GoKawiilThis post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any special information, so I am going to treat that all with a high degree of uncertainty. But I am a scholar of military history with a fair bit of training and experience in thinking about strategic problems, ancient and modern; it is this ‘guy that analyzes strategy’ focus that I want to bring to this.
I am doing this post outside of the normal Friday order because it is an unusual topic and I want to keep making it clear that even as world events continue to happen – as they must – I do not want this blog to turn into a politics newsletter. I simply haven’t had the time to polish and condense these thoughts for other publication – the hard work of much writing is turning 3,500 words (or 7,500, as it turns out) of thoughts into 1,500 words of a think piece – but I need to get them out of my head and on to the page before it burns out of the back of my head. That said, this post is going to be unavoidably ‘political,’ because as a citizen of the United States, commenting on the war means making a statement about the President who unilaterally and illegally launched it without much public debate and without consulting Congress.
And this war is dumb as hell.
I am going to spend the next however many words working through what I think are the strategic implications of where we are, but that is my broad thesis: for the United States this war was an unwise gamble on extremely long odds; the gamble (that the regime would collapse swiftly) has already failed and as a result locked in essentially nothing but negative outcomes. Even with the regime were to collapse in the coming weeks or suddenly sue for peace, every likely outcome leaves the United States in a meaningfully worse strategic position than when it started.
Now, before we go forward, I want to clarify a few things. First, none of this is a defense of the Iranian regime, which is odious. That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them. Second, this is a post fundamentally about American strategy or the lack thereof and thus not a post about Israeli strategy. For what it is worth, my view is that Benjamin Netanyahu has is playing an extremely short game because it benefits him politically and personally to do so and there is a significant (but by no means certain) chance that Israel will come to regret the decision to encourage this war. I’ll touch on some of that, but it isn’t my focus. Likewise, this is not a post about the strategy of the Gulf states, who – as is often the sad fate of small states – find their fate largely in the hands of larger powers. Finally, we should keep in mind that this isn’t an academic exercise: many, many people will suffer because of these decisions, both as victims of the violence in the region but also as a consequent of the economic ripples.
But that’s enough introduction. What I want to discuss here is first the extremely unwise gamble that the administration took and then the trap that it now finds itself in, from which there is no comfortable escape.
The Situation
We need to start by establishing some basic facts about Iran, as a country.
First, Iran is a large country. It has a population just over 90 million (somewhat more than Germany, about the same as Turkey), and a land area over more than 600,000 square miles (more than four times the size of Germany). Put another way Iran is more than twice as large as Texas, with roughly three times the population.
More relevantly for us, Iran is 3.5 times larger than Iraq and roughly twice the population. That’s a handy comparison because we know what it took to invade and then hold Iraq: coalition forces peaked at half a million deployed personnel during the invasion. Iran is bigger in every way and so would demand a larger army and thus an absolutely enormous investment of troops, money and fundamentally lives in order to subdue.
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