Opinion
US President Donald Trump’s war on Iran has entered contention for the title of the most aimless major war in modern history.
It’s too early to say whether the war has succeeded or failed. It’s still under way. This hasn’t constrained the US president, of course.
He declared victory less than two weeks into his “four to five weeks” war which, this week, enters its ninth week.
“We won,” he said on March 11. “In the first hour, it was over.” Winning “turned out to be easier than we thought”. There was “practically nothing left to target”.
Yet, after two months of war, Trump remains entangled while Iran treats him with contempt. Indeed, Trump’s administration can’t even organise a meeting with the enemy.
Iran’s negotiators flew out of the purported venue for peace talks, Islamabad, on the weekend as the US delegation was about to fly in. They would have encountered an empty meeting room.
Trump was left to cover his embarrassment by claiming, once again, that “we hold all the cards”. Yet he has no one to play cards with. This is a new nadir for American prestige.
It’s unwise to make premature pronouncements on victory and defeat. But we can make observations about the conduct of the war to date.
Reaching for a comparison in military history, strategist Mick Ryan, an Australian former major-general, compares America’s prosecution of the Iran war with Churchill’s Dardanelles campaign, the disastrous plan that delivered ANZAC carnage at Gallipoli. He begins with the caveat that all wars are different, then says: “Churchill had specific aims as Donald Trump had specific aims, but there was a failure to understand the will of the Turks and their German advisers” in Gallipoli, “and there are parallels in the Iran war of not understanding your enemy.”
One glaring US miscalculation was Washington’s blindness to Iran’s very conception of war.
When Trump said there was practically nothing left to target, he didn’t understand that Iran has a different comprehension of what should constitute a “target”.
The US and Israel prosecuted a war on political leaders and military assets. They hoped it would cripple Iran and, as a bonus, bring down the regime.
But Iran aimed chiefly at the US economy. By blocking Middle East energy arteries, Iran hit US fuel prices and US inflation.
With petrol prices and inflation up, Trump’s political standing is down. Seventy-eight per cent of Americans say fuel prices are a very big concern for them, and 77 per cent say Trump bears at least some responsibility, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on the weekend.
To be fair to US military planners, the Pentagon did warn Trump repeatedly that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz. But the president ignored the experts.
Trump did not realise the power of Iran’s economic war until it started to hurt the US. Belatedly, he imposed his own blockade. On Iran. After seven weeks of war, he was still groping for an effective counter to Iran’s economic war.
The war is now one of endurance. Who can remain lethal longer – Iran under physical siege or Trump under political siege?
For sheer aimlessness, Paul Dibb reaches further back into military history, beyond Gallipoli, to find its equal. The Australian former intelligence chief and strategic adviser tells me: “The nearest I can think of for being so aimless is the Crimean War.”
That takes us back 170 years. The Crimean War of 1853-56 pitted Imperial Russia on the one hand against Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire on the other. Its very name is shorthand for incompetence. It was one of the bloodiest in European history to that point.
The 1960 Encyclopedia Britannica described it as “perhaps the most ill-managed campaign in English history”.
Trump’s outstanding demands are twofold. He will not relent on Iran until, first, it opens the Strait of Hormuz. This is bizarre. The strait was wide open before Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu launched the war.
So Trump is inflicting on the world its biggest oil disruption in history, a new age of inflation, potential food shortages in poor countries and possible global recession, all to recover the status quo ante in the Strait of Hormuz? This is the apogee of strategic aimlessness, surely.
Trump’s second demand is that Iran be denied the ability to develop nuclear weapons. This is an ambition that every right-thinking person would embrace, surely. The president asserted that Iran was last month a mere “two to four weeks” away from a nuclear bomb.
Yet he’d earlier announced that “we obliterated their nuclear capability” in Operation Midnight Hammer, bombing raids on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June last year.
And his national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, submitted written testimony to the US Senate three weeks into the war that: “There has been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability. The entrances to the underground facilities that were bombed have been buried and shuttered with cement.” Tellingly, she refused to read out this part of her testimony lest she contradict her president’s new nuclear scare.
The only known remaining Iranian nuclear potential is what the International Energy Agency estimates to be 440 kilograms of enriched uranium buried deep underground and inaccessible.
And we know that Trump went into the war with no plan to deal with this uranium, which he calls “nuclear dust”. Because, after receiving classified briefings, a member of a Congressional subcommittee on national security, Democrat Bill Foster, related that the administration “never had a plan for that nuclear stockpile of enriched uranium – to destroy [it], to seize it, or to put it under international inspection”.
So Iran wasn’t a threat or a priority when Trump launched the war but it became one when he needed to nominate one. Both Trump’s current objectives are ones that already existed before his decision to assault Iran. This is remarkable strategic aimlessness.
“War is hard for intelligent people,” says Mick Ryan. “It’s impossible for people without the moral or intellectual capacity to understand what war is and how to wage it.”
In Norman Dixon’s famous 1976 study On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, the Crimean War is exhibit No.1 among the 10 leading case studies of destructive folly in the modern era. If Dixon were alive today, he would surely include Trump’s “little excursion” into Iran high on the list.
Peter Hartcher is political and international editor. His international affairs column can be read in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age each Tuesday.
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Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.