The US has hit 85 targets in Iraq and Syria with more to come in response to last weekend’s killing of three US reservists by Iran-backed militia and it took no time for critics to declare the action of US President Joe Biden’s administration as too weak to deter further attacks.
They are right about that, but the belief that the answer is to bomb Iran itself is magical thinking. Deterrence is too often seen just as a question of being tough enough: The bigger the threat or harder the hit, the greater the deterrent.
However, that is as likely to force an opponent to scale their attacks up as down, because for deterrence to work, what you do is no more important than what the other side is thinking, or as a RAND Corp study on the issue put it, you have to understand your opponent’s “interests, motives, and imperatives” and make use of those.
In Iran’s case, the imperatives are clear, and regime survival is at the top of the pile. So to back down in the wake of any US attack, the clerics in Tehran would have to believe their rule was more at risk from striking back than from appearing weak to a population that loathes it. That is anything but clear. We also know that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wants the US and Israel out of the Middle East, allowing Iran to take up what he sees as its rightful role as the region’s dominant power, because he has been telling that to the world for decades.
From Tehran’s point of view, it has been making great progress on that score ever since the US did it the enormous favor of invading Iraq and removing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein whose Sunni-dominated regime fought a grueling war with Iran from 1981 to 1988. The Israeli and US responses to Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7 last year have been another gift. With Saddam gone and Shiite allies in charge in Baghdad, Iran’s immediate priority is to get the US out of Iraq and take control of a neighbor that both produces and exports more oil than Iran does itself. It is very close to succeeding.
Despite losing elections to a multi-ethnic coalition and
westward-leaning government in 2021, Iran and its proxies used their control of the Supreme Court and other Iraqi institutions to topple the government and take over a year later.
As Michael Knights and a team monitoring Iraq have said in a report for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Iran-backed militias have been busy since installing their own people in the intelligence, security and other key services, as well as at the revenue-critical oil ministry.
Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani represents a coalition of mainly pro-Iran Shiite parties, and before Hamas set the region ablaze on Oct. 7, he was getting ready to negotiate the departure of the remaining US troops from Iraq.
The umbrella group that claimed responsibility for the Jan. 28 drone strike on US forces at the border between Jordan and Syria, Islamic Resistance in Iraq, includes Khatai’b Hezbollah, one of the Iraqi militias closest to Iran. At least some of its fighters get state salaries and it has commanders in the Popular Mobilization Forces, or Al-Hashd al-Shaabi, a consolidation of mainly pro-Iranian militias that are now part of the regular Iraqi military. So it should come as no surprise if — as the Iranian news agency Tasnim reported — the PMF was among the targets the US bombed on Friday. It is in effect an Iraqi version of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in training.
Iraqi groups that the US considers terrorist organizations, and are armed by and closely aligned with Iran, are close to capturing the state. The few thousand US troops left in Iraq are inherently vulnerable. Still more so the few hundred in Syria. To think that Tehran and its proxies would not pursue that advantage until the US presence is gone is naive. Their campaign merely accelerated under cover of the war in Gaza, under which any violence against the US or Israel could be sold to much of the world as a just cause. The attacks would no doubt continue once the US airstrikes blow over, or at some later time convenient to Tehran, because they contribute to a core Iranian foreign policy goal. That makes hitting Iran directly look like a natural alternative.
Some have pointed to the example of operation Praying Mantis in 1988, when the US Navy pounded Iranian naval vessels and oil platforms, to deter it from laying sea mines, after one damaged a US warship. It was a great example of when a muscular deterrence policy has worked.
Yet that does not mean it would work again today, against a much stronger Iran and in a radically different geopolitical situation. In 1988, Iran was exhausted by war with Iraq and, genuinely, isolated internationally. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini considered the soon-to-collapse Soviet Union as a lesser Satan, because of its atheism and war in neighboring Afghanistan. China was impoverished and absent from the Middle East, and there was no Axis of Resistance for Iran to deploy as a force multiplier abroad. The US, meanwhile, was near the height of its power.
Today, Iran has built up a large arsenal of drones and ballistic missiles, with ranges of 1,500km and perhaps beyond, as well as an as yet untested, but on paper sophisticated air defense system. It has proxies it can call on across a potential battlefield that stretches from Yemen in the south, to Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. It is internationally isolated only in Western imaginations. China has moved in to replace European investment, while Russia has become a key security partner, supplying high-end combat jets and other technologies. In Iraq, a US$264 billion economy that dwarfs those of Lebanon and Syria combined, the IRGC is trying to replicate for its proxies the industrial and energy empire it built at home. In this context, attacking Iran directly would be more likely to get the exposed US troops in Iraq and Syria killed.
Knight’s West Point study found that there has been just one fatal attack on US forces among more than 160 since October last year, because many were performative. With gloves off that would change. The US, of course, still has vastly superior force should it come to open warfare, which is why Tehran wants to avoid it. Yet it also knows the reluctance of Americans to get involved in yet another major Middle Eastern conflict, and for a deterrent strike to work the Iranians would have to believe Washington was willing to go all the way.
If the US wants to put Iran back in a box, it would have to start by either withdrawing or reinforcing its troops in Iraq and Syria to make them safe. There are other, less satisfying financial, cyber and other tools the US could use to put pressure on the Iranian regime.
Whether those would be able to change its behavior after more than 40 years of trying is uncertain. However, together with a rolling campaign of airstrikes against Iran’s proxies across the region, and a deal that brought a sharp reduction in casualties in Gaza to remove Tehran’s cover, they are worth a try. That would have a better shot at success than bombing Iran, and with a much lower risk of sparking the kind of war neither side can afford.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg.
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