The war on Iran has repeated the failures of past US conflicts defined by hubris and ignorance.
After threatening on Tuesday that a “whole civilisation will die tonight”, US President Donald Trump had to backtrack and announce a two-week delay in making good his threat. During this stand-down the US and Iran, along with Israel in the wings, will attempt to negotiate peace. Ironically, while the US maintains an overwhelming military advantage, Iran holds the strategic cards by controlling the Strait of Hormuz and hence retaining great influence on the price of gasoline and diesel fuel and the state of global stock markets.
On the current trajectory, the Iran war will repeat past failures of the US to win or to achieve successful outcomes in the wars it has fought.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, the Vietnam War was lost not on the battlefields which the US military always won, but in American TV and dining rooms, where the succession of lies told about the conflict and the 58,000 body bags of American soldiers finally took their toll.
In Afghanistan, the US also had military superiority, but that was not enough “to win”. Two decades of failed “nation-building” that sucked in billions of dollars produced weak pro-US institutions that could not outlast the Taliban’s resolve.
In Iraq after the 2003 invasion, the US was successful in removing Saddam Hussein’s regime. But that plunged the country into chaos, fuelling instability across the region for the following two decades – to the detriment of the US and its regional allies.
One of the reasons for these failures is that successive US presidents have been unprepared for the rigours of their office when it came to matters of war and peace. They have suffered from a profound lack of knowledge and understanding of the conditions for using force; failure to challenge the assumptions for going to war; hubris in which American intellectual and military superiority was taken for granted; groupthink; and bureaucratic ineptness in not testing all likely outcomes no matter how proficient the US military was. All this led to flawed strategic judgement.
It now appears that these past failures infected the war in Iran. In every war game and exercise played in the Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz was shut. Did no one advise Trump of that contingency or did he not listen? And why did he elect to go to war or in his terms launch an “excursion” into Iran, repeating Russian President Vladimir Putin’s colossal misjudgement that Kyiv would fall in a few days?
The most plausible explanation came from Secretary of State Marco Rubio when he first admitted and then reversed his statement that because Israel was about to strike Iran first, the US had no option other than to join the attack. Preemption is a specious reason for declaring war. The US could have told Israel either to proceed or not.
But the hubris and complete lack of understanding were apparent even before the Israelis rushed Trump to make a decision. His prime negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, lacked technical knowledge on nuclear weapons, which made them ineffective in negotiations with the Iranians. The White House misjudged and grossly exaggerated the time it would take for Iran to field a nuclear weapon and advanced long-range missiles.
Furthermore, the success of the Venezuelan operation and the exaggerated expectation of US military prowess blinded Trump, who readily believed Israel’s narrative that the regime in Tehran was about to collapse.
Now, reality has taken hold. Winning every battle does not win the war. As with the North Vietnamese and the Taliban, Iran’s strategy of winning by not losing bit. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz proved to be the most formidable weapon the Iranians wielded. With 20 percent of global energy, much of the phosphates required for fertilisers, and helium needed for chip manufacturing sealed in the Gulf, the consequences of a drawn-out conflict were clear: economic disaster.
Iran’s metric for success was not the number of US fighter jets downed or US military bases hit. It was the price of gasoline in the US and the dismal state of stock markets.
Even at its start, the war was highly unpopular, with nearly two-thirds of Americans opposing it. High gasoline prices and the risk of surging inflation meant increasing social discontent ahead of a key midterm election in the US.
Now Trump is faced with two unsatisfactory choices. As with President Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam war, Trump can either accept Iran’s conditions to end the war or continue to escalate and get bogged down in a drawn-out conflict – a “forever war”.
For the time being, the US president has opted for British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s notion that “jaw-jaw is better than war-war”. Whichever way Trump decides to go, given that he has trapped himself with no good options, the Iran war will prove to be the most catastrophic decision he will have made as president.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect media’s editorial stance.
