Opinion
Australian military strategist and retired major general Mick Ryan gives credit to the US and Israel for an “exquisite” opening military campaign against Iran. But that, he says, is the easy part.
The first day of the assault decapitated the entire leadership echelon of the Islamic Republic and it appears to have established air dominance over the capital. “The military planning over six to nine months you could call exquisite,” says Ryan with evident professional admiration.
“But it’s really what comes next is the question. It’s really all about society and politics rather than military and intelligence. We aren’t seeing it and the administration isn’t briefing Congress.”
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday said he’d agreed to a US request to use British air bases in the Middle East to help suppress Iranian missile and drone fire.
Anticipating the inevitable criticism, he said: “I want to be very clear: we all remember the mistakes of Iraq. And we have learned those lessons.” But did Trump?
Trump now stands on the brink of turning an early military victory into a politico-military muddle, and perhaps worse. Ryan tells me: “We’ve seen this playbook before” in US-led invasions. “An exquisite military campaign and then the question of what comes next. The political and economic and social elements are the hardest and most important bits. We were burnt worst in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
It was the failed US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that turned the country against the use of war. Presidential rhetoric reflected public opinion. Barack Obama said: “I am the president who ended wars.“ Donald Trump, on his re-election, said: “I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop the wars.”
The US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq combined cost the lives of more than 8000 US and allied service personnel. They killed a minimum of 86,000 enemy fighters, plus at least 159,000 civilians. The financial cost, including related items such as veterans’ care over 30 years, totals $US5.8 trillion, according to Brown University calculations.
For what? After 20 years in Afghanistan, the Taliban are back in control. After eight years of US-led bungling in Iraq, a contained and stable Iraqi dictatorship had degenerated into the fundamentalist caliphate of Daesh, so-called Islamic State, exporting extremist terror and propaganda across the world. That required yet another US-led war to suppress it. US troops remain in Iraq today to try to prevent Daesh from surging once more.
The American people have not forgotten the lessons. The early success of Trump’s attack on Iran has failed to impress. Only one in four approve, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken after the bombing started. Other polls show similar results.
Trump has shed his earlier antiwar intentions. But he has learned two lessons from the Iraq debacle. One, don’t try to make up fake evidence of a threat from foreign weapons of mass destruction; Trump simply asserted it instead, in the absence of any evidence. Two, don’t invade with ground troops; use air power alone to keep US casualties to a minimum.
Now, after the initial death and destruction, what? It’s hard to know exactly what Trump intends. On the first day of the attack on Iran he told the news outlet Axios: “I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians: ‘See you again in a few years if you start rebuilding’” nuclear and missile programs.
On the second day, he told the Daily Mail: “It’s always been a four-week process. We figured it will be four weeks or so. It’s always been about a four-week process so – as strong as it is, it’s a big country, it’ll take four weeks – or less.” On the same day, he told The Atlantic magazine: “They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them. They should have done it sooner.” Two days, four weeks, talk today or see you in a few years? He’s either a master of misinformation to keep the enemy guessing or he’s befuddled with no idea what he’s doing.
John Bolton has a firm view on that. Bolton is a US diplomat and a strategist who served Trump 1.0 as national security adviser. After working closely with Trump for a year and a half, Bolton argues that the president has no idea. “I don’t think he has a plan and that’s the problem,” Bolton tells me. Bolton spent a quarter-century urging his country’s leaders to attack Iran head-on to bring down its regime. Now that he has his wish for war, he’s concerned that Trump is about to bungle the removal of the regime.
Trump’s stated intention to talk to the Iranians now seems impractical to Ryan: “Have the Iranians really changed their minds? It’s only been 24 hours. Iran is still launching missiles and drones.” It looks like, he says, a “retaliatory dead-hand strike” designed in advance to be carried out automatically on the death of the ruler. Negotiations would be pointless with missiles screaming overhead.
And Bolton says that if Trump truly wants to remove the regime, it’d be unwise to end the venture in a matter of days. “You have to have patience and persistence. He may terminate strikes in a matter of days. If he does, he’s just going to repeat the mistake he made in Venezuela.
“Regime change means changing the regime. It doesn’t mean removing the public face of the regime and replacing that person with another member of the same regime and allowing things to go on pretty much as they did before.”
The key political task should be to establish co-ordination with the opposition inside Iran – “they must have some contacts because they managed to get 6000 Starlink terminals to the opposition in January” to help the resistance overcome regime-imposed communication blackouts.
“Trump needs to think through what we can do to help the opposition to do what they uniquely can do inside the country to exploit cracks in the regime. You can’t pick apart a regime in six days.”
Trump stands on the cusp. Conceivably, he could adroitly manage the removal of one of the world’s worst regimes, help midwife a more benign government and break America’s long run of strategic incompetence. Or is that inconceivable?
Peter Hartcher is the international editor for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
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Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.