The Wall Street Journal raises an ironic context for what increasingly looks like a major American military action in the next couple of days. It's one that the White House won't appreciate, but that George W. Bush might.
A decade ago, Donald Trump won the GOP presidential nomination in part by pledging to avoid military entanglements like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and especially the nation-building quagmire that followed both there and in Afghanistan. Even now, some in the MAGA base wonder whether Trump is walking into a "forever war" by confronting Iran (about which more in a moment). The scope of Trump's preparations speaks to the planning of a long, sustained, and massive operation, and the historical analogy may cut too close for comfort:
The U.S. is sending significant numbers of jet fighters and support aircraft to the Middle East, assembling the greatest amount of air power in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The U.S. is ready to take action against Iran, but President Trump hasn’t decided whether to order strikes or—if he does order them—whether the aim would be to halt Iran’s already-battered nuclear program, wipe out its missile force or try to topple the regime.
Over the past few days, the U.S. has continued to move cutting-edge F-35 and F-22 jet fighters toward the Middle East, according to flight-tracking data and a U.S. official. A second aircraft carrier loaded with attack and electronic-warfare planes is on the way. Command-and-control aircraft, which are vital for orchestrating large air campaigns, are inbound. And critical air defenses have been deployed to the region in recent weeks.
The firepower will give the U.S. the option of carrying out a sustained, weekslong air war against Iran instead of the one-and-done “Midnight Hammer” strike the U.S. carried out in June against three Iranian nuclear sites, U.S. officials said.
In other words, the Trump administration has planned to take the lead this time in military strikes on Iran. Israel led in the Twelve Day War last June, destroying Iranian air defenses in the opening hours and hitting strategic targets at will. Trump demanded that Iran surrender its nuclear weapons program, and when they refused, he ordered the strikes that destroyed Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz – and chose to stop there. Iran retaliated with a weak barrage of ballistic missiles aimed at Qatar and other US operations, but quickly settled afterward.
This time, Trump clearly anticipates more than just a rote retaliation. He envisions an actual war, declared or not, albeit without the invasion aspects of Iraq 2003. He does not have the assets to conquer Iran, nor would that even be possible with the current logistical profile in the region. Trump would order a sustained campaign against the infrastructure of the regime, especially its ballistic-missile systems and likely its navy in order to protect oil shipments through the Straits of Hormuz. Most of this buildup is likely intended for defense rather than offense, an effort to contain the expected heavy ballistic-missile attacks that will start as soon as the first raids take place.
Does that risk a "forever war"? Perhaps, but only if one ignores the war Iran has waged against the US since 1979. They abducted our diplomats in November 1979, a direct cassus belli to which Jimmy Carter never properly responded. Their proxy terror network Hezbollah killed over 240 Marines in Lebanon in 1982, then spent most of the rest of the decade kidnapping Americans in the region and hostaging them for years. Iran actively attacked Americans in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, as well as through proxy Shi'ite militias, killing hundreds of Americans. Qassem Soleimani ran that operation until Trump killed him in retaliation for continuing attacks.
The real risk in this operation is not a rerun of Iraq 2003, but Libya 2011. Those parallels are more apt, and perhaps more worrisome. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Samantha Power cooked up the "responsibility to protect" doctrine to justify remote regime change on the basis of Moammar Qaddafi's brutal repression of opposition to his dictatorial regime. That campaign lasted several weeks in conjunction with some of our NATO partners and succeeded – but the result was a failed state, an explosion of terror networks, and a massive refugee crisis in Europe.
Those risks exist in Iran too, which has its own ethnic conflicts as well as varying degrees of support for Islamist rule depending on geography. The IRGC is more capable than Qaddafi's military was in 2011 too, although Qaddafi's military had given us trouble in the years before the Iraq invasion and Qaddafi's sudden shift to cooperation with the US. These military strikes might create enough pressure to pull the regime down, but what follows is still unknown, and we won't have boots on the ground to shape those outcomes. After nearly 50 years of hostilities, we may be in a position where almost anything would be an improvement, but a failed state run by local warlords and tinpot potentates using leftover IRGC assets certainly won't be.
Still, it certainly looks as though Trump will get serious soon about using the military options. The New York Times notes that the Pentagon was in a "poor position" when Trump initially drew a red line at the beginning of January over massacring protesters on the streets, which the mullahs ignored. Thanks to the delay in response, that's no longer the case:
Despite Mr. Trump’s tough stance, the Pentagon last month was in a poor position to back him up. The 30,000 to 40,000 U.S. troops scattered around the Middle East, including at eight permanent bases, were low on air defenses to protect them from expected retaliation.
The additional fighter jets necessary to conduct the kind of operation Mr. Trump spoke of were idling at American bases in Europe, and as far away as the United States. Much of the military hardware in the Middle East accumulated over 20 years of war had since departed the region.
But over the past month, the U.S. military has moved the necessary air defenses — including Patriot missile defense and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems — into the region. Both systems can intercept Iranian ballistic missiles.
One military official said the U.S. military could now defend its troops, allies and assets from any Iranian retaliation for American strikes on its nuclear and military targets, at least for a short campaign. But, the official said, the question remained as to whether the American military is ready to sustain a longer and wider war.
There is one more complicating factor, however. Ramadan just started yesterday, as David's earlier post reminds us. The US traditionally would avoid initiating military action against an Islamist or even nominally Muslim nation during Ramadan, lest it allow for the conflict to be seen as a "crusade" or holy war, a characterization that could generate pan-Islamist fervor and complicate defenses. However, we've been at this long enough (for better and worse) to learn that this is an almost entirely conjectural threat, and that Muslim nations don't usually extend that courtesy to others, even when both combatants are nominally Muslim. Furthermore, most of the other Muslim nations in the region see Iran's version of Islamist tyranny as a far greater threat than the United States.
The real question will be whether Iran attempts to pre-empt the coming strikes by cutting a deal. It will take a lot more than another JCPOA to satisfy Trump; he will demand serious limits on ballistic-missile capabilities and an end to sponsoring terror through proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Iran will try to deke around those demands and stall for time, hoping to exhaust the US in the shifting of these resources to this theater. They still have time for another couple of bluffs and plays, but time is running out ... and they should know it.
