Pushing Back On Iran, Part 2: An Overview Of The Strategy
16 February 2018By Kenneth Pollack
Yesterday I laid out my rationale for advocating a more confrontational
American policy toward Iran. Today I want to provide a broad overview of the
strategy as I envision it. For any strategy to be worth its salt, it needs to
be comprehensive and integrated. It's not enough for each piece to make sense
on its own merits. All of the pieces need to work in unison. Seeing the whole
of the strategy is also the only way to understand how to prioritize
objectives and actions designed to attain those objectives. It's also
necessary to understand the sequencing of the various actions which ones
need to come first to enable those that should come later. Finally, gauging
the resources that will be required for the strategy to have a reasonable
prospect of success requires both a detailed assessment of its components and
a broader perspective on the totality of the effort.
So for all of those reasons, the most important next step is to sketch out the
broad brushstrokes of the strategy. In subsequent days, I will go back to some
of the most important or difficult of its components to deal with them in the
depth they deserve.
Critical assumptions
Every strategy, every policy, rests on a set of key assumptions that then
determine the objectives of the wider approach, and the means of achieving
those objectives. It is always a mistake to leave those key assumptions
implicit. Typically, that leads to confusion and goal displacement, where a
country ends up pursuing an intermediate objective as if it were the ultimate
goal. Often in those cases the country loses the ultimate goal as a result.
What's more, if you don't share my assumptions, you probably won't agree with
my proposed course of action.
So here are the key assumptions that inform my approach to pushing back on
Iran.
Iran will fight back. One of the most important things we need to recognize is
that Iran will not just shrug off a more confrontational American strategy. It
will look for ways to counterattack, and in the past it has been reasonably
smart about trying to do so at times and in ways where it has advantages. Iran
has responded to real and imagined American threats in the past with
terrorism, unconventional warfare, and cyber-attacks against the United States
and our allies. The more that we can tie Iran down, put it on the defensive,
and force it to commit its resources in areas where we have the advantage, the
less able Tehran will be to strike back at us. That too necessitates a
coordinated strategy in which we think through where to strike and where to
defend and when to strike and when to defend, which again raises the
importance of sequencing.
Allies are critical. Iran is not mighty, but neither is it weak. It does have
some dangerous weapons at its disposal, weapons whose bite we want to avoid.
Moreover, the American public will want its government to do all of this as
cheaply as possible. I have repeatedly argued that the United States has set
the bar too low when assessing the resources that will be needed to address
Middle Eastern problems, and the result has been that avoidable troubles were
allowed to fester and metastasize, requiring much more expensive cures later.
While I continue to believe that to be the case, including with Iran today, I
do agree that the threat from Iran does not justify a massive commitment akin
to the US reconstruction of Iraq, and therefore it is appropriate to try to
keep our own costs down. That's the first reason that pushing back on Iran
requires strong support from America's allies both those in the Middle East,
and our wider coalition of friends in Europe, Asia, and even Latin America.
The more that they contribute, the less we have to.
But there is another reason that allies are critically important to a more
confrontational strategy toward Iran. The more allied support the US can count
on in implementing such a policy, the more tools we will have available to
employ against Iran and the more protection we will have from Iran's
inevitable responses. Many sanctions will only have an impact on Iran if they
are adopted by large numbers of countries and we don't want unilateral US
sanctions to spark tensions or diplomatic ruptures with other countries,
causing them to fight back against us.
There are some countries that have capabilities related to Iran that we don't.
If we ever feel the need to stir up Iran's unhappy minorities (a topic I will
discuss in greater detail in a later essay), we will need the help of Iran's
neighbors to do so. The Israelis may be helpful in battling Iran in the cyber
and covert realms, as they have in the past. The Saudis, Emiratis, and
Kuwaitis might be helpful with energy markets either to pressure Iran or
prevent Tehran from trying to use oil prices against us. The Australians,
Jordanians, Emiratis, and some of our NATO allies have useful unconventional
warfare capabilities. Likewise, if we are going to contest Iranian control of
Syria or bolster an independent Iraq, the more we have regional and
international support, the more military, diplomatic, and financial ways we
will have to do so.
Our ultimate goal should be to diminish Iranian influence in the Middle East.
As I explained yesterday, we need Iran to stop threatening our allies, stop
exacerbating problems that then require the US to try to ameliorate or end,
and stop taking actions that impede a peaceful transformation toward a more
peaceful and prosperous Middle East. All of that is about reducing Iran's
influence and the harm it causes in the Middle East. That will be challenging
enough, but it is important to specify because it excludes some even more
ambitious, potential goals that the United States could adopt toward Iran, and
that some highly intelligent and accomplished Americans advocate.
