What’s the Idea
The push is clearly on for war with Iran. Most of the features of the last “crisis” repeat in this one. Officials and their auxiliaries deem conditions that have obtained for years to somehow suddenly be a “crisis.” People who despise the United Nations argue that we must act in defiance of the UN to save its honor. Partisans accuse the intelligence bureaucracy of hiding the awful truth. People who want to bomb foreigners accuse people who don’t want to bomb foreigners of lacking compassion. Not coincidentally, there’s an election approaching. I’m as bored with it as you are.
But it’s worth asking, So what’s the plan, anyway? We don’t have the ground forces to conquer and hold Iran. We have a lot of air power. But the claim that “we know too little about Iran’s nuclear program” (pdf) goes poorly with the idea that “We should destroy Iran’s nuclear program by surgical bombing.” (Someone else made this point. Thoreau? Speak up.) So like, what, huh?
I think the answer is, “The Halutz Plan.” It will be a punitive bombing campaign designed to either “inspire” some little-discerned opposition into overthrowing the Mullahs or pressuring the Mullahs themselves to agree to some sort of intrusive monitoring program. The US will aim to turn the intrusive monitoring program itself into one more source of pressure on the regime, in the same way UNSCOM became an auxiliary of the US program for regime change in Iraq in the 1990s. We’ll loudly announce that we’re attacking “key nuclear sites” but also “critical infrastructure supporting the regimes weapon programs and terror support.” In practice this will mean bridges and power plants and dams and water treatment facilities – it will, in other words, be a strategic bombing campaign.
This was how Israel started the recent Lebanon campaign – aiming to intimidate the country’s other groups into “dealing with” Hezbollah, while, in classic Israeli fashion, reducing not just their motivation but their ability to do so. (Making it essentially impossible for Lebanon to move its Army around the country, for instance.) It’s how NATO began the war against Serbia in 1999.
Serbia would be, at first blush, the successful version of the strategy, but it had some things going for it that the Iran campaign won’t. NATO had, in the final analysis, limited objectives – kicking Serbian troops out of a single Serb province and replacing Serbian authority with a nationalist force already prepared to assume control. It was prepared to look the other way once that force, the KLA, actually held sway in the province. Whatever you think of the wisdom or justice of NATO’s policy, it suited the means available.
Even here, NATO had a grandiose official war aim it utterly lacked the means or will (and maybe the interest) to achieve: a multi-ethnic, democratic peaceful Kosovo.
NATO also had a ground force to turn to once weeks of strategic bombing, against civilian and military targets, became obviously futile: again, the KLA. The NATO-KLA alliance was able to commence plausible combined-arms operations against Serb forces in Kosovo. NATO also didn’t push its military operations to the point that the KLA would have been asked to exert authority in non-Kosovar Serbia.
The above conditions won’t obtain in Iran. Nor will some of the conditions that saved Halutz and Olmert’s Lebanon adventure. Israel had a plausible ground force to throw against Hezbollah, however indifferently it performed. Its enemy, Hezbollah, could accrue political benefits from accepting a cease fire. And so far, at least, Israel has failed to achieve its declared war aims. It still lacks the two soldiers it went to war to retrieve and Hezbollah still has the arsenal of rockets Israel wanted to disarm. The international force and negotiations may or may not achieve both the objectives Israel sought on the battlefield, but the international force is the fallback plan after the original “smash Hezbollah” plan didn’t work.
Many reports indicate that the US positively egged Israel on to “smash Hezbollah.” I suspect it was both an attempt to remove one of Iran’s cards to play in the US-Iran war and a dry run for the US-Iran war. We’ll have even less going for us than Israel did: bigger objectives, less motivation, paltrier means. We’ll make a big noise, break a lot of crockery and kill a bunch of people. The plans to do this will be entertained with utmost seriousness. Later on, the same people will promise that the next war will solve the problems caused by this one.
Comment by Dave L —
August 27, 2006 @ 6:19 pm
Nice, plausible post about our plans.
What about Iran’s? Hezbollah surprised with its counter-punching; anyone think that Iran might, just conceivably, have a measure or two up its sleeve?
