Henry Kissinger’s ambivalence about the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s was captured in this famous quote: “It’s a pity both sides can’t lose.” At first glance, the current Iran war might seem to be another case where choosing a favorite is challenging. After all:
1) On one side you have Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump. I recently referred to them on Twitter as “psychopathic monsters,” and the only thing that gave me second thoughts about that tweet was my wife’s contention that, strictly speaking, Trump is a sociopath, not a psychopath. And, my clinical evaluation aside, these two men launched an unprovoked and massively destructive war on Iran that clearly violated the UN Charter (which, by the way, is an actual treaty, a kind of multilateral non-aggression pact, that was ratified by the US Senate—and the US constitution says ratified treaties are the “law of the land.”)
2) On the other side you have an authoritarian regime that recently killed thousands of protesters and is said by prominent experts to be the “leading state sponsor of terrorism” and “the most destabilizing force in the Middle East.”
But, actually, it should be easy for Americans who care about America’s interests to pick sides in this war, especially if they also care about the future of the Middle East and of the whole world. They should want Iran to win—though maybe I should put “win” in quotes since, as I’ll explain, the kind of “victory” I’m talking about doesn’t entail military conquest or a lot of further killing and in fact involves a lot fewer future deaths than American and Israeli “victory” would entail.
In evaluating the consequences of Iranian “victory,” it’s important to understand Iran’s war aims—and to grasp an underappreciated irony about them: Broadly speaking, these aims are shared by most of Iran’s current “enemies”—the Gulf Arab states that host US military bases and have been besieged by attacks from Iran since Israel and America attacked it two weeks ago. What’s more (just to get all the big ironies on the table before we resolve them), Iran’s attacks on Arab countries are a big part of the reason that these countries have a kind of sympathy for Iran’s war aims.
So what are those war aims? There’s more than one, and the first is survival of the regime. This isn’t the goal I’m talking about when I say Iran’s and the Gulf States’ goals converge, but it is, in fact, something a lot of Gulf rulers probably hope for. After all, unlike Donald Trump, they realize that the Venezuela scenario was never likely to play out in Iran, where the fall of the regime—if it could be engineered at all—would stand a good chance of ushering in a period of chaos and civil war and mass migration, something few Arabs in the Gulf region welcome.
But, as important a goal as survival is, and notwithstanding all the commentary to the effect that for the Iranian regime “survival is victory,” survival really isn’t victory, or at least it isn’t complete victory, in the view of Iran’s leaders.
Initially, the goal of survival did seem to dominate Iran’s strategy. The attacks on Arab states and regional energy infrastructure, analysts said, were designed to get those states, along with financial markets, to put pressure on Trump to stop the war with the regime still intact. But as time wore on, and Iranian leaders sounded less and less eager for a ceasefire, more and more regional experts said Iran’s aims go beyond just stopping the fighting: Iran wants to stop the fighting in a way that will keep it from starting again.
After all, when Israel and America attacked Iran last summer (also in clear violation of international law), stopping the fighting turned out not to mean much. Only eight months later, Netanyahu and Trump repeated the exercise on an even larger scale.
What’s more, it was pretty predictable last summer (and in fact was predicted) that Iran would get attacked again before long. One reason is Israel’s basic approach to national security, an approach grounded partly in the conviction of many Israelis that they will always be widely and deeply hated in the Middle East, regardless of what they do. Israeli strategists don’t put much faith in the engineering of enduringly stable relations with neighbors—whether by strong commercial or strategic bonds or by structures of mutual deterrence. Rather, the basic aim is to persistently degrade the economic and military power of neighbors that have threatened or could plausibly threaten Israel, thus neutralizing the threat.
For example: Killing one in 30 Gazans may somewhat deepen the pre-existing hatred of Israel in Gaza, but so long as Israel is killing lots of young males and destroying lots of infrastructure, the hatred can’t assume truly threatening form. Even the new Syrian regime—which is basically US-friendly and Israel-friendly—was welcomed onto the stage with extensive bombing by Israel, which took advantage of the power transition in Damascus to destroy as much Syrian military hardware as possible. Just in case…
As Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute recently put it, “Israel believes that its security is achieved by dominating the region. It is not seeking security by balancing threats or managing threats. It actually has to dominate the region. So for it to have total security, everyone else has to have total insecurity.”
