War With Iran Won’t Be Iraq All Over Again. It’ll Be Much Worse.
Trita Parsi, March 30, 2018
Huffington Post
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-parsi-war-with-iran_us_5abd46fde4b055e50acc2e82
With John Bolton joining the White House as President
Donald Trump’s new national security adviser, risk of the U.S. going to war with Iran has increased to levels not seen since Dick Cheney was vice president.
Bolton and Cheney were both architects of the Iraq war, a war that Bolton publicly stands behind to this day. And Bolton has consistently
advocated bombing Iran ― and even
pressed United Nations Ambassador Nicki Haley to trigger a confrontation in order to kill the Iran nuclear deal. Bolton’s nomination has Americans rightly alarmed that we could soon be dragged into yet another quagmire in the Middle East.
But war with Iran will be nothing like the disastrous invasion of Iraq. It will be much, much worse ― with far more American lives lost.
Saddam Hussein’s army ― although one of the strongest in the Middle East in terms of size ― was no match for the U.S. military. Within three weeks, the Iraqi army had been completely defeated. In fact, the overwhelming majority (roughly 90 percent) of American deaths in Iraq did not come as a result of the initial invasion ― they came during the ensuing occupation.
Saddam’s military was so easily crushed partly because the Iraqi dictator had put all of his eggs in one basket: A conventional military. In a direct force-on-forceconfrontation with the U.S., no conventional military in the Middle East stands a chance.
That’s precisely why the Iranians have prepared a completely different strategy.
The Iranians know very well that the American public has little tolerance for war casualties. Thus, their defense strategy has been primarily aimed at deterring an attack by
preparing attrition warfare that raises America’s risks and costs. Instead of focusing on reducing Iran’s own costs, the goal would be to cause as many U.S. casualties as early and as quickly as possible in order to strike a massive psychological blow to America’s willingness to continue the fight. The strategy is not focused on directly defeating the U.S., but rather to make the cost of victory politically non-viable for America.
The U.S. is well familiar with Iran’s non-conventional capabilities. After the tanker wars in the 1980s when the American and Iranian navies repeatedly clashed in the Persian Gulf, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Navy and the regular naval forces shifted their capabilities to asymmetric warfare, investing in smaller “fast boats” and submarines, similar to how guerrillas would fight a standing army.
Moreover, since Iranians cannot match Saudi Arabia and UAE’s vast military expenditures on high-tech Western (mainly American) weaponry, including a strong air force, they have strategically focused on missile capabilities. This partly explains why Tehran's military expenditures are dwarfed by those of its rivals: The U.S. spends roughly 49 times as much on arms compared to Iran, according to the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Saudi Arabia outspends Iran by a factor of five, and even tiny UAE spends roughly twice as much as Iran on defense.
With tens of thousands of U.S. troops already stationed in the region, the Middle East is a target-rich landscape for the Iranians. Iran can push Shia militias in Iraq to renew their attacks on U.S. troops. It can target U.S. personnel in Syria. Or it can target the literally hundreds of U.S. military installments throughout the region ― from Jordan, to Kuwait to Afghanistan. The aim will be to make U.S. troops and targets feel unsafe throughout the area (and possibly beyond), regardless of how far they may be from the front lines.
“Iran will never start any war,”
then-IRGC commander Mohsen Rezaei said in 1997, but if the U.S. attacked first “we will turn the region into a slaughterhouse for them. There is no greater place than the Persian Gulf to destroy America’s might.”
But Iran’s defense strategy is not limited to slaughter in a military sense. By
temporarily closing the Strait of Hormuz ― a strategic maritime choke point through which roughly 30 percent of the world’s oil supply passes ― Tehran could inflict massive damage to the world economy, causing oil prices to skyrocket and likely compelling other great powers to intervene to put an end to the war. Indeed, even a brief closure of the strait would create enough
ambiguity and uncertainty to “drive up shipping insurance and other costs to astronomical heights,” a senior European diplomat told the
Christian Science Monitor in 2012.
Ultimately, however, Tehran’s war planners are zeroing in on the one variable they believe is Iran’s greatest strength and America’s greatest weakness: casualty sensitivity.
If Iran’s defense strategy works, a U.S. attack on Iran ― unlike Iraq ― will draw an immediate response throughout the region, leading to thousands of U.S. casualties in the earliest stages of the war. The Iranian calculation is that U.S. sensitivity to casualties will quickly push the American public against the war ― which likely wouldn’t be popular to begin with ― presenting the Pentagon with a scenario it hates: waging a conflict the public opposes.
This is precisely why many
U.S. military officials have
warned against war with Iran. And it’s a big reason why both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations opted not to attack Iran. They knew very well that, despite the U.S. military superiority, confrontation with Iran would lead to the deaths of thousands of Americans.
Trump, however, seems oblivious to these realities. He and Bolton may view war as a video game, but for the thousands of Americans who will have their loved ones killed in yet another disastrous war of choice, not to mention the Iranian civilians, the pain will be real enough.
The only way to win this war is to ensure Trump and Bolton are stopped before they start it.