Looking, determinedly, for a bright side, one could surmise that this is at least likely to provide a quick, definitive end to our Iraq misadventure.
Comment by Nell —
August 27, 2006 @ 7:41 pm
What’s your thinking on timing? My sense is after the November elections, before the new Congress is seated.
Until Nov. 7, the drumbeat for sanctions (and war if no sanctions) is just an electoral tactic.
It still seems so insane that I keep hoping the joint chiefs will stop it.
Trackback by apostropher —
August 27, 2006 @ 8:02 pm
Idiots rule….
All signs indicate that the Cheney administration is chomping at the bit to go to war with Iran, despite the fact that everybody with two brain cells to run together (a category which, unfortunately, excludes most of the administration) understands……
Comment by Hesiod —
August 27, 2006 @ 8:10 pm
Actually. this is about creating a crisis to enhance Bush and the GOP’s poll ratings.
We ain’t invadfing nobody. OUr military commander swould all resign en masse.
Comment by matthew hogan —
August 27, 2006 @ 8:12 pm
“People who want to bomb foreigners accuse people who don’t want to bomb foreigners of lacking compassion.”
This line will be stolen and appropriated, if not by me, then by someone else.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 27, 2006 @ 9:07 pm
Matt, it’s nothing but a variation on Bill Kauffman’s “Why is it always the people who object to killing foreigners who get called xenophobes.”
Nell, I suspect Hesiod is right: after the election. There are a few rounds of charades yet to play with “diplomacy.”
Dave, I’m sure Iran has something up its sleeve. Beats me what it is. Closing the straits of Hormuz makes a fun temporary measure for Iran, but while the Russians – oil exporters – might find it amusing, the Chinese will not.
They might close it long enough that the PRC steps in with a proposed settlement that enhances both China’s and Iran’s prestige and position. Who knows?
Comment by Dave Intermittentq —
August 27, 2006 @ 11:22 pm
I know I’ve said it before, but you really, really need to get a copy of Robert Pape’s “Bombing to Win.” It’s the best book I’ve read on the limitations (many) of strategic bombing to compel a state to change behaviors, and it would suggest a pretty ugly picture for a U.S. war plan built on infrastructure attacks. You’ll read, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry.
Comment by Glaivester —
August 27, 2006 @ 11:47 pm
The goal will be to bomb Tehran in the hopes of killing the mullahs.
Comment by Tom Scudder —
August 28, 2006 @ 1:11 am
What, all of them?
Comment by Nell —
August 28, 2006 @ 3:09 am
I’m the one who said ‘after the election.’ Hesiod thinks it won’t happen at all — because it’s just an electoral tool and because the joint chiefs will stop it. Hope to hell he’s right.
Bombing before the new Congress is seated (particularly if Democrats retake one or both chambers) would have the advantage to the kingly regime of generating the least resistance from ‘respectable’ quarters. But that’s really just four months off; can the diplomacy theater be fully played out by then?
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
August 28, 2006 @ 6:34 am
I think that people aren’t being cynical enough about what the war aims are. I think that the war aim is nothing more than destabilization through the destruction of any civil authority. That’s what happened in Iraq.
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Comment by Jennifer —
August 28, 2006 @ 7:02 am
I hope we don’t try something with Iran, but this administration is just crazy enough to try. One possible benefit, from their perspective: oil is of such strategic importance that even if you can’t get it for yourself, denying its use to the enemy is a victory in itself. A war with Iran wouldn’t make us any richer, but it would at least keep Iran busy enough to not be able to sell anything to China.
And, just as our post-war Iraq plan was “be greeted as liberators and catch the flowers they toss our way,” our post-war Iran plan in regards to China would be “hope they’re so busy selling us toys and gadgets they don’t have time to notice how much of their oil supply is gone, and get mad about it.”
Comment by Happy Jack —
August 28, 2006 @ 12:11 pm
Dave, I’m sure Iran has something up its sleeve. Beats me what it is.
I suspect our troops in Iraq might have to learn to do without fresh strawberries for their ice cream. Among other things, that is.