What the U.S.-Iraq Wars Can Teach us
The U.S.-led Gulf War (1991) saw Iraq’s large but unsophisticated military decimated, its vast infrastructure obliterated, and its formal leadership structures shattered, all within a few weeks of initial combat. U.S. President George H.W. Bush and his administration decided to end the lopsided ground war before achieving a prime objective, which was the decapitation of Saddam Hussain’s dictatorial regime. The Bush administration reasoned that further military action against a now routed and fleeing foe would blight the reputation of the U.S. in international circles and amongst the American people.
The U.S. government, having failed to eliminate Saddam—a valid target as Iraq’s supreme military commander—through multiple waves of targeted bombings, pivoted, turning instead to encouraging the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrow Saddam and his Baathist regime. The Iraqi people took notice, and, naively assuming the U.S. would support their revolution, took to the streets and local centers of administrative power en masse. The U.S., under pressure from its Arab coalition partners—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Gulf states—who feared a Shiite-dominated Iraq more than a weakened Saddam, declined to come to the aid of the insurgents. By allowing the Iraqi military to fly armed helicopters, the U.S. inadvertently supported Saddam’s Revolutionary Guard in its massacre of tens of thousands of Iraqi opposition forces and adjacent civilians that was to follow the end of formal hostilities with coalition forces.
Saddam Hussain would remain in power for over twelve more years before Bush fils finished what Bush père had left undone. When Saddam was finally removed, Iraq descended into an abyss of chaos and instability, hosting and breeding radical Islamist groups that—despite the U.S. military occupation—spread violence and terror throughout the region and the world, a plague that persists to this day.
In neither conflict does it appear that the U.S. had a coherent strategy for what to do after the shooting stopped.
Present Day
Iran lost the lion’s share of its leadership and military infrastructure in the early stages of Epic Fury. This time, the U.S. was successful in quickly decapitating the regime, taking out Iran’s Supreme Leader (Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei), successor clerics, and much of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)’s senior leadership. As with Iraq, the U.S. government has again encouraged popular revolt and coup d’état. Initially, mass celebrations and anti-regime protests broke out in cities across Iran. These demonstrations were quickly and brutally quieted under the jackboots of the IRGC, and once again we have rumors of tens of thousands of civilian deaths and innumerable casualties.
Hopes placed in emergent leadership from the Iranian exile community abroad—a Persian Charles de Gaulle waiting in the wings—were quickly dashed. Unlike France in WWII, there is no organized resistance or Iranian government in exile. Those who expected an uprising from expatriates also failed to consider that this generation of exiled Iranians are neither battle-hardened revolutionaries nor guerillas. The children and grandchildren of the Shah’s generation haven’t suffered prison or severe depravations—think of Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in a South African prison fighting apartheid—and don’t have the will for the fight. Their homeland is an ideal and an identity, but not one to suffer and die for. They’re happy to finance a revolution, but are too accustomed to living lives of luxury in cosmopolitan cities like London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles to consider returning home and taking up arms themselves.
So, for the moment, the Iranian theocracy lives on, supported by the IRGC, and by the psychologically numbing effect of nearly fifty years of repression. A popular uprising now seems highly unlikely. There is not one unified opposition in Iran, but multiple competing factions that would vie for power and turn their swords on one another as soon as they could.
Iranian leadership assumes that time is on their side. Regime continuance requires biding time and patiently enduring until the U.S. grows weary of war. Ceasefires allow Iranian forces to rest, resupply, and rebuild. Iranian leadership is well aware that President Trump and the Republican Party face midterm elections in November, less than five months away. The U.S. economy is up, at least as far as GDP is concerned (+), the markets are up (+), wages are up (+), but so are gas prices (—) and inflation generally (—). Multiple polls show the economy, despite nominal growth, is main street America’s biggest concern (—). So far there are no images of Americans coming home in body bags (+) or instances of on-U.S. soil terror (+). Still, the war and its costs are not likely to remain tolerable for the American public. The administration needs a decisive victory, not a drawn out imbroglio. The same polls—and a fracture in the formerly cohesive MAGA movement—confirm that Trump needs a victory, or at least a viable offramp, sooner than later.
What does a quick ending look like? No one organizing military operations ever seems to plan for the day after, and this time appears no different. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (not to mention Israel) are pleased to see Iran weakened. U.S. oil interests and infrastructure firms are chomping at the bit to step into the gap should the government fall. But Iranian instability is not in China’s interests. China will support the regime, while doing its best to leave no fingerprints. Nor would Russia, Turkey, India, and a host of other nations, benefit from Iranian political chaos. Unlike in the first Gulf War, Europe is not supporting U.S. and Israeli actions. EU leaders, having in large part tolerated Islamist extremism in their own countries, have learned to live with the radical Shiite clerics. The EU is neither the Great Satan nor the Little Satan, just regular infidels happy to continue to profit from trade with the regime.
Without an endgame, Iran risks being cast—rightly or wrongly—by critics of the Trump administration as a new Afghanistan, where the US fought the Taliban for twenty years only to turn the government back over to—you guessed it—the Taliban.
President Trump faces a difficult dilemma. Walk away now and the mullahs—still in power—will declare victory. Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been materially set back but not wholly eliminated. If ending the Iranian nuclear threat is accomplished, perhaps this is enough. A U.S. invasion of Iran seems out of the question, and for good reason. The resource commitment and cost to American lives would be too much to bear, and arguably weaken U.S. preparedness against China. So instead, we seem destined to live in an uneasy stalemate, which the on-again off-again ceasefire represents. Rather than escalating further, we now enter into an extended period of tit-for-tat retaliations and a semi-permanent U.S. Navy-enforced maritime blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Where does this end?