The Mask Is
Off: Trump Is Seeking War with Iran
The unmasking
of Trump’s plans to sabotage the nuclear deal began two weeks ago when he
reluctantly had to certify that Iran indeed was in compliance. Both the US
intelligence as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency had confirmed
Tehran’s fair play. But Trump threw a tantrum in the Oval Office and berated
his national security team for not having found a way to claim Iran was
cheating. According to Foreign
Policy, the adults in
the room—Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and
National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster—eventually calmed Trump down but only
on the condition that they double down on finding a way for the president to
blow up the deal by October.
Prior to the
revelation of Trump’s Iran certification meltdown, most analysts and diplomats
believed that Trump’s rhetoric on Iran was just that—empty talk. His bark was
worse than his bite, as demonstrated when he certified Iran’s compliance back
in April and when he renewed sanctions waivers in May. The distance between his
rhetoric and actual policy was tangible. Rhetorically, Trump officials
described Iran as the root of all problems in the Middle East and as the greatest
state sponsor of terror. Trump even suggested he might quit the deal.
In action,
however, President Trump continued to waive sanctions and admitted that Iran
was adhering to the deal. As a result, many concluded that Trump would continue
to fulfill the obligations of the deal while sticking to his harsh rhetoric in
order to appease domestic opponents of the nuclear deal—as well as Trump’s
allies in Saudi Arabia and Israel.
But now,
assessments are changing. The tangible danger of Trump’s malice on the Iran
deal—as well as the danger of the advice of the “adults in the room”—became
further clarified this week as tidbits of the reality TV star’s plans began to
leak.
How to Wreck a
Deal
Recognizing
that refusing to certify Iran would isolate the United States, Trump’s advisors
gave him another plan. Use the spot-inspections mechanism of the nuclear deal,
they suggested, to demand access to a whole set of military sites in Iran. Once
Iran balks—which it will since the mechanism is only supposed to be used if
tangible evidence exists that those sites are being used for illicit nuclear
activities—Trump can claim that Iran is in violation, blowing up the nuclear
deal while shifting the blame to Tehran.
Thus, the
advice of the adults in the room—those who we are supposed to restrain
Trump—was not to keep the highly successful nuclear deal that has taken both an
Iranian bomb and war with Iran off the table. Rather, they recommended killing
it in a manner that would conceal Trump’s malice and shift the cost to Iran.
According
to The New York
Times, the groundwork for this strategy has already
been laid. Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker (R-TN) calls this strategy
“radical enforcement” of the deal. “If they don’t let us in,” Corker told The
Washington Post, “boom.” Then he added: “You want the breakup of this deal
to be about Iran. You don’t want it to be about the U.S., because we want our
allies with us.”
This is a
charade, a rerun of the machinations that resulted in the Iraq war. It doesn’t
matter what Iran does or doesn’t do. If it were up to Trump, he’d never have
accepted that Iran was in compliance in the first place. He admitted as much to
the Wall Street
Journal. “If it was up
to me, I would have had them [the Iranians] non-compliant 180 days ago.”
Sounding supremely
confident of the “radical implementation” strategy, Trump added that “I think
they’ll be noncompliant [in October].” In so doing, he further confirmed doubts
that the process is about determining whether Iran is in compliance or not. The
administration is committed to finding a way to claim Iran has violated the
accord, regardless of the facts—just as George W. Bush did with Iraq.
Potential for
Backfire
But Trump’s
confidence may be misplaced on two levels. First, abusing the inspection
mechanisms of the deal may prove harder than Trump has been led to believe. The
inspections are the cornerstone of the deal, and Iran’s ability to cheat on the
deal is essentially non-existent as long as the integrity and efficiency of the
inspections remain in tact. But if Trump begins to abuse the mechanism to
fabricate a conflict, he will end up undermining the inspections regime and
actually enhance the ability of those in Iran who would like to pursue a covert
nuclear program. Precisely because of the commitment of Europe and others to
non-proliferation, they are likely to resist Trump’s efforts to tinker with the
inspections.
Second, by
revealing his hand, Trump has displayed his duplicity for all to see. That
includes the American public, whose anti-war sentiments remain strong and are a
key reason they supported the nuclear deal in the first place.
The American
public knows the Iraq playbook quite well. Trump’s own supporters remain
enraged by the disastrous war with Iraq. They know how they got played. It’s
difficult to imagine why they would allow themselves to get played again by a
president who has left little doubt about his intent to deceive.
About Author
Dr. Trita Parsi is the founder
and president of the National Iranian American Council and an expert on
US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign politics, and the geopolitics of the
Middle East. Parsi is the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas
Improving World Order. He is an award-wining author of two books, Treacherous
Alliance - The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the US (Yale University
Press, 2007) and A Single Roll of the Dice - Obama's Diplomacy with Iran (Yale
University Press, 2012). Treacherous Alliance won the Council of Foreign
Relations Arthur Ross Award in 2008 (Silver medallion). A Single Roll of the
Dice was selected as The Best Book on The Middle East in 2012 by Foreign
Affairs. Parsi currently teaches at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign
Service at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He tweets at @tparsi.
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