran is not. They have a 2500 year history as a nation, and they will fight.