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17 June, 2011

Article 1.  The Guardian
Where the Arab spring will end is anyone's guess
Ian Black
Article 2.  Al-Ahram Weekly
Netanyahu and the Arab spring
Abdel-Moneim Said
Article 3.  The New Yorker
Zawahiri at the Helm
Lawrence Wright
Article 4.  NYT
Does Foreign Policy Matter?
Roger Cohen
Article 5.  Los Angeles Times
European Union: Everywhere you look, a crisis
Timothy Garton Ash
Article 6.  The American Interest
What Would War with Iran Look Like?
Jeffrey White



Article 1.

The Guardian

Where the Arab spring will end is anyone's guess

Ian Black



June 17, 2011 -- Tunisia's Jasmine revolution will always be remembered as the event that triggered the Arab spring, which has shattered the status quo from Libya to Syria and is widely seen as the biggest transformative event of the 21st century so far. But, six months on, progress has been patchy.

Mohammed Bouazizi, the young Tunisian who started it all by burning himself to death in December 2010, had his desperate imitators in Egypt, where revolution erupted days after Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali's flight into Saudi exile; and in Jordan, which has seen sporadic unrest but no uprising.

But if the politics of the Arab spring are local, many factors are common across: young people angry and frustrated at the lack of freedoms, opportunities and jobs, unaccountable and corrupt governments, cronyism and, in a few places, grinding poverty.

Rich and poor alike lived in fear of the secret police. But Tunisia, one of the most repressive regimes, fell quickly. The decision by the army to dump the president and not crush the protests was a vital lesson for the Egyptian generals. The alternative is the cruelty of the dictators' fightbacks in Tripoli and Damascus. Regional differences were ignored in the chain reaction that followed. Yemen's protests were galvanised by the drama in Cairo's Tahrir Square but they also involved tribalism, elite rivalry and a small but alarming al-Qaida presence against a background of resource depletion and fear of state failure. Sectarian tensions were the key to the trouble in Bahrain, where a Sunni monarchy rules over a restive Shia majority.

Islamists, the bogeymen of the west and the enemies of all autocratic Arab regimes, have not - yet - played a significant role. Still, Ennahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt have new opportunities in multi-party systems that will in turn change them. The killing of Osama bin Laden was a timely reminder of the defeat of jihadi ideology in an Arab world being transformed by people power.

Another variable has been the response: French support for Ben Ali was embarrassing; the US was praising Mubarak days before he departed. Muammar Gaddafi had no friends - and the Arab League was crucial in providing a figleaf for UN-sanctioned Nato intervention. Bashar al-Assad, by contrast, has yet to be condemned by the UN for a crackdown that has cost at least 1,300 lives. Bahrain is too strategically important to face more than a rebuke from the US.

Elsewhere in the region, Israel is nervous about the demise of Mubarak. Turkey fears instability in Syria. The Palestinians, eclipsed by drama elsewhere, are trying to learn lessons. Iran's support for the Arab uprisings is sheer hypocrisy given its crushing of democratic protests since 2009.

Now the EU and the US must stop being seen by Arabs as "partners for dictators" in the words of the Tunisian academic Ahmed Driss. Billions of dollars will be needed to support democracy and development.

Tunisia and Egypt fear instability as they face free elections. But the really hard transformational work, as the respected commentator Rami Khouri has observed, "will start in the years after the new parliaments are elected and the complete infrastructure of political governance is forged according to the will of the majority".

There are exceptions. The Saudis are investing to create jobs and defuse dissent. Jordan and Morocco have tried liberal gestures. Algeria's oil wealth and experience of civil war have helped maintain peace there. But it is striking how Arab unrest has become a permanent feature of the global landscape. It is unfinished business wherever it is happening. "The outcome of this tectonic realignment is not just unpredictable but unknowable," said Prince Hassan of Jordan.






Article 2.

Al-Ahram Weekly

Netanyahu and the Arab spring

Abdel-Moneim Said



9 - 15 June 2011 -- Two regionally and globally crucial spectacles have been unfolding in the Arab world this year. The first is the wave of "revolutions", or "uprisings", or whatever they might be called that have variously overthrown regimes, striven to overthrow others, and made yet others so uncomfortable that not a day goes by without them announcing various reforms.

The second spectacle originated in Washington, where US President Barack Obama has launched his latest initiative to kickstart a new Palestinian-Israeli peace process based on the two-state solution defined by the 1967 borders, albeit modifiable by land swaps in order to accommodate the concrete changes that have taken place over the past 44 years.

What happened next will be familiar to all: Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu went to Washington, furious at Obama's announcement. In spite of the fact that both leaders addressed the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Obama's speech being conciliatory while Netanyahu remained inflexible, the bridge between the two leaders remains fragile. However, to complete the picture, there is a need to refer as well to Netanyahu's speech to the joint houses of Congress, also made during his recent visit to Washington.

The standing ovation Netanyahu received there was a palpable reminder of how deeply Israel has worked its way under America's skin and that no differences between the two seem ever likely to ever spoil their intimacy.

The two spectacles combined are planting the seeds for new events in the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. Obama would not have uttered the magic words "1967 borders" if he had not wanted to woo the new Arab revolutionaries and taken some credit for steering their revolution towards the establishment of democracy, the spread of freedom and the advancement of American interests in the region. The approach is perfectly in keeping with Obama's sophisticated style, which contrasts so starkly with his predecessor's crass behaviour.

