Oops we did it again - trying to bomb our way to victory in Iran

By: Percy Wegmann

We once again find ourselves at war in a country thousands of miles away. As usual, we’re at war without Congress having declared it, and since Congress didn’t declare it, the President hasn’t made a formal case for it. Instead, he’s given us a buffet of reasons that change almost daily. But, there’s a theme; Iran’s regime is bad, they sponsor terrorism, threaten the very existence of our ally Israel, sponsor terrorist groups, have been implicated in a plot to assassinate our President, and murder their own people for protesting against the government. Wouldn’t we all be a lot better off if that regime were no longer in power? Sounds like time for regime change!

Despite a Congress that long ago abdicated its war making responsibility to the President, Donald Trump has some constraints; he ran as an anti-war candidate, specifically campaigned against our disastrous invasion of Iraq, and faces an electorate that has little appetite for putting American boots on the ground. So, he finds himself reaching for the time-honored technique of using our air superiority to bomb the another country into submission. Unfortunately, this never works.

I learned this back in the 90s thanks to the work of University of Chicago professor Robert Pape. His book “Bombing to Win” looked at the history of strategic bombing campaigns and found that bombing by itself never achieved its political objectives. In WW II, Germany’s bombing of the UK and Allied firebombing of Germany and Japan inflicted massive industrial damage and civilian casualties, but they failed to achieve submission. If anything, they strengthened the enemies’ resolve. The war in Europe didn’t end until American and Soviet tanks rolled into Germany, and it didn’t end in the Pacific until the US dropped atomic bombs and Russia promised to join the ground war (an often overlooked detail). Let’s also not forget that after Japan’s surrender, US troops occupied Japan until 1952. We tried strategic bombing again during the Cold War, first in North Korea and later of Vietnam. In both cases, massive bombing campaigns failed to defeat our communist enemies. History’s lesson is clear - if we want to subdue a regime politically and change it in a permanent way, we need boots on the ground.

Addressing the current conflict, Robert Pape talks about three stages of what he calls the “escalation trap”.

In stage 1, we celebrate our tactical successes; we’ve assassinated lots of Iranian leaders, decimated their navy, crippled their missile launches and dramatically reduced their drone activity. Hurray!

In stage 2, we recognize our strategic failures; despite everything we’ve done, the Iranian regime is still in charge, and Iran has achieved de facto control over oil shipments transiting through the Strait of Hormuz, accounting for 20% of the world’s total liquid petroleum products. This doesn’t require Iran to achieve military superiority, it just requires Iran to deploy enough drones and missiles to keep the Strait hazardous to civilian shipping. This is asymmetric warfare of a similar kind that defeated us in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. No matter how much damage we do, we won’t win because we’re not setting the terms of victory. If Trump’s international plea for help is any indication, we’re at or near this stage now. Oh oh!

Stage 3 is when the escalation trap springs. Rather than accepting defeat and backing down, we tend to deepen our involvement, for example by putting boots on the ground. LBJ did this in Vietnam, Bush and Obama did it in Iraq and Afghanistan. I dearly hope that this time will be different, that the unpopularity of this war and Trump’s short attention span will combine to get us to back off, but as Pape pointed out in a recent interview on UnHerd, the war may be out of our hands now; Israel has its own agenda, and Iran may very well seek to press its strategic advantage and extract concessions from us before agreeing to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

If we do escalate, we face a protracted war with similar problems as Vietnam and Afghanistan. While we hold a decisive advantage in population and power, we have what my old professor John Mearsheimer would call an imbalance of resolve. Iran is not, and never was, an existential threat to us, but if we invade, we will be an existential threat to them; in a fight that means relatively little to us and everything to them, they have the upper hand.

Ron Paul warned us years ago to avoid wars of choice, and he specifically warned against a war of choice in Iran. Make no mistake, this is a war of choice, and the worst is likely still head of us.