In my most recent blog, I hinted towards the end at my views on the current Iran conflict. On reflection, it’s a little unfair to leave it hanging like that, so here are some more developed thoughts.
Armed conflict is a very serious undertaking. That should go without saying, but political leaders do not always fully interrogate the interplay of costs and benefits before they embark on this course of action. They do not always factor in the losses on their own side, the (particularly civilian) casualties on the other or the economic, political and societal damage.
If they did, they would know that conflict almost never goes as expected. It is one thing to snatch the leader of a country fairly close to home, as the US did with Nicolás Maduro; quite another to transform a country of 90 million people like Iran into an acceptable (to the US) polity. This is not new news: perhaps contrary to the maxim that the first casualty of war is the truth, the first casualty of war is usually whatever level of planning has been undertaken. It appears in this case that, for ‘Phase IV’ (post-warfighting), there has been very little.
Here’s the UK’s Iraq Inquiry (‘Chilcot’) on the subject of planning:
‘Although the UK expected to be involved in Iraq for a lengthy period after the conflict, the Government was unprepared for the role in which the UK found itself from April 2003. Much of what went wrong stemmed from that lack of preparation.
‘In any undertaking of this kind, certain fundamental elements are of vital importance:
‘The best possible appreciation of the theatre of operations, including the political, cultural and ethnic background, and the state of society, the economy and infrastructure;
‘A hard-headed assessment of risks;
‘Objectives which are realistic within that context, and if necessary limited – rather than idealistic and based on optimistic assumptions; and,
‘Allocation of the resources necessary for the task – both military and civil.
‘All of these elements were lacking in the UK’s approach to its role in post-conflict Iraq.’
I would suggest that searching for the words ‘UK’ and ‘Iraq’ in the above and replacing them with ‘US’ and ‘Iran’ accurately captures the current state-of-play. I said in my previous blog that bad policy-making is like throwing so much undercooked spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. The Trump Administration has been very busy in this regard.
The first problem, as many have pointed out, is that the Administration hasn’t explained with any clarity what the Iran intervention is for and how it is expected to end. Various soundbite-length explanations have been offered, including: ‘we did it because the Israelis were about to’; there was a need to pre-empt an Iranian military strike (for which no evidence has yet been forthcoming); the Iranian nuclear programme (which, according to the Administration, had been ‘obliterated’ last year), its ballistic missile programme or its navy have to be eliminated; regime change; or, perhaps most convincingly (cf Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s 2 March statement), ‘might is right’.
It’s a given of successful public policy that the overarching narrative has to be well-evidenced and compelling. For the Iran intervention, it isn’t. There’s also been equivocation over whether there might be boots on the ground. I’m unaware of any state-on-state conflict of this kind that has been settled without some kind of land presence. Air campaigns are of course important, sometimes vital, but to rely on air power alone is a ‘light blue touchpaper and retire’ approach: it does not determine what happens at ground level amidst complex and unpredictable societies. The 2011 Libya intervention is a good example.
Maybe, like Maduro, it’s the FAFO (‘f*ck around and find out’) doctrine again: more politely, play games with us and face the consequences. Who knows? The thinking may become clear in coming days, though stating a casus belli after hostilities have commenced is unorthodox. And the Administration doesn’t always apply the FAFO doctrine: Putin has played a long and tricksy, f*ck around game with Trump over Ukraine and he has yet to ‘find out’.
It may be that, behind the scenes, the Trump Administration has prepared a smooth takeover by acceptable Iranian political groups nurtured over time, and capable of withstanding the brutal backlash of the IRGC and its Basij militias. My scepticism that this is not the case, though, rests on Chilcot’s point about having the best possible appreciation of the theatre of operations. My guess is that planning has been based more on what US (and Israeli) forces can do than on what they might achieve. I don’t believe for a moment that any deep understanding of Iran’s political, cultural and ethnic background underpins this intervention. It’s just not in the Trump Administration’s DNA to try to understand others, or to try to anticipate the unintended consequences of their actions.
We all hope, of course, that the Iranian regime is on the way out. Any doubts about the intervention are like expressions of concern for a dear friend who has taken to brawling in the gutter. The America we loved, for all its faults, was better than this.
Then there is the reality with which we are now living. Already a number of US Service personnel have been killed. There appear to be substantial civilian casualties in Iran. There is massive disruption to the global economy, on a par with that experienced during the pandemic. International law is missing in action.
As for the effectiveness of regime decapitation, experience suggests that it does little to uproot either the ideas or the structures that perpetuate murderous ideologies such as that of Iran’s theocracy. They might be weakened, but it takes something more than decapitation to supplant them. It appears that this is sufficient for Trump in Venezuela, where he would prefer to treat with a debased regime rather than see democratic renewal, but it is hard to imagine how that might work in Iran (and it has yet to be proven that it works in Venezuela).
It is for others to judge whether this action is some kind of diversionary tactic ahead of the mid-terms. I just don’t know. But what I do know is that there is almost never a military solution to a political problem. The Second World War is probably the only modern exception, and even that concluded with a lot of politics, not least the division of conquered Germany, enforced initially by the long-term, boots-on-the-ground presence of Allied forces. What happens to politics following the current conflict?
The irony of this is that Trump’s buddy Putin did something similar in Ukraine: he placed expectation over planning, and reaped the consequences. As the UK’s former Chief of Defence Staff Adm Sir Tony Radakin has said, a snail setting out from the Ukraine/Russia border in February 2022 would have been well into Poland by now, not mired in the Donbas. Also like Putin, Trump has surrounded himself with ‘yes’ men and women, people unlikely to explain how difficult some things are. People who are highly unlikely to dissent. It appears that the current crop of autocratic world leaders, with the possible exception of Xi (fingers crossed on Taiwan), don’t understand, and don’t want to know, the limitations of force.
Trump in Iran is less snail, more bull in a china shop. But acting rather than thinking seems to me unlikely to provide a lasting solution to a complex situation that pre-dates the 47 years of Iranian theocracy.
Prove us all wrong, Mr. President – if you can.
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