Iran War at 5 Weeks
So much winning.
Ali Vaez, Iran project director for the International Crisis Group, takes to NYT to argue “Trump Has Lost Control of Events in Iran.” After setting the table, he gets to the crucial bit:
If Iran cannot prevail in a conventional military exchange, it can still prolong the conflict, widen its costs, disrupt the global economy and make the exercise of American and Israeli power more expensive than its architects anticipated. In the process, it has shown that a degraded military and a severely damaged state do not need a weapon of mass destruction to hold its adversaries hostage.
This is why the three tacks Washington has taken to pressure Iran to cede control of the waterway — threatening to destroy Iran’s energy infrastructure, downplaying the disruption as a problem for others to deal with and saying the strait will open “naturally” after the war, and adding it to the long list of requirements for a potential agreement — have not yielded results.
Between the military shortcomings Iran displayed in the 12-day war last June and the nationwide protests it brutally suppressed this year, proponents of this war may have concluded that a regime already hollowed out by sanctions, corruption and popular anger would crack once struck with sufficient force, perhaps proving an exception to the conventional wisdom that air power alone cannot produce a more favorable political order. But a regime built to endure, its leadership infused with a culture of martyrdom and resistance and bereft of mercy, can continue to repress and remain in power.
Though the war may well end up compounding the challenges the Islamic republic faces, for the moment, a tightened grip has enabled Iran’s leaders to recast themselves as guardians of a besieged nation, rather than its tormentors.
The Atlantic‘s Graeme Wood makes related points in “Trump’s Stone Age Threat Will Lead to Tragedy.”
This mismatch—with America measuring its success by its destruction of Iran’s capabilities, and Iran measuring its success by its stubborn will to fight—has left Trump sounding frustrated. How badly must he devastate the Iranian military before he is allowed to declare victory? On Wednesday, he claimed that the Iranian navy and air force were “gone,” their radar destroyed, their ability to produce and fire missiles “beaten,” and their defense-industrial base on the way to being “annihilated,” with the exception of their ability to produce oil. He furthermore vowed to destroy “each and every one of their electric generating plants, probably simultaneously.”
[…]
For Iran, what counts is resistance, against arrogant and wicked oppressors, chiefly the United States and Israel. This resistance need not be accompanied by battlefield triumphs.
[…]
The war was begun, it seems, with the hope that the regime would fall and be replaced by a less fanatical one. The pivot in recent weeks toward attacking Iranian infrastructure is the predictable reaction to the failure to appreciate the vigor of the ethic of resistance. If you cannot change the regime, or otherwise modify the intentions of the Iranian leadership, then the only way to reduce the threat the regime poses is to deprive it of its powers and ability to recover them.
Veteran defense reporter Laura Rozen (“Watching the strange spectacle of Trump committing political suicide“) is more devastating still.
Iran reportedly rejected a U.S. 48-hour ceasefire offer, according to Iranian state media. The Wall Street Journal reported that Iran has told a group of countries trying to mediate that it is not willing to meet US officials in Pakistan in the coming days, the paper reported. An Iranian official did not immediately respond to a query if that was the case.
“Iranian decision-makers are likely to prefer continued fighting over a ceasefire that would only serve as a prelude to a future round of hostilities,” former Israeli intelligence Iran analyst Danny Citrinowicz wrote on Twitter. “Absent guarantees that address their core strategic conditions, Iran has little incentive to bring the current campaign to an end.”
“While Iran may not have determined the timing of the conflict’s onset, it is intent on shaping the conditions under which it ends,” he said.
[…]
[I]t is Iran that increasingly thinks it has the upper hand, says Iran analyst Hamidreza Azizi.
“Trump’s recent speech was intended to project control over escalation and an endgame trajectory, but Iran has interpreted it in the opposite way,” Azizi wrote. “The combination of maximalist threats, the absence of a clear political endpoint, and the lack of a practical plan for reopening Hormuz allows Tehran to portray Washington not as dominant, but as strategically incoherent.”
Trump’s threats, in a belated address to the nation on Wednesday about the war, to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age has worked to the Iranian regime’s advantage, and turned some Iranian people initially hoping for a better government to emerge from the US campaign against it, said Alex Vatanka, an Iran expert at the Middle East Institute.
“If the United States starts blowing things up just for the sake of it, I think what happens is the regime benefits,” Vatanka said on a virtual Iran panel hosted by the Middle East Institute on Thursday. “The reaction to Pres. Trump’s comment about putting Iran back in the Stone Age really has not gone down well at all…and I am being generous in how I describe it.”
“In terms of what the US has in the toolbox, the idea of just sort of relying on more posturing, more escalation, that’s exactly what the regime on the other side seems to want,” he said.
