Cocky Iran Hawks Forget the History of Blowback

The first band of overconfident war-hungry politicians were elected to the U.S. House in 1810 and 1811. They had a new name: “War Hawks.” Led by Henry Clay, a rare freshman elected Speaker of the House, the Hawks helped to instigate the War of 1812 in part because they believed plucking Canada from the British Empire would be a cakewalk. It would be a “mere matter of marching” predicted former President Thomas Jefferson. They were delusional because, according to historian Donald R. Hickey, they were “too young to remember the horrors of the last British war and thus willing to run the risks of another to vindicate the nation’s rights.” 

Youth cannot explain the weak grasp of history from President Donald Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and their hype squads, who all appear to believe war with Iran’s theocratic and terroristic government will end in tidy fashion, despite all historical evidence to the contrary. 

For example, on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo, Senator Lindsey Graham offered the rosiest of Iran War scenarios:  

It’s not if the regime falls, it’s a matter of when … When this regime goes down, we’re going to have a new Middle East. We’re going to make a ton of money … Venezuela and Iran have 31% of the world’s oil reserves. We’re going to have a partnership with 31% of the known reserves. 

The same day, on CBS’s Face The Nation with Margaret Brennan, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, suggested ground forces would not be necessary to dislodge the current Iranian regime: 

BRENNAN: So your prime minister gave an address Saturday and said to the IRGC: “To those who lay down their arms, no harm shall come. To those who do not, their blood is on their own heads.” If there are no Israeli ground forces, who do you want the IRGC to surrender to? How does that work?  

LEITER: There are many precedents in history where the people themselves, like Romania – they turned their guns around against [Nicolae] Ceaușescu. When people are deprived of freedom, there’s a certain point where they say, enough. And all they have to do is put down their weapons and not participate. 

Left unsaid are the many precedents where the people don’t or can’t so breezily usher in freedom.  

Grassroots “Arab Spring” uprisings during the Barack Obama administration ousted dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, only to see nascent democracies backslide into dictatorships. The toppling of Yemen’s dictator plunged the country into an ongoing civil war with one of the factions, the Houthis, who are backed by Iran. Libya’s dictator for 42 years, Muammar Gaddafi, was killed by his countrymen after Obama secured United Nations Security Council cooperation for a NATO-led bombing campaign designed to protect civilians from threatened genocide. Libya then fractured with power splintered between two rival governments and an array of militias.  

Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks organized by Al Qaeda, sought to democratize Afghanistan and Iraq with military invasion and occupation in concert with State Department-led nation-building operations. Despite early optimism for speedy resolution—with both Afghanistan’s terrorist-affiliated Taliban government and Iraq’s strongman Saddam Hussein quickly deposed after combat began—American troops stayed in Iraq for nine years and Afghanistan for twenty years. Casualty estimates vary but hundreds of thousands were killed in the two wars.  

While the weakly governed Iraq experienced a period when the terrorist organization ISIS seized part of its territory, today the country remains whole thanks to a balky multiparty parliamentary democracy with elements of institutional sectarianism spreading power among Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims and Kurds. Still, according to the democracy monitoring organization Freedom House, “democratic governance is impeded in practice by corruption, militias operating outside the bounds of the law, and the weakness of formal institutions. Increasingly, Iran’s regime has been able to influence politics in Baghdad. State officials and powerful militias routinely infringe on the rights of citizens through legal and extrajudicial means.” 

One could argue that a corrupt, fractious, Iran-friendly democracy is still an upgrade over Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, albeit one that came at enormous human cost. But no such argument exists for Afghanistan. America tired of militarily propping up the country’s corrupt democracy and, thanks to a deal first forged by Donald Trump then carried out by Joe Biden, effectively gave the government back to the Taliban. (Since last month, ominously, Afghanistan and Pakistan have been at war.) 

The Afghanistan example is likely far more relevant to the current situation than the comforting Romanian example cited by the Israeli Ambassador. Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Soviet Union-backed dictator resisting the political and economic reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev. One month after the Berlin Wall fell, the Romanian people revolted. The Romanian army sided with the protesters and so did Gorbachev. After a botched escape attempt, Ceaușescu was quickly arrested, tried, and executed.  

Ceaușescu was not a leader of a theocratic movement with a long history of asymmetric warfare including acts of terrorism, like the Taliban or Islamic Republic of Iran. People with religious fervor and an appetite for violence tend to be tenacious characters, which is why the Taliban kept fighting for two decades until they outlasted America and regained power.  

