As President Donald Trump has acknowledged, America’s war on Iran will not be as easy or quick as the previous military incursion he authorized, the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
The goals for the South American operation were much simpler: Take out the incompetent and criminal Maduro and put in his place a regime of his lieutenants who are more inclined to take orders from Washington.
Regime change in Iran, an obvious goal despite conflicting signals from the administration, won’t be so easy while also destroying Iran’s nuclear program, its missile arsenal, its navy and its terrorist subsidiaries.
The initial assault by U.S. and Israeli forces over the weekend was a huge military and intelligence success. Not only did it kill Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but dozens of those in Khamenei’s inner circle.
Few outside of Iran will mourn the death of Khamenei, a ruthless cleric who had no qualms about the killing of thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of his countrymen because they voiced opposition to his oppressive and disastrous rule. How the assassination, though, will play out in a country that reveres martyrdom is uncertain. Trump, in the hours after the strikes, was encouraging the protesters to seize control of their country. Without the organizational structure within the opposition or much in the way of arms, that seems improbable, at least in the short run.
More likely is a protracted campaign for which the successors to Khamenei will calculate neither Trump nor the American people have the stomach. Iran is already trying to turn this into a regional war, sending missiles into neighboring Arab states that have been inclined to work amicably with the U.S. and other Western powers. Iran is also targeting oil and natural gas facilities and transportation routes on the hope that disruption of the region’s energy supply will drive up the price of energy and send economies in the U.S. and around the world into a tailspin, making the war quickly unpopular.
For this reason, Trump’s decision to go it alone with Israel was a mistake, even though it was helpful from a military perspective in preserving the element of surprise.
Trump won’t be the first president to believe that consulting with Congress before launching military hostilities is optional, nor was he required to line up allies to give their approval or participate in the offensive. He will regret, however, not having that united front domestically and internationally if things go sour with the war.
Trump has claimed, with little evidence, that the U.S. was in imminent danger of Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon. Iran, to be sure, has been chasing nuclear weapons capability for decades. Its Islamic fundamentalist regime has made “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” central tenets of its aspirations. Still, by most experts’ accounts, Iran was several years away from nuclear weapons capability, particularly after the major setback its nuclear program suffered from U.S. bombing runs last summer.
What’s more likely is Trump and his advisers decided to act now, just as they did in Venezuela, because the adversary was at a particularly weak point from wrecked economies and internal dissent.
This makes the attack, as New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger correctly noted both during the build-up to the offensive and after it was commenced, a “war of choice” by Trump, not a “war of necessity.” Wars of choice are not just frowned on internationally. They had previously been scorned by Candidate Trump as a waste of American blood and treasure.
Trump sounds resolute about the Iran war, saying that he is prepared to continue the attacks as long as it takes to meet the objectives. As history has repeatedly shown, however, it’s a lot easier to start a war than to end one.