It is also an approach that is not far from the target. Obama's own appearance on the scene has been a special sort of revolution, and a rich and inspiring one at that. His address in Cairo delivered a revolutionary message, equating what America stands for with "humanitarian" traits. Certainly, no one will dispute the fact that Obama had previously displayed no great fondness for Arab leaders, unlike the Bush family with its various friendships and financial connections with a good number of them. However, it has nevertheless not taken long for Obama's courtship of the Arab revolutionaries to run up against the Israeli wall, one that invariably looms up to create a gulf between the US and the Arab world.

At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that in the modern history of the Middle East, revolution and Arab awakening have long been linked with the Palestinian cause. The recent reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, for example, probably reflected a general desire to take advantage of a propitious historical moment, which then found its reaffirmation in a global willingness to recognise a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders and a US readiness to pronounce the magic words in spite of Israel's anger.

However, the problem may be more complicated still, since the Arab revolutionary movements of the second half of the 20th century, which often built their revolutionary credentials and impetus on their championship of the Palestinian cause, themselves became the enemies of the people, being crowned during the current revolutionary period with infamy and dishonour. This applies to the former regime in Iraq, the regime in Syria and the Mubarak regime in Egypt.

The case of Hizbullah reflects this revolutionary predicament with respect to the Palestinian cause and the struggle against Israel. It suffices to recall which side this group came down upon when it had to chose between the Syrian people, who are presently fighting for their future and for the future of their children, and a regime that has thrived off a conflict in which it has never fired a single shot to liberate the Golan Heights from Israeli occupation, regardless of its political posturing.

All this leads to the question of whether Netanyahu's new position is based on some type of analysis of the ongoing Arab revolutions. Does he believe that they will turn out to be like their predecessors and feed off the Palestinian cause, for example, and has this led him to want to deal firmly with them from the outset? Egypt received a message to the effect that Al-Qaeda was in control of the Sinai and that Israel therefore felt itself free to act as it wishes.

Alternatively, could Netanyahu's thinking be headed in another direction, such that the current Arab revolutions are seeking to rectify the fatal habit of previous revolutions of focussing on external affairs at the expense of domestic needs and that they will therefore seek to avert wars, conflicts and attendant tribulations?

Surely it is no coincidence that a leading Nasserist Arab nationalist and presidential candidate, Hamdeen Sabahi, has stated several times that he has no intention of opening hostilities against Israel and every intention instead of waging war on poverty and fighting for educational and healthcare reforms and other such urgent domestic causes.

Of course, it is difficult to know what is going on in the minds of Israeli decision-makers. But the result seems clear: Netanyahu has decided to mix deterrence with opportunity. Undoubtedly, he believes that the Arab revolutions will not be prepared to move closer to peace on his terms and that they will most likely make the current peace colder than the polar icecaps. However, Israel can live with frigidity. Indeed, the Israeli right has never been keen to make the climate warmer, let alone to turn Israel into a normal country at home with others in the Middle East, a notion that seems to find few takers in Israel.

As is the case with epic narratives, the Arab spring and the Obama initiative are two threads of a story whose coming together does not herald an end, but rather forms one out of many chapters. The fate of this coming together is still difficult to determine. However, there are elements that seem to be propelling it forward, such as the recent French initiative offering to host a Palestinian-Israeli summit meeting, which must be seen against the backdrop of the looming September deadline when the Palestinians and Arabs plan to seek a UN General Assembly Resolution recognising a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.

France is clearly striving to score points for its new more active approach to the Middle East. However, it is also working in the same direction as Obama, which is to dissuade the Palestinians and Arabs from going to the UN in September.

Curiously, all this is unfolding at a time when the Arabs' own collective body, the Arab League, is weaker than ever. No Arab summit has been convened, and the current secretary-general is preoccupied with his own political future in Egypt. Meanwhile, bilateral relations that have long rested on an Egyptian-Saudi footing are in some confusion. There seems to be considerable wavering between the principle that this basis should remain firm regardless of changes in the political regime and the conviction that no basis can remain the same when its constituent components have changed.

The components, whether in Cairo or Riyadh, are changing, but the two sides continue to reach out to the other in the midst of a raging storm.

It is impossible to predict the end of a story having so many different and intricately interwoven threads. Yet, it would be equally impossible to ignore the Palestinian factor at this moment of Arab ferment, as much as it has been impossible at times of Arab stagnation.


Article 3.

The New Yorker

Zawahiri at the Helm

Lawrence Wright



June 16, 2011 -- Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon, has come into his inheritance—Al Qaeda—at a time when the organization is at its nadir. Osama bin Laden, its charismatic founder, is dead, and after some internal debate his No. 2 man, Zawahiri, has taken control. For nearly a decade, bin Laden pushed his followers to come up with a second act to 9/11, but they were unable to match the appalling brilliance of that attack. Now it is up to Zawahiri to salvage an organization that many think (and hope) has drifted into irrelevance. Compared to bin Laden, Zawahiri lacks charisma, but it would be a mistake to underestimate his commitment and his willingness to spill blood. He was hardened by the torture he endured in the three years he spent in Egyptian prisons following the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat, in 1981, and by the savage underground war that he has fought with Egyptian intelligence agencies ever since.  Zawahiri has shown a daring willingness to improvise. He inaugurated the use of suicide bombers with his failed attack on the Egyptian Interior Minister, Hasan al-Alfi, in 1993, although the tactic breaks a fundamental taboo in Islam against the taking of one’s own life. He also introduced the propaganda ploy of the martyrdom video, which would become a signature of Al Qaeda.