As I will discuss in greater detail in a later essay in this series, I feel
that regime change in Iran would be desirable and eventually necessary, but it
should not be the immediate goal of American policy. This Iranian regime has
repeatedly proven itself to be so odious to us, to its neighbors, and to its
people that the world would be best served by its demise. I will also note
that if pursued diligently and competently, a strategy of pushing back on Iran
could help set the stage for eventual regime change in Iran, by siphoning off
the resources and legitimacy of the regime.
But regime change is not guaranteed, nor is it essential to the success of
this policy. Moreover, the American public clearly does not want to have to
invade and occupy Iran, so we should not push back on it in ways that run a
high risk of forcing us to do that. Mucking around in Iran's internal security
or trying to spark insurgencies or a revolution in Iran could do just that. If
we pursue regime change as our near-term goal, Iran will counterattack hard;
they might mount a terror attack so lethal that, like 9/11, it pushes us into
a massive military response. Alternatively, our regime change efforts might
succeed, the country could slide into chaos and civil war, and that too could
push us to invade to stabilize it.
At the other end of the ideological spectrum, we should not make our goal
sitting down with the Iranians and negotiating an end to our confrontation
with them. That too would be desirable, and it too could follow logically from
a well-executed policy of pushing back on Iran (by forcing Iran to make
painful compromises to avoid even greater losses), but it too is not essential
for the United States to secure its interests. In most cases, it will be
obvious when Iran's influence has been diminished and when it is no longer
able to cause problems in the region, and we don't need a formal "surrender"
on their part, or even a clear delineation of what they can and can't do.
Again, nice to have, but not essential and hard to get.
Where (and how) do we push back?
Pushing back on Iran is an inherently offensive, confrontational strategy. So
I want to start out by outlining where (and briefly how) the United States
should seek to confront Iran to hurt it and reduce its influence. At the most
basic level, the United States should look to push back on the Iranians in one
of two categories of areas: (1) places where they are vulnerable and where we
can cause more harm to them than they can to us, or (2) places where our
allies are vulnerable and need help to fend off an Iranian challenge.
If the United States is going to push back on Iran, Syria is the best example
of the first category a place where Iran is vulnerable and where we can do
more harm to them than they can to us. Mostly to protect Hezbollah's control
of Lebanon, Iran has tied itself to the unpopular and incompetent Assad
regime, has invested huge amounts of blood and treasure in Syria (making it
very unpopular with the Iranian people), and has tied its regional prestige to
Syrian fortunes. Although the Iranian-Assad-Hezbollah-Russia coalition has
made major gains in Syria because of the mistakes and neglect of the Obama and
Trump administrations, Iran's commitment and exposure render it highly
vulnerable there. It can't leave, but it has no good, cheap, or quick solution
to the problem. The United States should exploit that predicament by ramping
up American covert assistance to the Syrian opposition to try to bleed the
Assad regime and its Iranian backers over time, exactly the way that the
United States backed the Afghan
Mujahideen as they bled the Soviets in Afghanistan or as the Russians and
Chinese did to the United States in Vietnam.
Iraq is another country of great importance to Iran, which also makes it a
significant potential vulnerability. Of course, Iraq is also more important to
the United States than is Syria, and it is a very different state than Syria.
That means confronting Iran there needs to look very different than it would
in Syria. Ultimately, Iran has made sizable gains in Iraq, but its dominance
is far from complete and there are still many Iraqis including Prime
Minister Haidar al-Abadi who don't want to live under Iranian hegemony. The
more independent Iraq is, the weaker Iran's grip on the "Shi'a crescent" and
the less able it would be to use Iraq (and Syria) as conduits to the rest of
the Arab world. If the US is willing to make a long-term commitment to Iraq,
including a large residual American military force and significant economic
and technical assistance to empower those who would champion Iraqi
nationalism, there is good reason to believe that we could help Iraq become
strong and independent, which would greatly reduce (but not eliminate) Iran's
influence there.
Yemen is even tougher than Iraq, but it is another place where Iranian
influence needs to be reduced. The problem is that the civil war has given
Iran an entrιe that it has used to try to hurt (or just scare) Saudi Arabia,
and it has worked. The right answer for Yemen starts with ending the Yemeni
civil war. That has been hard so far, in part because America's allies have
taken a hardline with the Houthi-led (and Iranian-backed) opposition. It may
well be possible to get a solution to the fighting through diplomacy, if our
allies are willing to compromise on key issues like Yemen's internal
boundaries and a new power-sharing arrangement that would exclude some of
their key proxies. Even if that works, it may require a peacekeeping force to
help enforce the agreement and considerable inducements positive and
negative to the Houthis to convince them to cut ties with Iranians.