(In some other Arab countries, dictators suppress radical Islamist groups, and so their removal can give radicals a toehold. This is what happened in Iraq. And since Egypt’s brief affair with democracy brought the Muslim Brotherhood—a group with a violent history—into power, the Obama administration didn’t overly exert itself when the Egyptian military ousted the elected president and authoritarianism returned.) 

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a government similar to Afghanistan’s Taliban regime except after 47 years in power it’s much bigger and more deeply entrenched. The notion that it would fall from American and Israeli air power alone is questionable if not implausible. But even if it did fall, we have no reason to believe its followers would vaporize. Beyond the above examples of determined 21st century Islamists, we also know the history of American meddling in Iranian political affairs and what it wrought.  

Dwight D. Eisenhower, mere months after his 1953 inauguration, authorized a CIA-led coup that ousted Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh—who had the temerity to nationalize Iran’s oil industry. That was followed by a consolidation of power by the monarchial and oppressive Shah. The Iranian people did not forget. It took 26 years, but they overthrew the Shah and brought in the ayatollahs. Right now, Donald Trump, Lindsey Graham, and others are openly talking about taking Iran’s oil. Middle Eastern media have already taken note that Graham is boasting how “we are going to make a ton of money.” American profiteering is not going to happen without backlash, even if that backlash takes time to manifest.  

Far-right political scientist Richard Hanania, a former white nationalist who has run hot and cold on Trump, published a Boston Globe column praising Trump’s Iran strategy for deploying maximum military force while eschewing Bush-style nation-building: 

In the end, the United States had no idea how to import Western institutions and attitudes into poor Muslim societies. Yet this does not mean that American power cannot be used decisively for more limited ends. The US military is bad at nation-building and social engineering, but as we’ve seen recently, it is very good at killing people. 

But what about what happens after the killing part? Hanania argues: 

It is too early to say what will happen, and there may yet be negative consequences for the greater Middle East and perhaps some terrorist attacks elsewhere, like the shootings that just occurred in Austin, Texas. But note that anti-interventionists no longer discuss “World War III” or make such apocalyptic forecasts, which generally depended on the assumption that Russia or China might come to the aid of the target of American intervention. And although a broader regional war is possible, Iran would fight it practically alone against the United States, Israel, and the Gulf Arab states. Trump’s latest gambit may be ill-considered, but through the killing of Soleimani, the decimation of Hezbollah, and our maximum pressure campaign, over time we’ve learned that the Iranian ability to inflict significant harms on the United States is quite limited. 

Hanania—unlike Graham, Leiter, and other cheerleaders—at least acknowledges negative possibilities. Still, there is a lot of ahistoric hand-waving with his argument, downplaying that “there may yet be negative consequences for the greater Middle East and perhaps some terrorist attacks elsewhere” and that “a broader regional war is possible.” No one is arguing that either the Iranian government or a deposed-government-turned-terrorist-insurgency can win a war against the United States outright. But years of terrorist attacks take a toll, on both life and economic stability, and should not treated as tolerable or inevitable.  

The killing part is the easy part. Subsequent nation-building may have been too hard to do, but that doesn’t mean nation-neglecting is going to be more pleasant. 

What is difficult about the problem of an Iranian government led by violent theocrats is that there is no obvious solution. This allows Trump and his allies to make the simplistic demagogic argument that a war of choice is the only reasonable choice. However, as I argued last week, Obama had been successfully pursuing the alternate path of negotiated agreement constraining Iran’s nuclear program and reducing regional tensions. Whether it would have eventually led to a broader moderation from the existing Iran government or a democratic transition will never be known, but before Trump withdrew from the agreement Iran was in compliance and we weren’t in a regional war.  

The hubris of War Hawks led us into the War of 1812, which lasted through 1814, and included a failed invasion of Canada and the burning down of the White House, though we managed to escape falling to the British completely and the public treated the draw like a victory. Ever since this mixed lesson, America has been torn between jingoistic cockiness and pacific skittishness when it comes to war. Trump, as did Bush, is trying to appeal to both sides of that coin, boasting that the spoils of war will come easy without sacrifice. History old and recent reminds us that the early pyrotechnics of a war are not sufficient to make such a case. 

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