Friday, June 20, 2025

Pondering War with Iran

Oz Katerji:

Comparisons with Iraq fall short.

In Iraq, WMD was the pretext, regime change was the objective, occupation was the strategy.

In Iran, WMD is the pretext, objective remains unclear, strategy remains unclear.

The US actually had a plan in Iraq, this is something else entirely.

I was not expecting to see ‘actually, by comparison, Iraq was the *better* plan’ crop up in my life…

2 comments:

David said...

Arguably, you could say that in both cases the idea is "use force and hope the victims start seeing things our way."

In reality, I suspect that clear, achievable objectives that resolve an issue are quite rare in military affairs, and it may well be perverse to even expect them. Israelis and Palestinians, India and Iran, the various ethnic groups of, say, the Congo region or Ethiopia--none of these people fight each other because they have a plan to resolve their issues. Most wars are really episodes in ongoing situations. The reality of most war is closer to feud than to the common American notion of what war is.

The US idea of "solving" an issue is, I would say, a deceptive outlier. It's built, first, on the models of the Civil War and World War II. The "resolutions" of these events required utterly destroying the enemy, which in turn required tremendous, costly, years-long, all-out efforts in what were conceived of as great, moral causes (and in neither case were all political problems actually solved). In both cases, the motives were much deeper than, and preceded, goal-setting and plan-making.

Second, the US model is rooted in our myth that a prosperous peace is the human norm. War in this view is this unusual thing you do to resolve some problem, so that you can go back to the old, simple, peaceable way things are supposed to be. Although they may complain about it, in practice I think a lot of contemporary embattled societies simply accept that hatred of their neighbors and periodic violence is part of existence. Again, it's feud.

Note I am NOT saying this because I support an attack on Iran. I've always been absolutely against it. But I think using the presence or absence of stated clear goals and a plan to achieve them as criteria for engaging or not engaging in military action is misguided. In effect what that leads to is a lot of spreadsheet roleplaying. If our leaders can't make a compelling moral case for war, and sustain it in spite of the doubts of a considerable portion of the population, quite aside from and antecedent to the whole management-school-style means-and-ends pantomime, that's a sign we should beg off.

Death Breath said...

No longer pondering. Guess he didn't believe Gabbard anyway.