Whose national interest is being served by the war in Iran? It may wreck the world economy for a year, destabilize the Middle East for a generation, place entire populations at risk and kill huge numbers of innocent people; surely there must be some benefit for a nation or people.
The Pentagon reportedly requested more than US$200-billion this week to continue the battle after two weeks of strikes failed to achieve much. Israeli citizens are suffering some of the worst bombardments and drone strikes from Iran in recent history. Residents of eight other countries have found themselves under attack from Iran, including heavy strikes on the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. So you’d think this is being done to deliver these populations some long-term gain.
Yet it is not easy to find any interests being served here. And if you examine the type of war being fought, it becomes apparent that the interests at stake are not those of the people affected.
There are really two wars being fought in Iran. Lawrence Freedman, the British professor of military strategy, has called it a “split-screen war.”
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On one screen is an apparent effort to cause the Islamic regime to collapse by eliminating its senior leadership, its governance infrastructure and its military crown jewels. This is known as a decapitation strike: a short, intense effort to remove the head of a country so that a successor regime can be installed (as the U.S. did in Iraq after 2003) or the people can rise up.
Decapitation strikes, when they do not involve large commitments of ground troops over a longer period of time, have a very poor track record. Iran’s clerical regime knows all about them – it watched the Iraq war closely, well aware that it might be next. And it developed a long-term strategy it calls “mosaic defence,” in which power, authority and weapons are very widely dispersed, both geographically and institutionally.
The mosaic defence was no secret; Iranian leaders boasted about it for more than 20 years. It would have been a top item in any intelligence briefings received by Mr. Trump, if he were to have listened to them.
Those briefings would have predicted exactly what has happened since the air strikes began on Feb. 28: the mosaic was successfully implemented, and the assassination of top leaders led to their replacement by what largely amounts to a government of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a huge, dispersed and more extreme and unreachable organization. This greatly reduces the chance of Iranians overthrowing their regime, and increases the chance of a mass slaughter.
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Those briefings also would have stressed the well-documented fact, reiterated in Congressional hearings this week, that Iran had no nuclear-weapons program and would have been years from creating a weapon; the air strikes have simply reduced the chance of such arms being controlled in the future.
In the short run, this has made Iran a more dangerous regional power than it was before the war, as anyone in Riyadh or Dubai will tell you. At some point, the IRGC will likely run out of armaments, at which point it will mainly be a threat to its own people (and to its immediate neighbours, by creating tides of refugees).
On the second screen, simultaneous with the decapitation strikes, is what Dr. Freedman calls the “Gotterdammerung” of economic-infrastructure warfare. The mosaic defence included ruthless attacks on the petroleum infrastructure of the Gulf states and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. The United States and Israel have taken this bait, launching strikes on targets such as the South Pars gas field and the Tehran oil facilities that could take years or even decades to rebuild. Though Mr. Trump ordered Israel to end these attacks this week, Israeli officials said that they were conducted in close co-ordination with the President.
This form of warfare is inconsistent with any national interest – it serves only to ensure that any future Iran will be poorer, weaker and more unstable. At best, it turns a country that’s a regional threat into a country that’s a dangerous victim in need of expensive assistance.
This – a weaker, hobbled Iran that further impoverishes the region but is no longer in competition with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey or Israel for regional dominance – is a goal that’s desirable not to people but to leaders. Especially so to Benjamin Netanyahu, who has sought to divide and weaken Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon in similar ways, for his own political benefit. But it is a strategy that greatly harms the interests of his citizens.
That may be the lasting lesson of this war: The pursuit of political security by national leaders has all but guaranteed greater insecurity for their citizens.