HOW NOT TO GUARANTEE STRATEGIC DEFEAT
“Don’t give up the ship!” Captain James Lawrence’s dying order to the crew of the USS Chesapeake, while battling HMS Shannon in 1813
No sooner had the levers of economic sanctions against Iran been strengthened when cries from the left and the right turned up the volume to call for our surrender.
The left’s are better orchestrated, essentially an almost frothing set of talking points that the current engagement with Tehran has been a needless and unsustainable departure from what recent Democrat administrations had already solved with skilled diplomacy. The right’s positions, as usual poorly organized, offer a mixed bag of regrets that so much has gone badly (list of horribles to follow) it is now time to throw in the towel. Both, however, stem largely from political and ideological motivation.
Oddly enough, they have a common objective. They want to get out of the conflict – and to get out fast, at any cost. In essence this would be a guarantee of strategic defeat.
Bringing war to a conclusion is always dicey. Often, great slaughter is undertaken even when it is foregone how it is going to end. Consider the final months of the Civil War, the last day of WW I (more than a thousand doughboys were killed before 11 a.m.), and the closing campaign to take Berlin (by the Soviets) in WW II. How to end a war when you have the upper hand is always a problem for national leaders. They are torn between the temptation to increase the killing or to diminish the efforts to achieve the original goals of the war. Such is the tension today for us as the Administration faces a stubborn and fanatical foe in Iran determined to fight to the end. What is the road to surrender, and who surrenders?
Insights to the answer may lie in the final days of the war against Japan. By the summer of 1945, the allies were unchallenged in the skies (save for kamikazes), the Japanese navy was at the bottom of the sea, and the Soviets were about to unleash their armies into Japanese territories. Yet Japan’s military leaders were determined to carry on, mobilizing the entire population to fight on with whatever they had at hand. They ‘bravely’ referred to it as the One Hundred Million campaign, meaning the numbers they expected would die --most of them Japanese civilians (see Evan Thomas’s excellent book, Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II).
The Americans had their own estimates of military casualties it would likely suffer (hundreds of thousands to millions) and spoke in terms of facing endless replicated battles on the scale of Okinawa and Iwo Jima. In lieu of that, we elected the option of the atomic bomb, the first on Hiroshima on the 6th of August and Nagasaki on the 9th. Even then, the Japanese hardliners (read military leaders) held firm, advancing their plans for a political coup should the peacemakers (referred to as ‘traitors’ by them) prove dominant. Nonetheless, despite surrender terms offered that allowed for the emperor to remain in place unharmed, the Japanese would not budge.
This impasse led the Americans to begin moving forward to drop a third bomb (then being assembled), this one on Tokyo. Our leaders were reluctant to do so (aghast at the demonstrated destructive power of the first two) but saw no other option. The Japanese did not know we had only three bombs, so they expected more were coming. This threat of more atomic bombs and the continued saturation of fire-bombings mattered to Emperor Hirohito, however, and to aother peace advocate — Foreign Minister Togo. Both knew how terrible the war had been for Japan (its people now in the early phases of starvation, the military being the only ones adequately fed) and had had enough. Their military, however, was dismissive of the reality, and divorced from any empathy for the suffering of their own people.
In the end, as the third bomb was being uploaded, Hirohito and Togo gathered their courage, denied the generals and admirals their idiocy, and signaled their readiness to surrender.
We did not know then what was going on in the Royal Palace just as we do not know now what is happening in the corridors of power in Iran. But we do know that we have great leverage over the conditions that can influence their decisions.
The first of these is our military prowess amply demonstrated in Operation Epic Fury in the spring and in the Straits of Hormuz now. The second is the economic stranglehold which has been greatly enhanced in recent days.
We also know that the Iranian people are suffering. Their economy is staggering and the rial has become virtually worthless. Everywhere (save for the political elites) deprivation is worsening.
Containing the internal unrest that might otherwise rear up has been a major concern of the fanatical IRGC leadership. So far, they have repressed it after a short but bloody uprising in the spring, but have the seeds of that rebellion gone away? Only time will tell.
We need to take that time, using the threat (and actual use) of military power when necessary and the application of severe economic sanctions to continually increase the pressure on Iran and its leaders. Now is not the time to seek an ‘exit ramp’ and surrender the goals with which we entered this conflict. Iran’s efforts to become a nuclear armed nation cannot be allowed to continue. Its endless terrorism by its regional and worldwide operatives must be dismembered.
The arguments to cease and desist using the levers we have at hand — many of them motivated by short term political objectives — are not the way ahead. Patience, strength, and calibration are what is needed. Conditions will change constantly, the power centers in Iran will bluff and deceive endlessly, and factions within our own political structures will cry out “enough” repeatedly. None of these should become a call for retreat.
Many believe the IRGC is too fanatical to fold. That was also thought to be the case with Japan’s military leadership in 1945. But when the pressure becomes so great that it is impossible for leaders to demand that their subjects ‘bear the unbearable’ any longer, those leaders start to think about their own skins.
Stay the course; apply the pressure. That is a more certain path to bring strategic positives from this trying but necessary face-off.
https://johnalucas6.substack.com/p/how-not-to-guarantee-strategic-defeat
