Fabbaist.eth

Critics of the Iran and Venezuela strikes who warn they will lead to another Iraq or Afghanistan are making the wrong analogy, and don’t grasp how much the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan changed the way the US wages war. The closer model is Israel’s “mowing the grass.” Trump is no pacifist, but he criticized the Iraq war because he understood the US public has a low tolerance for casualties, and that soldiers coming home in caskets, or with PTSD and missing limbs, demoralizes voters. Thus his preferred means of hard power is pushbutton warfare: airstrikes, drone attacks and assassinations at a safe distance, with no follow up ground invasion. There’s no plan for an extended occupation, and no ambitions for post-conflict reconstruction, state-building or democratization. It’s a model of coercing cooperation through threats of violence aimed at individual leaders and key security institutions. It presumes regime continuity, not transition, in order to have a negotiating partner with the credible power to enforce the US’s demands. Without an occupation force, this model can’t secure permanent changes in government, only temporary changes in government behavior. In Venezuela, this was done through a reshuffling of leadership, and that depended on identifying and negotiating with a friendly official to take Maduro’s place. So far there doesn’t appear to be any Delcy Rodriguez waiting in the wings in Iran, which makes this attack appear even less likely to change anything. How do airstrikes lead to a voluntary coordinated effort among all state institutions - clerics, military, bureaucracy - to dissolve the state? Given that this is the third airstrike by Trump targeting Iran or Iranian officials, and the first two didn’t achieve a change in hostilities, much less in government, we can expect the regime to remain and for more strikes in the future. This is akin to Israel’s policy of periodic bombardments of Gaza; ostensibly to degrade Hamas’s military capabilities, but more practically to create a regular war spectacle for voters that conveniently distracts from Netanyahu’s corruption scandals. The idea is not to overthrow Hamas but to maintain it as a constant but managed threat that is useful for domestic political purposes. Both the Venezuela and Iran attacks succeeded in knocking the Epstein files out of the news for a while. They killed or kidnapped individual dictators without ending the dictatorships. For the populations who have suffered under both regimes, including exiles, this is cold comfort. The killing of Khamenei sparked celebrations, justifiably so given the tens of thousands his security forces killed in recent months. I wonder though how long the celebrations will continue when it becomes apparent that the same security forces are still in charge, and possibly making some kind of deal with the US, or just the Trump family.

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