The grim resignation of Israelis to living in a place where security comes via endless conflict is reflected in a term long used for Israel’s periodic military campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah: “mowing the lawn.” In recent years that metaphor has increasingly been extended to Iran. Walter Russell Mead, a deeply pro-Israel columnist for the Wall Street Journal, this week acknowledged that maybe the regime change scenario wasn’t going to play out in Iran this time—but, he added (perhaps by way of consoling himself), this war would still be remembered as “the Mother of All Lawnmowers.”
But even when Israel uses a lawnmower that powerful, it still expects to use it again before terribly long. That is the expectation that the Iranian regime wants to change. Hence its current strategy: to make this war so painful for so many influential actors that Israel will be strongly discouraged from repeating the exercise any time soon—discouraged by Arab states and, most importantly, by America.
Inflicting this pain has so far involved relatively few deaths, compared to the 2,000 or so people, mainly civilians, killed by the US or Israel in Iran or Lebanon over the past two weeks. You don’t have to land many missiles or suicide drones on targets in Dubai before Dubai’s commercial identity—as a place where the rich can live and party and park assets, and international business can get done—is imperiled. And temporarily crippling a couple of Amazon data centers in the Gulf—which Iranian strikes have done—needn’t kill anyone in order to send an important message: Attracting those big, coveted AI data centers—like the 10-square-mile OpenAI “Stargate” facility slated for the United Arab Emirates—could get a lot harder if they’re thought of as tempting Iranian targets amid the next lawn mowing.
In other words: After this conflict ends, it won’t be enough for the Gulf states to tell tourists and investors and businesses that the Iranian drone and missile strikes have stopped. They’ll have to be able to credibly say that Iran won’t be doing such things again for a long, long time. And since Iran is now signaling that it could do such things again if it gets attacked again, the Gulf states will be strongly incentivized to help Iran somehow arrange things so that it is no longer subject to such attacks. As Vali Nasr of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies put it this week, “a ceasefire alone will not lift the shadow of risk that Iran has imposed over the Gulf, which is now experiencing its nightmare scenario.”
So Iran and the Gulf states share an interest in establishing some kind of architecture for regional stability.
Such a project faces steep odds for various reasons, including Gulf anger toward Iran over all the drone and missile strikes. On the other hand, there’s also a lot of Gulf anger toward Israel and America, which were implored by many Gulf leaders not to start this war. So if Gulf states let anger be their guide, they could wind up pretty isolated.
A bigger obstacle to an architecture of regional stability is that Israel doesn’t want one. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that Israel’s security strategy is, in a sense, to foment regional instability—to repeatedly attack neighboring states and non-state actors, degrading their economic and military strength and letting the chips fall where they may.
This is the thing (OK, one of many things) that Trump seems not to have grasped: Whereas for him the failure of this attack to replicate the no-fuss regime change of Venezuela is a big political problem, for Bibi Netanyahu it’s not. Worst case is that Bibi got America to help him mow the Iranian lawn—and if continued attacks manage to collapse the regime, and lead to civil war, so much the better; if there’s one thing he finds less threatening than a degraded state, it’s no state at all.
Should this war bring enlightenment to Trump, he could play a constructive role after it. He could pressure Israel to lay off Iran—and if he’s willing to pull out the big guns, and deny Israel American missile defense in the wake of any attack on Iran, the pressure could succeed. But even in that unlikely event, there’s a bigger problem with the idea of Trump ushering in some new security architecture for the Middle East: Why would Iran trust any commitment made by the Trump administration, whose last contact with the Iranian government was pretending to negotiate with it while plotting a sneak attack?
This mistrust of America may explain the way Iran is now signaling its aspirations for the post-war Middle East. Here is Nasr’s paraphrasal:
Iran says it will only accept a ceasefire with international guarantees for its sovereignty, which would probably mean a direct role for Russia and China… The US would then have to agree to some form of the nuclear deal it left on the table in Geneva in February and commit to lifting sanctions. Iran’s leaders entered this war with the goal of ensuring it will be the last one. Either it breaks them or radically changes the country’s circumstances. They are betting on surviving long enough and squeezing the global economy hard enough to realize that goal.