Bin Laden needed Zawahiri, not least because of his physical ailments. Although bin Laden did not have kidney disease, as was widely thought, he was often ill; Zawahiri served as his personal physician, and manipulated his position to cement their relationship. Bin Laden also depended on Zawahiri for his organizational skill and the talented men he brought with him. But Zawahiri also depended on bin Laden, whose money, mystique, and connections to wealthy Gulf Arabs gave Al Qaeda an advantage few other terror groups have ever enjoyed. Zawahiri has experience in rebuilding broken terrorist groups; his own organization in Egypt, Al Jihad, was twice wiped out by operational errors, and Zawahiri had to rally the demoralized survivors, even pretending to step aside from power, although he was never really far from the controls. His ultimate solution was to merge Al Jihad with Al Qaeda, making it into an Egyptian body with a Saudi head. Now that bin Laden is gone, the challenge for Zawahiri will be to keep non-Egyptians in Al Qaeda. Members pledged their loyalty to bin Laden personally, not to the organization, so a new round of declarations will have to be made, providing Zawahiri an immediate test of his popularity.  One big difference in Zawahiri’s leadership from that of his predecessor is likely to be a renewed focus on Egypt. Zawahiri’s terrorist career began when he was fifteen years old, when he started a cell to overthrow the Egyptian government. Now the government actually has been overthrown, no thanks to Zawahiri’s efforts. The country is in a tumultuous and formative but also vulnerable moment in its history, which Zawahiri will seek to exploit. He knows that Egypt is the real game in the Islamist contest for power. The future of Egypt will determine much of what happens in the rest of the Arab world. No matter how it turns out, the Egyptian revolution will be seen historically as a bookend to the Iranian revolution in 1979, which added reality to the radical Islamist agenda and inspired so many young Muslims, like Zawahiri, to take up jihad. Iran showed them that they actually could take over a major Muslim country and turn it into a theocracy. Zawahiri was always frustrated that it was a Shiite country that became the first important Islamic theocracy in the modern world. He will devote himself to making Egypt a Sunni replica of the Iranian state, and not the end of a trend that has led so many Muslim countries into fundamentalist dead ends.


Article 4.

NYT

Does Foreign Policy Matter?

Roger Cohen



June 16, 2011— Perhaps foreign policy doesn’t matter in U.S. elections. President George H.W. Bush orchestrated a peaceful unwinding of the Cold War that united Germany within the West. A Europe divided became whole and free. Hundreds of millions of people benefited. They still do. This was one of the finest hours of American diplomacy.   His reward for great achievements on the world stage was to be defeated in the 1992 election. After all, he’d raised taxes. He’d let the size of government grow. Confronted by a grocery store checkout scanner, he looked like a genteel space cadet. So he had his comeuppance from Bill Clinton, who’d got how groceries get bought.

Yes, Americans want money in their pockets that keeps food on the table: to heck with huge events across the oceans. They think foreign policy is for the birds.  Or do they? Americans have an exalted sense of their nation and its liberating mission. That self-image stops making sense if America is not engaged. The authoritative 2010 survey of American public opinion by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that more than 8 out of 10 Americans think it’s either “very desirable” or “somewhat desirable” for the United States to “exert strong leadership in world affairs.”

In the real world that means doing foreign policy. I see Americans torn. There’s a quasi-isolationist urge. They’re tired of wars. They want jobs. They see problems piling up on the home front that they want fixed ahead of any foreign adventures.  At the same time something rankles when they hear talk of American decline and the end of the American century and China rising. They want a president to stand tall for American greatness if only to anaesthetize them against day-to-day hardship.

Republican wannabes sense all this. To judge by the early stages of the 2012 campaign, they think foreign policy might matter after all. They’re trying to cast Barack Obama as a president who has sold America short, an impostor who has ditched the mystical belief in the unique calling of the United States that is American exceptionalism.

So Mitt Romney says Obama takes his values not from the small towns of America but from “the capitals of Europe.” Obama treats Israel the way European countries do — with “suspicion” and “distrust.” He’s offering “European answers to American problems.” He’s projecting a weak United States: “We’re following the French into Libya.” The president is a naïve idealist undermined by his “questioning as to whether America is an exceptional nation.”

For Europe, in the above characterization, read land of feckless socialists on welfare bent on universal health care.

Not to be outdone, Newt Gingrich has decrypted in Obama a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview.

Gingrich wants a “foreign policy that is clear about the evil that we face” — that would be Shariah law among other things — and rooted in this universalist message: “America is still the last, best hope of mankind on Earth.”    As for Sarah Palin, she attributes most of Obama’s problems to what she’s called his “lack of faith in American exceptionalism.”   I have several reactions to this that all fit under the rubric: baloney! First, we’re not in 1990 any longer: America remains dominant but cannot resolve major problems alone and will in the next decade, by some estimates, see China overtake it as the world’s largest economy.   Second, it’s precisely Republican factionalism in Washington that’s stopping the United States from attaining again the greatness Republicans invoke. Remember James Madison’s admonition to “break and control the violence of faction” through a “well-constructed Union.”

Right now factionalism leaves critical budget challenges unmet, stops serious investment in education and research, and leaves America trailing China on the green technologies that will be big job-creators in coming decades. The road to the American future is not “Drill, Baby, Drill!”

Third, it’s just delusional to imagine that any president, Republican or Democrat, confronted by the meltdown of 2008, would not have seen as a core task a retrenchment of U.S. overseas commitments in an attempt to bring them in line with diminished resources.

