WIMBY (War in My BackYard)

And so the war came

A stock photograph of the B-2 Spirit bomber, the kind used to carry out airstrikes in Iran this morning local time.

And so the war came.

A war party in Washington, D.C., has wanted to bomb Iran for decades—some since 1979 and others more recently, as the Islamic Republic slowly assembled materials for a nuclear weapon. (So slowly until recently that I think it was debatable whether they were really trying to build a weapon or hedging while engaging in negotiations.) The stakes have always been serious even if American politicians have not treated it so:

Bombing them back to the Stone Age, whoever “they” are, has been a simple prescription for a number of ailments. Now, the United States has administered the dosage to a new patient—in a time and manner not entirely of its own choosing.

Will it work? Intellectual honesty compels me to admit that there is more of a case than I thought two weeks ago. Specifically, the relative weakness of the Iranian response to Israel’s bombing campaign—which may have been a consequence of the tactical successes of those strikes—suggests that Iran’s ability to retaliate may be lower than I had assumed.

On the other hand, the Iranian regime has cards left to play. There are two obvious ones: naval warfare against shipping in the Arabian Gulf and the use of nontraditional attacks (that is, terrorism) through proxies against targets in the West and the region. What could those look like? One recent example would be the San Bernardino shootings inspired by ISIS; an earlier one would be the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. These are asymmetrical responses that would play, in the short term at least, to Iran’s strengths.

Both, however, would have drawbacks. Attacks on shipping would draw in other countries and represent a major expansion of the conflict without any clear purpose other than reprisal. (Does sticking a limpet mine to a tanker bring back the centrifuges of Natanz?) That dynamic could tend to sway governments’ opinion against Tehran. Furthermore, U.S. and partner countries probably have the military upper hand at sea, although I do not discount the possibility that Iranian naval drones or missile ships could deal damage.

Terrorist proxy attacks would have similar drawbacks. Inflicting pain may offer emotional satisfaction, which might be useful for domestic consumption. Online, one sees that a lot of audiences in the region believe that Iran’s strikes against Israel have demonstrated its strength, so the propaganda effect of even a pointless blow against civilians might be sufficient to save the regime. It is not easy to see how a prolonged campaign of such attacks would offer compensation for—effectively—the dismantling of Iran’s air force and air defenses, the decapitation of its leadership, and a severe, if likely short-term, setback to its nuclear ambitions. And, again, every such strike would tend to harden the opinion of other countries against Iran—even China, which is not a fan of sponsors of terrorism.

A more subtle strategy might be one that uses strikes directly against U.S. military facilities in the region. Not, to be clear, because these would be militarily effective—again, the strikes against Israel have shown that Iran is apparently less capable than assumed. I don’t even believe that many missiles would get through. I do think, however, that the political effect of warheads exploding in a country like Bahrain might unnerve regional governments about the wisdom of hosting U.S. installations. In particular, it might make it politically untenable with domestic audiences, who could—plausibly—conclude that the United States gets more out of the basing arrangements than they do. Weighed against this, of course, is the fact that Iranian warheads exploding on, say, Bahraini soil might lead rulers around the region to conclude that Iran does, in fact, pose a threat sufficiently grave that they need protection. (The irony would be that the proximate cause of that need would be U.S. actions. Well, they don’t call it a protection mutual benefit society.)

The Iranian regime, then, seems to have few good options. Surrender is always an option, of course. That’s unappealing, not least because it could jeopardize the regime’s hold on power, although I could see that it would be more plausible to concede defeat to the United States than to Israel. At this point, we might as well begin speculating that it’s going to be easier for elements of the regime to act against each other than the outside world. The failures of the Iranian military and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps to deter or defend against Israeli actions (and the thoroughness with which Israeli intelligence compromised Iranian security) might justify a purge of those elements. Nothing quite like blaming the enemy’s victory on a stab in the back!

For all this, I still don’t think that the attack will “work”. Iranian attitudes toward the United States will be hardened for a generation again. The United States, in the span of a decade, has withdrawn peremptorily from a seriously negotiated agreement with Tehran and then—at least it can be plausibly said to have—used negotiations as a cover for attacks on the subject of those negotiations. Despite some indications of distance between Trump and Netanyahu, the United States is now a direct party to an Israeli war. Constitutional prohibitions on unilateral executive uses of force have been shredded. The best-case scenario I outlined above was political instability in a country of 90 million people—risking a civil war in a major regional power that could easily draw in its neighbors.

I have no special insight into any of these dynamics because I live in the region. Does it matter that my local subreddit reported weird noises overnight just before the attacks? Not really. “Skin in the game” can make you take analyses more seriously but it can also meaningfully bias your analyses in ways too subtle to notice until it’s too late. (Of course, that also applies to analysts in the United States.)

Being here, however, does make it somewhat more likely that I will be closer to the action. It is a reminder that these aren’t geopolitical chess pieces or rhetorical acts. These involve real explosives, real concrete, real flesh and real bone. On net, treating U.S. foreign policy as if it were a deadly serious exercise instead of content for social media probably does represent an improvement.