Retired Marine General Jim Mattis, who served as Trump’s first defense secretary, put it this way a few days ago:
What we’re seeing is a situation where targetry never makes up for a lack of strategy. And by that I mean 15,000 targets have been hit. There have been significant military successes, but they are not matched by strategic outcomes. Now, some of the strategic outcomes early on, unconditional surrender, regime change, we’re going to dictate who the next supreme leader is — those were clearly nonsense. Those were delusional and you don’t hear those bandied about anymore. There are some that have been achieved in the military realm. They no longer have a Navy of any note. They no longer have the numbers of ballistic missiles and the defense infrastructure they had before. But the bottom line is it is not matched by success in the strategic area, and that’s a bad thing.
We’re really good at targetry. But this war, like so many of America’s post-World War II wars, has lacked a crucial strategic component: a plausible theory of victory.
Blowing up targets is a means to an end. It erodes the adversary’s ability to fight. But, given that the entire governing apparatus has been built up to preserve the regime, there was never any obvious connection between blowing up targets and the toppling of the regime beyond hoping that an unarmed populace would rise up against a massive, well-armed internal security force.
I share Citrinowicz’ assessment that the regime has the upper hand here. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, and no one seems to have the appetite to absorb the losses required to reopen it by force. And there’s no reason that they would trust a ceasefire deal made with Trump or Netanyahu.
I have no idea how this ends. Leaving Iran in control of the Strait would seem a non-starter. Escalation into a ground fight nobody wanted seems insane.
Trump has started going after infrastructure, taking out a new Iranian suspension bridge. This is a very bad thing to do, apart from being a war crime, as Iran will retaliate at GCC infrastructure such as desalinization plants. Very bad for a lot of people.
Al Jazeera and others are reporting that a French flagged container ship, along with 3 Omani tankers and a Japanese LNG tanker have passed through the Strait of Hormuz. So it appears that other nations are beginning to cut deals with Iran to resume some shipping.
This of course undercuts the felon with his challenge to nations that refused to help him open the strait to do so on their own and so they have. Also the BBC is reporting that Starmer’s people are talking about the rupture in US-UK relations in the trump era as being beyond repair.
@charontwo: Bridges are almost always legitimate military targets. But likely still a bad idea, since it makes a better state of the peace much harder to achieve.
Strategic bombing has failed at bringing about political change since WWII. But, of course, Trump and Hegseth talking to experts who could tell you that hard-won lesson would cause their penises to shrivel and fall off, which would be even worse for them than fighting a stupid war and triggering a world economic crisis.
Bombing things exists only at the technical and tactical levels of strategy. Successes at these lower levels are necessary, but not sufficient, for success at the operational and theater levels. If you have no idea what success looks like, at those higher levels, then you fail, despite all the pyrotechnics.
But, of course, we’re dealing with a degenerate, narcissistic moron and his subordinate, a former platoon commander who only ever thought in terms of the tactical level, and even there, he did it with the mindset of a Norse berserker (Ferocity! Lethality! Grarrr!). And here we are.
@Sleeping Dog:
The Iranians are researching the ships trapped in the Persian Gulf, if they have any Israeli or U.S. ownership or part ownership they get to eat cruise missiles.
“Jacob Kaarsbo“
Trump’s best chance to declare victory and quit was Wednesday. After 15,000 targets we must be getting close to attacking individual police stations and post offices. As this continues to not work I seriously fear dimbulb will paint himself into a corner and drop a nuke.
@James Joyner:
There has to be a concrete military advantage proportionate to the resulting harm to civilian infrastructure.
“I bomb your stuff until you do as I demand” doesn’t meet that standard. Ergo, war crime.
@gVOR10:
Making the rubble bounce is always intimidating.
edit: “…dimbulb will paint himself into a corner and drop a nuke.”
That still won’t achieve his objectives, whatever they are.
In similar vein, recommend today’s NYT The Daily for an interview by David French with Stanley McCrystal.
Seeing the Taco so-called administration seems to understand movies, I thought I’d paraphrase Dean Wormer for Whiskey Pete’s benefit: Drunk and stupid is no way to go to war, son.
The war was lost on Day One. In fact, it was lost before that, when Hegseth and Trump decided, ‘Who cares about the strait?’ It’s a fiasco, a war lost in record time. The self-inflicted damage is extraordinary. We’ve managed to make Iran the toll collector for the Gulf. How do you do this much damage and this much destruction and somehow make the enemy stronger?