But with an angry, anxious nation, Republicans are betting that invocations of greatness and dominance, however illusory, will resonate. Bruce Jentleson, a political scientist at Duke University, said, “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, they can’t attack Obama as a wimp, but they will attack him as not being a real American.” Obama, he added, must answer by demonstrating “what this generation of Americans is going to show the world, how it’s going to compete in a global era. Against the illusion of restoration, he must offer adaptation.”

With the U.S. economy wobbling, Obama runs the Bush Sr. risk. He got Bin Laden and has been on the right side of the Arab Spring — what Timothy Garton Ash has called “the most hopeful set of events in the 21st century so far, comparable in scale and potential to 1989.” Americans respond to that kind of hope. They care about foreign policy and see through foreign posturing. What they need now from Obama is a better sense of how their economy can thrive in this changed world.





Article 5.

Los Angeles Times

European Union: Everywhere you look, a crisis

Timothy Garton Ash



June 16, 2011 -- Like an overladen container lorry laboring up a steep hill, the European Union is close to stalling. Greece is the most urgent part of this crisis. Between the fury on the streets of Athens and the continued disunity of decision-makers in Brussels, Berlin, Frankfurt and Luxembourg, the crunch could come any day. But it's not just Greece. In Ireland, Portugal and Spain too, the anger is boiling over, as people feel that the young, the poor and the unemployed are being forced to pay for the selfish improvidence of their politicians — and of the French and German bankers, who loaned profusely where they should not have loaned at all.
Across the Continent, the legions of the indignados, as they are called in Spain, and the aganaktismenoi (the outraged), as they say in Greece, are growing. And it's not just the Eurozone. Every single major project of the European Union is faltering. France and Italy are suggesting that the achievement of the Schengen area, in which 25 European countries have removed border controls, should be chipped away, just because a few thousand people from convulsed North Africa have taken refuge on the Italian island of Lampedusa. Many European countries are already in a panic about the integration of immigrants and people of migrant origin, especially those who are Muslims. Solidarity and social justice, central values of the post-1945 European project, are in retreat almost everywhere as a result of growing inequality and spending cuts to tackle public debt.
In the Arab Spring, Europe faces the most hopeful set of events in the 21st century so far, comparable in scale and potential to 1989; but the Continent's collective and institutional response to this historic opening has been feeble. Even in the most hopeful cases — Tunisia and Egypt — we may have only a few months in which to prevent the Arab Spring becoming an Arab fall. The disappointed hopes of that half of the population that is under 30 would then produce further, larger immigrant surges to Europe. In their own countries, Islamists would exploit the chances and the confusion of semi-freedom.
The European-led military intervention in Libya was always likely to be a slow, difficult grind, but it has painfully exposed Europe's chronic failure to concentrate its military capabilities. Already, some of the European powers involved are running short of munitions. You can understand why U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was scathing about this in Brussels last week. Even enlargement, Europe's most successful project, is close to stalling. In his victory speech after the recent Turkish elections, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan did not even mention the EU. Yes, Croatia will probably join the EU in 2013, and that's good news. But Croatians might be forgiven for wondering what exactly they will be joining.  Retired prime ministers and foreign ministers never tire of attributing this faltering of the European project to the lack of leadership. (Subtext: It was all so much better when we were in charge.) This is true, but less than half the story. For although the quality of European leadership is somewhat poorer than it was a quarter-century ago, the need for it is greater.   Why? Because all the great underlying motivators of the European project back in the days of Helmut Kohl, Francois Mitterrand and Jacques Delors, and even more so in the time of the founding fathers, have faded or disappeared. Those powerful driving forces included searing personal experiences of war, occupation, holocaust, fascist and communist dictatorships; the Soviet threat, catalyzing west European solidarity; generous, energetic American support for European unification; and a West Germany that was the mighty engine of European integration, with France on top as the driver. All these are now gone, or very much diminished. While there are intellectually convincing new rationales for the project, including the rise of non-Western giants such as China, rationales are no match for emotional motivators.  The key to so much of this, especially on the economic side, is Germany. For much of its history, what has become the European Union pursued political ends by economic means. For Kohl and Mitterrand, the euro was mainly a political project, not an economic one. Now the boot is on the other foot. To save a poorly designed and overextended monetary union, the political must ride to the rescue of the economic.  That will require Angela Merkel's leadership. If we are talking about the European economy and currency, Germany is the indispensable power. Only the combination of Germany and the European Central Bank, working in unison, has a chance of calming the mighty markets.
For more than a year now, Merkel has attempted to find the narrow — perhaps nonexistent — line where the minimum that can be done to save the embattled Eurozone periphery meets the maximum she thinks German public opinion will bear. She has then tried to win her Eurozone partners to that course. So far, it has not worked. Now she needs to start from the other end: Work out, with the central bank and other Eurozone governments, what is the best, most credible deal available, and then put all her authority on the line to convince a reluctant German public that this is in the long-term, enlightened national self-interest of Germany. And it is.  For no one has more to lose from the disintegration of the Eurozone than the Continent's central economic power. It may soon be too late.

Timothy Garton Ash, a contributing editor to Opinion, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of European studies at Oxford University.




Article 6.

The American Interest

What Would War with Iran Look Like?

Jeffrey White



July - August 2011 -- The debate over what to do about an Iranian Islamist regime apparently bent on acquiring nuclear weapons has been on or near our front burner for at least six years, and is now almost a settled feature of the policy landscape. There is general agreement in the United States on two points. First, an Iranian nuclear weapons capability is “unacceptable”, as both the Bush and Obama Administrations have put it; and second, we prefer getting to an acceptable outcome without using force. The debate gets testy when we consider that means short of force, such as sanctions and covert technical sabotage, might not work.