This is a big part of the reason to root for Iran’s success in realizing its war aims: Its goal is regional stability, and Israel’s goal is more nearly the opposite, and America’s goal is… well, so long as Trump is president, it’s hard to say what America’s goal is. But Trump has become such a global menace—with this illegal and irrational attack on Iran being only the most recent example—that it will be good for the world if he gets some negative reinforcement for his adventurism. Many future lives could be saved if this war becomes a clear political loss for Trump.
As of now, America and Israel are the two most lawless and destabilizing nations on the planet. They seem to compete with each other for the title of most frequent violator of the UN Charter’s ban on transborder aggression, and no other country is in their league. (Though, yes, what Russia lacks in number of violations it makes up for in magnitude: the invasion of Ukraine was a very consequential crime.)
But, you may ask, how can I suggest that America or Israel deserve the title of most destabilizing nation when so many think tank experts and MSM commentators have suggested that Iran may deserve that title? And, also, isn’t Iran the “leading state sponsor of terrorism”?
Challenging those claims as thoroughly as they deserve to be challenged would take a whole ‘nother piece—and, who knows, maybe I’ll write it soon. But for now I’ll just cite one quick case study: the Iran-Iraq war that Henry Kissinger wished both sides could somehow lose.
That war began in 1980, when Iraq invaded Iran, and lasted until 1988 and led to hundreds of thousands of Iranian deaths. It was a true national trauma. And the US backed Iraq with intelligence and weapons and other military equipment. So, fifteen years later, when the US invaded Iraq and overthrew its government, Iran naturally got nervous—all the more so since George W. Bush had, before the invasion, named Iran and Iraq as the only two Middle Eastern members of the “axis of evil.”
Iran then did what any rational nation in its position would have done: Try to drive the US out of Iraq by using whatever resources were at its disposal—which in this case included sympathetic Shia who could be deployed as anti-American militias. Attacks on US soldiers by these militias are often cited as evidence that Iran is a “destabilizing” force in the Middle East—and are sometimes enlisted as well in the “leading state sponsor of terrorism” indictment. But it was America that—then as now—had violated international law by attacking another country without provocation. And the threat Iran perceived was real; we now know that there was talk in the Bush administration of using Iraq as a base for launching an attack on Iran—talk that subsided as America’s occupation of Iraq started heading south.
So, is the claim that “Iran is responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq” false? No, it’s true. But this violence came in response to a threat that was much more genuine than the “threat” America was addressing when it invaded Iraq or the “threat” America was addressing two weeks ago when it attacked Iran. So, as much I deplore all violence, citing this particular violence as evidence that Iran poses an inherent threat, even when it is itself not threatened, doesn’t make any sense.
This isolated case study doesn’t come close to addressing all the evidence commonly cited in arguments that Iran is evil and a big threat to America and a truly existential threat to Israel. And I don’t expect anyone to take my word that much of this cited evidence, on close inspection, would turn out, similarly, to have less force than meets the eye. But if this context for the killing of American troops by Iran-backed militias came as news to you—if you hadn’t realized that pretty much any nation in Iran’s position would have tried to drive American troops out of Iraq, if necessary by killing some of them—I’d ask you to at least keep an open mind about how accurate the image of Iran presented by American media and American think tankers is or isn’t.
I’d also ask that, if you’ve been rooting for America and Israel to succeed in inflicting more mayhem in Iran, up to and including the collapse of the regime, you pause and reflect—especially if you purport to hope for long term peace and stability in the Middle East. There are many nations that want to bring peace and stability to the Middle East, but America and Israel don’t seem to be among them.
Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.
Excellent, powerfully argued piece
Yup, one thing that Trump has done is expose American foreign policy for what it is. An incompetent imperialist power. This really brings me back to my undergraduate days wrestling with the aftermath of the Vietnam war, like how could we be so stupid?