In the Persian Gulf itself, it would be useful and important for the US Navy
to more aggressively assert its freedom of navigation and the Law of the Sea.
In the past, the United States allowed the Iranian navies, particularly the
Revolutionary Guard Navy, to get away with frequent, dangerous transgressions
of both. While that avoided crises in the Gulf, it also convinced our allies
that the United States was uninterested in standing up to Tehran, which fed
their fears and encouraged their own overreactions. That should change. The
Iranian navy has already reined in its horns in the Gulf as of last summer,
but if it resumes, the US Navy should make painfully clear to Tehran that its
reckless actions will not be tolerated. If that results in a clash, so be it.
And the United States needs to ensure that when that incident is over, the
Iranians come away convinced that it was a mistake for them to have ever
provoked us.
Where do we hang back?
Pushing back on Iran does not mean aggressively attacking it everywhere across
the board. Again, that's not necessary to achieve the goals I laid out above,
it won't be possible given the limited resources the American public will be
willing to commit (even if there is some discretion there), and just taking on
the task I have outlined above will be enough of a challenge for this
administration at this time. Consequently, pretty much everywhere else, the US
should be mostly on the defensive. That does not mean we should be passive,
especially with regard to our defense of America and Americans, both of which
could well become targets of Iranian retaliation.
That said, it is worth spelling out some specific areas where I think the US
should be thinking more in terms of defense than offense as part of a strategy
of pushing back on Iran.
The first and most obvious arena is the nuclear realm. I was deeply
disappointed by the JCPOA, believing that the Obama administration could have
and should have gotten a much more stringent deal. I also think that the Trump
administration is right about its most important weaknesses: the sunset
clauses that allow Iran to revive its nuclear program in 7 - 12 years, and a
complex inspections process that creates lots of room for uncertainty. (I am
less concerned about Iranian ballistic missiles, which I suspect will become
less and less militarily relevant in the future as UAV technology progresses.)
Nevertheless, I remain convinced that it would be a mistake for the United
States to unilaterally abrogate or violate the agreement. Its flaws
notwithstanding, we cannot lose sight of the fact that (a) the JCPOA has
significantly constrained Iran's nuclear activities, and (b) the rest of the
world strongly favors it and could well break with the United States if we gut
it. Given the critical role of our allies to make push back work, that is a
risk we should not run.
Lebanon is another place I would not take on the Iranians, at least not now
and not until success in other areas has greatly reduced Tehran's hold on
Lebanon. Hezbollah is like a parasite on Lebanon and its long-term health
necessitates removing that parasite, but only when it can be done without
killing the patient. At present, Lebanon is too fragile, and too much under
Hezbollah's thumb. Challenging Iran there is likely to produce one of three
bad outcomes: we lose, we break Lebanon, or both.
Finally, I think the US should actively develop its capabilities to wage both
cyber and unconventional warfare in Iran, but hold off on actively doing so.
These will be seen as existential threats to the Iranian regime and it will
retaliate in extreme ways ways that might do severe damage to Americans and
might demand a bigger American response than we really want to make. (See my
comments about regime change, above). But we want to have those capabilities
at our disposal in case we need to use them. The Iranian regime has a long
history of completely misreading the United States, and when it retaliates it
sometimes goes overboard. As Michael Eisenstadt has cogently argued, the US
should develop these capabilities indeed, the capability to pursue regime
change should we wish to do so and hold it in reserve as a deterrent. Even
more than a nuclear attack or conventional invasion, if the Iranian regime
knows that the United States has a strong capability to threaten its grip on
power through covert means, that is likely to restrain it from becoming too
aggressive in fighting back against a new American pushback strategy.
A look ahead
So that is a quick overview of what I envision this policy encompassing: The
US should wage an Afghan Muj-style covert war against Iran in Syria,
strengthen Iraq so that it can stand independent of Iran, broker a
power-sharing agreement in Yemen to extract our GCC allies and help evict the
Iranians, develop covert and cyber tools against Iran itself but hold them in
reserve, all while looking to preserve but supplement the JCPOA. There is
obviously far more that could be said and others might have useful additions
or alternative versions of the same strategy. In the next few days I am going
to lay out in greater detail what I have in mind for the Syria, Iraq, and
nuclear components of the strategy, as well as come back to the issue of
regime change and the role it should play.
Pushing Back On Iran, Part 4: The Struggle For Iraq
Pushing Back On Iran, Part 3: The Syrian Civil War
Pushing Back On Iran, Part 2: An Overview Of The Strategy
Pushing Back On Iran, Part 1: The Why - Because Iran Treats...
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