It may be too simple to reduce the argument to just two sides—those who fear the regime’s acquisition of nuclear weapons more than the consequences of a war to prevent it, and those who fear the consequences of a war above all else—but in this case simplicity has the virtue of capturing the essence as observers ponder which set of unpalatable risks they would rather run. What is remarkable, though hardly surprising, is that the two sides usually put forth very different assessments of what using force would entail. Those who fear Iranian nukes above all else tend to minimize the risks of using force, while those who fear war tend to exaggerate them. Neither side, however, has persuasively spelled out the reasons for their assessment, leading one to suspect that much of the argument rests on less than rigorous analysis.

What would an honest assessment of the risks of military conflict with Iran look like? How should we think about it? These are difficult questions even for those who are not partisans of one side or the other. Wars are notorious for yielding unintended and unexpected consequences; for reasons explained below, a war against Iran is even harder than usual to bound analytically.

Complexity, Uncertainty and War

Our first consideration in analyzing the likely course of war with Iran is that a U.S.-led attack would be merely the first phase of a war, the opening act of an extended drama whose scenes would unfold, not according to any script, but to an emergent logic of its own. Given the political context in which military engagement would rest, even a minor attack would likely become a major test of strength involving not only the United States and Iran but also a host of allies and associates. It is therefore disingenuous to try to frame military action against Iran as a simple “raid” or even a broader “operation.” We are talking here about war, with attendant potential high costs to all combatants in terms of military casualties, civilian damage and economic disruption.

At least three concepts are key to any coherent discussion of a U.S.-Iranian military engagement: complexity, uncertainty and war itself. By complexity we mean the number of moving parts in a given situation: actors, processes and the connections among them. By uncertainty we mean structural uncertainty—that is, not just ignorance of the magnitudes of agreed casual factors, but the ignorance of the causal factors themselves, and their mutual relations. For example, not only may the U.S. government not know, say, the technical status of the Iranian nuclear program, or the actual state of readiness of Iranian forces. It may not know (or worse, have wrong) the decision-making and implementation protocols of the Iranian government, how the Iranian people and military would react to an attack, what Tehran would ask its allies and proxies to do, and what in fact they will do.

Enemy disinformation, as well as simple error, can also set us on the wrong track. The enemy acts not just on the battlefield but also through an ability to influence our understanding of the situation by means of denial and deception. In this and other ways complexity reinforces uncertainty.1 The large number of actors involved in the Iranian situation would make it very difficult to discern clearly what is happening once the shooting starts, and the scene would remain very fluid as long as the fight persisted, and very likely for a good while afterward.2

As to the meaning of war, it may hardly seem worthwhile to probe something so self-evident, except that it is not self-evident anymore, if it ever was. A simple definition of war is the waging of armed conflict against an enemy, but this is too limited a concept in the 21st century. War in our time involves simultaneous conflict in the military, diplomatic, economic and social domains on four levels: political, strategic, operational and tactical.3 While a war with Iran might begin in the military domain, it would likely expand to others, and while it might begin at the operational or tactical level it would soon encompass strategic and political levels as well.

How these twin expansions would take place has everything to do with context. All wars have one. Would a U.S.-Iran war break out during a protracted diplomatic process, or in the absence or abeyance of one? Would it happen during a period of increasing tension and military readiness, or out of the blue, after one party thinks that the dangers of war have subsided? Would the U.S. government assemble a broad “coalition of the willing”, just a few close allies-in-arms at the ready, or go it alone, even actively dissuading Israel from joining an attack? What would the domestic political situation be in the United States? Would there be an internal political consensus to act, or would there be an active, acrimonious debate? Would the American people be prepared for the aftermath of an initial attack, including rising oil prices and falling stock values? What would the economic situation be like in the United States and beyond? The answers to these questions would have a substantial impact on the war’s course, conduct and outcome.4

Whose War, for What Purpose?

Perhaps the most critical contextual element concerns how senior U.S. decision-makers, the presumed initiators of war in this case, would construe their war aims.5 These aims must somehow affirm that force can be employed to achieve reasonable political and strategic objectives, but those objectives could range from the limited to the expansive. Three sets of objectives come readily to mind.

First, a war could aim to simply delay the Iranian nuclear weapons program through the physical destruction of key facilities and human assets: a Peenemünde option, so to speak.6 Second, war could aim to effectively end the Iranian nuclear program by inflicting broad damage on its components and other key regime assets, military, infrastructure and leadership, combined with the threat to re-strike as necessary: a submission option. Third, war could aim to topple the regime through a concerted campaign against its assets and supporting mechanisms, coupled with support to its presumably less WMD-desirous opponents: a regime change option.

The U.S. government has military options corresponding more or less to these aims. A Peenemünde option would presuppose a narrowly focused, short duration strike largely limited to nuclear facilities. It would aim to inflict serious damage, but also to restrict the scope of conflict. Such an attack would rely on U.S. stealth systems, electronic warfare, cruise missiles and air power. U.S. allies could play a supporting role, especially in dealing with an Iranian response, but American forces would carry the brunt of the action.

A submission option would call for a sustained air and naval campaign against nuclear associated facilities, air defense systems, command centers, offensive missile forces, naval forces and the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Republic (IRGC), the regime’s praetorian guard and shock troops. This campaign would aim to severely damage the nuclear program, limit Iran’s ability to defend against the attack (and subsequent restrikes, if necessary) and reduce its capabilities for post-attack retaliation.

