The United States has launched a war against Iran of uncertain duration, with almost no public debate and no attempt to articulate to the American people the goals of the operation, how we will measure whether we have achieved those goals, what military strategy we are following to achieve them, or what resources we will have to commit to succeed.
Any president should be expected to provide this information to the American people. And I know from my own experience at the Pentagon and in Congress that doing so is seldom easy. But since launching its airstrikes over the weekend, the Trump administration has offered contradictory, at times flatly false and nonsensical answers to the questions Americans need answers to. This information vacuum isn’t just a communications failure – it reveals the strategic incoherence of the Trump administration’s Iranian adventure.
Strategy involves connecting how you will use the tools at hand – in this case, American military air power – to achievement of your goals. But President Donald Trump and the few administration officials who have spoken publicly have not clearly articulated the operation’s goals, or how they expect airstrikes to achieve them.
Why did we launch these strikes now? Was it Iran’s refusal to agree to Trump’s terms in recent talks over the Iranian nuclear program – the program that Trump promised us just months ago had been “obliterated?” Was it, as anonymous administration officials have suggested, because of intelligence indicating Iran was planning a pre-emptive strike against U.S. forces in the region? That explanation fell apart almost as soon as it was floated.
Or was the goal, as Trump suggested in his announcement video, regime change? And if that is the objective, what is the strategy for getting there? How will stand-off missile and bomb attacks enable the Iranian people to, as the administration apparently hopes, rise up against Iran’s vast security apparatus and oust the regime?
After all, it was not Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who killed 30,000 Iranians protesting his regime in recent months. It was thousands of plain-clothes enforcers, police and militia who have almost as much at stake in the Islamic republic’s survival as Khamenei had. How will air power support unarmed, unorganized shopkeepers and students against this force? Will U.S. aircraft provide close-air support to the people in the streets? How much risk to U.S. aircrews, and Iranian civilians, will we accept?
Regime change in Iran cannot be achieved by decapitation strikes against leadership. Someone must march into the halls of power and oust not just one supreme leader, but thousands of bureaucrats, security officials and clerics, all of whom are ideologically committed to the Islamic revolution. The administration has not even tried to explain how this happens.
And that’s bad news because, if the regime does not change, we have just made the Iranian nuclear threat vastly worse. Put yourself, for the moment, in the shoes of whatever third-string ayatollah takes over for Khamenei. You are very clear on your goal – survival of the regime. You know you have almost 1,000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, most of the way to weapons-grade. What better way to ensure your survival than a crash program to enrich that uranium to 90 percent purity and build a bomb?
“Well,” you may say, “we’ll just bomb their nuclear facilities again.” Absent regime change, that’s a recipe for years of a rinse-and-repeat cycle of Iran pushing for a bomb, the U.S. bombing its nuclear facilities, and Iran starting over again. And we must get the difficult task of finding and successfully striking nuclear program targets right every time. The Iranians only need to succeed in building a bomb once.
Trump’s own statements on Sunday reveal the strategic incoherence. Will we “take over the whole thing” – which seems to be a threat to invade a nation of 93 million people and 630,000 square miles? Or will we “end it in two or three days” – and if so, how does that leave us any closer to regime change or an end to the nuclear threat?
Donald Trump is not the first president to recognize that Iran’s government is run by murderous thugs. Any of the seven presidents who served before this administration could have launched a campaign like this, and I suspect all of them considered it. But they didn’t – because they understood that when you put Americans in harm’s way, you need to be able to explain how their efforts will achieve a strategic purpose that makes us safer. That’s a responsibility the Trump administration has failed to uphold.
Gordon Trowbridge is a former Detroit News journalist and has served in senior positions at the Department of Defense and in Congress. He also worked for the offices of Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Sen. Carl Levin.
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Trowbridge: Trump’s Iran strategy lacks clear goals
Reporting by Gordon Trowbridge / The Detroit News
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