A lot of useful info in the following:
“Wajeeh Lion”
Excerpts:
Concluding:
@Scott: That interview with McCrystal was excellent. He is actually knowledgeable about the realities and history of war and particular conflict in that area of the world. Unlike most advocates of the war he notes that from Iran’s perspective, the conflict started in 1953 when we and the UK overthrew a legitimately elected government. We placed the Shah in power and he ran a brutal regime using SAVAK (secret police) to jail and torture people. Then when he was overthrown, the US gave the Shah sanctuary. So the US ends up being surprised that Iran captured our embassy and chanted death to America but people who know the history were not.
I think he also made a good analogy with Ukraine. US presidents tend to be infatuated with our own military strength. We will blow everything up and of course they will surrender. So in Ukraine a much larger, stronger military has had limited success because Ukraine is motivated to not give up. They know what it is like to live under Russian rule and have millions of their people killed and thousands of their children stolen. Also as McCrystal notes with every Iranian we kill it makes them less likely to want to aid the US/Israel by overthrowing their current govt.
Finally, I really appreciate that McCrystal went over more recent history. That the leaders of Iran truly have been awful and even if the war was a stupid idea we should hope we win. (For those interested in special operations functions it’s a great listen as he goes over the strengths and failures that let people get seduced into believing special ops can achieve anything and that bombing campaigns are great. He also provides IMO a very good if restrained assessment of Hegseth.)
Steve
@charontwo: Very interesting piece from Wajeeh Lion. I hadn’t realized the Iranians had so thoroughly routinized tolling the strait. Trump said other countries should open the strait, and apparently they are. But I have to take issue with something he said.
It’s sanewashing to talk of this as though “Washington” will make some reasoned decision.
@gVOR10:
True, the decision is largely from Trump’s psychology. This is a guy who is annoyed at the TACO meme.
Here is something I just came across re how Trump thinks:
https://paulwaldman.substack.com/p/the-one-phrase-that-explains-trumps
@charontwo:
I would’ve thought that Iran was forcing ship traffic through their narrow alternate corridor between Qeshm Island and Larak Island using threats including mines placed between Larak Island and the Oman/UAE side of the Strait.
And perhaps not coincidentally, in your referenced “Jacob Kaarsbo” podcast, Malcolm Nance indicates the location where the A-10 was shot down yesterday, and it is in the corridor that passes between Qeshm and Larak islands, where the Iranians are reportedly piloting ships that have paid the toll or otherwise met with their approval. Nance also said that a second A-10 was damaged at that location but returned safely, both aircraft having been hit by shoulder-launched missiles.
@Michael Reynolds:
It’s strategic incomptence of an order seldom seen since the inglorious adventures of Signor Mussolini.
How the f@ck could anyone just overlook the Straits and wishcast the IRGC just collapsing?
It’s always been obvious to all the analysts that IF a war with Iran was required (which it was not), it HAD to be full scale. Not some daft fantasy of “bomb and win”
“Go big, or go home.”
So, Netanyahu played Trump, because Bibi (mistakenly) thinks all the collateral consequences are irrelevant to Israel and (more importntly) to his political position.
With nobody in the sycophantic adminstration willing to tell him it was a stupid play, because Hegseth is an idiot, and Rubio an opportunistic coward.
And now Trump is deperately hoping for some “one neat trick” to extricate him from this shitshow.
Be that escalation of bombing targets, or somehow bullying US allies into the war.
What really pisses me off is it’s not even semi-comptent evil; it’s just banal and vapid dumbf@ckerry.
*bah*
*drinks*
@JohnSF:
I’m seriously beginning to wonder what the top officers at the Pentagon can do to keep El Taco from carrying out a nuclear strike on Iran.
@Kathy:
This is a nasty thought that is sometimes occuring to me.
That Trump may assume “nukes = win”
In reality, if Trump nuked Tehran, the IRGC would still rule in Iran, and still have control at the Straits.
A saturation tactical nuclear bombardment of the northern shores of the Straits in depth might work. Temporarily. But would still need (NBC equipped) forces to prevent IRGC drone launchers from coming back in.
This may seem like casual dismisal of nuclear weapons use, but I’m familiar with BAOR battle plans from the 1970’s that assumed continuing combat even after much of Germany had been reduced to radioactive rubble.
Nuclear weapons are not neccearily and inevitably a “push the button and win” option.
My fear is that Trump may be stupid enough to think they are.
@Kathy:
In my understanding of the nuclear strike command chain in the US: the Pentagon can do nothing at all.
The President has both command authority and technical means to issue such strike commands to the USAF and USN forces with nuclear weapons.
If the Pentagon instructed all such forces to ignore all such commands, that might just work.
Or it might not.
Especially re SSBN submarines, which generally have very limited communications.
The only sure method would be to cut off Trump as US CIC from all channels.
In effect, a military coup.
Which would also have to include removing Hegseth.
Which would be nice. 😉