A regime-change option would require a broad military offensive that could include nuclear facilities, air defenses, Iran’s retaliatory capabilities, leadership targets, regime supporters, and national infrastructure and economic targets. This could include putting some forces on the ground to collect intelligence and neutralize specific targets that are difficult to strike effectively with air power. No large-scale ground operations are likely, but they cannot be ruled out at some levels of conflict and in some scenarios, such as those that posit a need to open and secure passage through the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf.

In general, the more expansive a war’s goals as a plan escalates from strike to campaign to broad offensive, the greater the force needed to achieve those goals, the greater the uncertainty in achieving them, and the greater the consequences of both success and failure. Moreover, a war’s goals at the outset of conflict may not remain stable. Early sudden successes or unanticipated failures can lead to the escalation of initially limited goals, particularly if terminating hostilities proves difficult. Lateral expansion as well as escalation is also possible: Iranian leaders might surrender or agree to a truce but be unable to enforce a similar decision on Hizballah leaders or terror agents around the world. This leads to yet another layer of complexity and uncertainty: Whose war would this be?

A U.S.-Iranian war would probably not be fought by the United States and Iran alone. Each would have partners or allies, both willing and not-so-willing. Pre-conflict commitments, longstanding relationships, the course of operations and other factors would place the United States and Iran at the center of more or less structured coalitions of the marginally willing.

A Western coalition could consist of the United States and most of its traditional allies (but very likely not Turkey, based on the evolution of Turkish politics) in addition to some Persian Gulf states, Jordan and perhaps Egypt, depending on where its revolution takes it. Much would depend on whether U.S. leaders could persuade others to go along, which would mean convincing them that U.S. forces could shield them from Iranian and Iranian-proxy retaliation, or at least substantially weaken its effects.

Coalition warfare would present a number of challenges to the U.S. government. Overall, it would lend legitimacy to the action, but it would also constrict U.S. freedom of action, perhaps by limiting the scope and intensity of military operations. There would thus be tension between the desire for a small coalition of the capable for operational and security purposes and a broader coalition that would include marginally useful allies to maximize legitimacy.

The U.S. administration would probably not welcome Israeli participation. But if Israel were directly attacked by Iran or its allies, Washington would find it difficult to keep Israel out—as it did during the 1991 Gulf War. That would complicate the U.S. ability to manage its coalition, although it would not necessarily break it apart. Iranian diplomacy and information operations would seek to exploit Israeli participation to the fullest.

Iran would have its own coalition. Hizballah in particular could act at Iran’s behest both by attacking Israel directly and by using its asymmetric and irregular warfare capabilities to expand the conflict and complicate the maintenance of the U.S. coalition. The escalation of the Hizballah-Israel conflict could draw in Syria and Hamas; Hamas in particular could feel compelled to respond to an Iranian request for assistance. Some or all of these satellite actors might choose to leave Iran to its fate, especially if initial U.S. strikes seemed devastating to the point of decisive. But their involvement would spread the conflict to the entire eastern Mediterranean and perhaps beyond, complicating both U.S. military operations and coalition diplomacy.

It seems fairly clear then that a conflict with Iran is unlikely to be an isolated event in which the U.S. strikes, Iran retaliates, and it’s over—with Iran either left with a viable nuclear program or not. War is far more likely to be a series of actions played out over time at varying levels of intensity and with a strong potential for escalation. Nor can war with Iran be limited to military action; it will extend to the diplomatic, economic and social domains. U.S. decision-makers might prefer a limited war that would privilege U.S. military and technical advantages, but Iran can force a broader conflict, where it can employ its own political, economic and social means of waging war, including terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and against U.S. interests abroad. The challenge for the United States would be to conduct the conflict so that the longer and broader the war, the more Iran would lose. That objective should affect how the U.S. government would fight in all four domains.

This means that even if the shooting starts at the military tactical or operational levels, the United States or a U.S.-led coalition must plan for all four levels of war and organize itself to ensure unity of command and purpose across those levels. It will, for example, find itself involved in a “secret war” of terrorist attacks and special counterterror operations outside the main theater of conflict. It will find itself in a “political war” involving Iranian and allied diplomatic and information operations to weaken support from other states and actors for the U.S. coalition and mobilize support for Iran. It will find itself in an “economic war” featuring Iranian efforts to disrupt the oil market.7 A “social war” would involve appeals to Islamic solidarity and attempts to weaken popular support for adversary governments through influence operations and attacks aimed at civilians. In such a broad and protracted contest, the United States might not enjoy a favorable balance of advantages. It is by no means clear, either, that the U.S. government is structured to effectively prosecute such a war, or that its intelligence capabilities are oriented properly toward supporting it.

Given these caveats and complexities, it seems to follow that if the United States chose to attack Iran, it would do so in ways that would prevent Iran from expanding the conflict into areas where it held an advantage. The reasoning might go something like this: Since the Iranian regime has many ways to widen a war into domains that do not favor the United States, the best option is to execute regime-change before the regime can open its bag of tricks. Or it might go like this: Start small, but if the Iranians escalate the war, shift immediately to a regime-change option before they can succeed. Almost needless to say, these are hard-to-control and high-risk approaches. A decapitation strategy, we know, did not fare so well in March 2003 against Iraq, and it would probably be harder to pull off against a more deeply institutionalized polity like Iran.

As for a “start small” approach, let’s suppose that the war begins with a limited air and naval operation. Iran could respond in a limited “tit-for-tat” way. But the regime might conclude that the operation is intended to remove it from power (or succeed in doing so unintentionally); if so, it might respond with a high level of violence along several axes of capability. There is simply no way to predict with confidence how radicals in Iran would respond to an initially limited U.S. attack. We must base our predictions largely on what the leadership says, the Iranian regime’s history and our limited intelligence on the regime’s internal dynamics.8 All this is subject to interpretation by experts employing various explicit or implicit models, the most prominent of which casts the regime as a “rational actor” that calculates risks and rewards like any Western state. In this model the highest goal is regime survival, a notion that doesn’t necessarily apply to the Iranian clerical regime. Clerics, even Christian ones from an earlier age, have been known to take their otherworldly prerogatives seriously.

All we can say, then, is that the regime would not try to martyr itself, nor would it be passive. Most likely, Iran would seek to prolong and expand the war, attrite U.S. forces and morale, and weaken the resolve of coalition members. Iran has the means, methods and allies with which to respond in this fashion, and it has made clear that it would use them.9

Important Iranian conventional war assets include short- and medium-range missiles; strike aircraft; missile-equipped naval combatants and small boats; naval mine-laying capabilities; regular army and IRGC special forces; and air defense and coastal defense missiles. These conventional capabilities provide Iran a substantial ability for a local fight in the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf and along its borders.10 Iran “leans” on the Persian Gulf states from a military and political perspective. Shi‘a populations in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia could be a useful resource and environment for terrorist and irregular operations.

While the Iranian military is at its most dangerous close to its frontiers, we are not “safe” from it anywhere. Missile systems (principally the Shahab 3 variants and Sejjl types) allow Iran to strike targets throughout the Middle East, including population centers, military facilities, infrastructure and U.S. forces based in the region.11 Iranian missile numbers and launchers are limited, but Iran has other means of waging a global conflict, including its allies. For instance, Iran would likely attempt to induce Hizballah to attack Israel. Likewise, Hizballah would expect Iran to assist it and any conflict with Israel. Either case could eventually involve Syria.

Hizballah can now strike targets throughout Israel. Its missiles and rockets are also accurate enough to hit military installations and other important facilities, and it can fire as many as 500–600 per day. Hizballah also has the ability to conduct terrorist or special operations against civilian, military and infrastructure targets outside the immediate theater of war. Sheikh Nasrallah has plausibly threatened to attack shipping in the eastern Mediterranean in the event of a conflict with Israel.12 If Hizballah were to gain access to Syria’s P-800 Yakhont supersonic cruise missile system—a distinct possibility—it could potentially strike targets as distant as 300 kilometers from the Lebanese coast.

Syrian military forces are optimized and deployed for war with Israel, so it would have only a limited ability to directly assist Iran in a conflict with the United States. Syria’s missile systems could target military sites, logistics facilities and airfields in Israel. Syria’s Yakhont coastal defense cruise missile system gives it an enhanced capability to threaten naval and merchant vessels in the eastern Mediterranean.

Hamas is also part of this threat environment, although its offensive and defensive capabilities are much more limited than Hizballah’s. Hamas’s offensive capabilities rest on mortars and rockets of gradually increasing range, bringing more of central and southern Israel under threat with every upgrade. Hamas can now reach central Tel Aviv and beyond Beersheba in southern Israel.

Iran will likely supplement this proxy war by exploiting “images of victory”—such as sinking a U.S. naval unit or displaying U.S. casualties and prisoners to undermine support for the U.S. action and bolster its own supporters.

U.S. conventional military capabilities, especially combined with those of its likely allies, are of course far superior to those of Iran. In many recent years the size of the U.S. defense supplemental alone exceeded the entire Iranian defense budget. But a fight with Iran would not be a fair or clean fight. Winning in any meaningful sense might prove costly.

Escalation

If Iran’s advantage lies in broadening and widening a conflict once begun, how might we expect its leaders to go about it? At least three types of escalation are open to Tehran: horizontal, vertical and domain.

Horizontal escalation involves the spread of hostilities from beyond the immediate area of conflict to additional geographic areas and political actors.13 Iran’s means and methods, as discussed above, give it the ability to escalate horizontally within the Middle East region and beyond to include Europe and the United States.

Vertical escalation involves the employment of new or increasingly potent weapons systems, attacking new types of targets, or introducing additional types of forces into the conflict.14 What begins as essentially a fight between U.S. and allied air and naval strike assets and Iranian air defense assets could be quickly expanded by Iran to the use of offensive missile systems and naval surface and sub-surface forces in retaliation. Iranian escalation to the employment of WMD (if a war occurred after an Iranian breakout) seems unlikely short of an imminent threat to the regime, but that threat would be hanging in the air as fighting escalated.

Domain escalation refers to the expansion of the conflict from the purely military domain to the diplomatic, economic and social domains, in which Iran has some advantages.

In summary, an attack on Iran could produce dynamics that would push either or both sides to escalate the conflict even if neither had an interest or an initial intention to do so. Iranian civilian casualties, for example, could provoke Iran to step up its response. This becomes more likely as the scale of a U.S. attack increases. Downed U.S. aircrews could lead to search and rescue operations that could become significant military actions in their own right. The need to restrike targets that were missed or inadequately damaged could also prolong the conflict and involve additional forces. As the conflict developed, internal and external political pressures could press both antagonists to escalate the fighting.

On the other hand, there may also be countervailing pressures. A very successful operation could cause Iran to seek a rapid exit, at least from the military aspect of the war. So, too, could increased domestic unrest within Iran. International political pressure brought about by economic disruption of the oil market and fears of military escalation could work to restrain the United States. But we cannot rule out the possibility of escalation, and that knowledge should reinforce the need for clarity of purpose and a full understanding of the risks involved before we pull the trigger.

How It Ends

Just as we cannot rule out escalation, we cannot rule out the harmful protraction of a war. Every war has to end, but how it does so is no simple matter. Even if it were soundly defeated, Iran could complicate the endgame. It’s not simply a matter of our declaring “mission accomplished” and bringing the troops home. As retired Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege writes:

Although Sun Tzu warned statesmen and generals many centuries ago that long wars benefit no one, they continue to occur, and for some very fundamental human reasons. Statesmen and generals who start wars commit themselves to worthy war aims that are expressed far too specifically—and too soon—in order to get the polity on board. Then they conceive of a strategy based on what they think they know about their capabilities and the situation. They begin taking concrete steps along the path that they think will get them to that end. They learn far too slowly that what they initially thought they knew was in fact wrong or no longer relevant. . . . Things can get much more convoluted by adding allies, different influential actors among the polity, and multiple adversaries. This is why wars are easier to get into than out of.15

Knowing when to end a war relates to war aims and measures of success. A war’s aims should be definitive enough so that success can be measured in some clear way. This is easiest to do where the aims concern discrete things such as the destruction of material targets. Measuring success becomes harder as aims become more political and psychological, such as weakening or toppling a regime, encouraging opposition or deterring further action. Then, too, war aims can expand as fighting escalates or broadens. In a situation in which Iran has retaliated strongly and managed to inflict losses (especially civilian losses) on the United States or its coalition partners, we should expect to hear calls to inflict more damage, to punish the regime and its forces, to bring a “decisive” end to the conflict.

Short of inflicting a total defeat on Iran, an outcome that seems scarcely conceivable, exiting the war could be challenging if Iran chooses to fight on in some form of asymmetric conflict. We might then have to compel Iran to quit, and that could potentially require the application of force well beyond what was originally agreed upon within the United States or with coalition partners. Even then, if the Iranian regime survives at all, it is likely to declare victory, and many of its supporters would believe it. How or when a war with Iran would actually end is therefore no easy topic to nail down. Any attack on Iran of sufficient scale to significantly damage its nuclear program would have rolling consequences both in the short and long term. After the last bomb falls there will be a new reality in the region and beyond.

In the short term, there would be consequences in the military, diplomatic, economic and social domains. The intensity and locus of these consequences would depend on the outcome of the attack and conflict, but there would be “battle damage” in all domains. Short-term consequences would likely include a tense and unstable military situation (unless the conflict ended cleanly) that would require the commitment of forces for monitoring and reacting to emergent threats; and also a potential political crisis in the region propelled by instability and uncertainty about the future, including residual Iranian capabilities to retaliate directly or indirectly.16 The oil market would remain in shock for some time after an attack. Naval mines, wartime damage to facilities and irregular attacks on facilities or tankers would see to that. Social turmoil would be likely as various population groups react to the attack and subsequent conflict. In short, there would be no bright line ending the war in the economic, diplomatic and social realms.

To turn to the long-term consequences, Iran would almost certainly remain a major player in its region. Its adjustment to the war and its outcome would have a major role in shaping regional realities. A beaten, humiliated but still defiant Iran with essentially the same political system and approach to the region and the world would be a long-term, growing danger similar to Iraq after the First Gulf War (or Germany after World War I). This would extend beyond the military to include dangers in the other domains.

The first conclusion we should draw from this exercise is that the U.S. government should be prepared for a long and difficult conflict if it ultimately decides it must attack Iran. An attack might end quickly with few complications if Iran acts “rationally.” We may not like what that means, however: One “rational” ending for the Iranians would be to accept their losses, declare “victory” because the regime survived, lick their wounds, prepare for indirect retaliation, and resume nuclear activities on a clandestine basis. But a war might not end cleanly, and the U.S. administration could find itself in a messy and protracted conflict. This suggests the need for both an expansive approach to net assessment and deep and broad preparation not just of the military but also of the “home front” and the economy, for Iran may choose to fight on these fronts as well as within its own borders and in the region.

How well prepared is the United States for this kind of fight? This is at least in part a question of national or societal resilience. If all options are on the table, as both Bush and Obama Administration spokesmen have insisted, are preparations for employing all options being made ready? If not, then Iran may decide that some of the options on the table lack credibility.

The second conclusion we should take from this discussion is that, in attacking Iran, we would be trading one set of risks for another. Any option we choose, even choosing not to choose, will have political as well as military-strategic consequences. As hard as it is to know the consequences of war, it is just as hard to know the consequences of a decision to “learn to live” with a nuclear-armed Iran. Both courses are fraught and logically open-ended. Thus the fear of potentially negative consequences from a war should not necessarily rule one out. Winston Churchill, reflecting on British policy before World War II, wrote:

If the circumstances are such as to warrant it, force may be used. And if this be so, it should be used under the conditions which are most favourable. There is no merit in putting off a war for a year if, when it comes, it is a far worse war or one much harder to win.17

In any case, if the United States decides to attack Iran it should certainly look before it leaps and prepare itself for a hard landing. Above all, U.S. leaders should not underestimate the scope or misread the broad nature of war and should therefore organize the U.S. government in advance to prosecute it coherently. In light of how we have fared with whole-of-government approaches and unity-of-command issues in Iraq and Afghanistan, this is clearly a requirement we need to take seriously.



Jeffrey White is a defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former senior U.S. intelligence officer.





























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