Five weeks. We are now five weeks in and entering the sixth week of the war on Iran. What was supposed to be a “precise, overwhelming military campaign” to eliminate “an imminent nuclear threat” and urge the Iranian people to “take over” their government is now anything but precise or overwhelming. Gulf countries are seized up with retaliatory Iranian attacks, the strait of Hormuz is shut, and there is no sign of regime collapse either through military degradation or popular takeover. The recovery of two downed US aircrew is celebrated beyond the facts of the matter because nothing else is going to plan. The mistake, as ever, is a combination of hubris and ignorance, flaws made even more serious by the particularities of the Iranian regime.
There is a mental lag at the start of wars. A cognitive delay that means you can’t quite adjust to the fact that dangerous conflict cannot be swiftly contained. That mental lag is even longer when the United States is involved. Because it remains inconceivable to some that a superior military power would not swiftly achieve its objectives. That an inferior power would not immediately succumb. That allies would not fall into line and rally behind the US. Inconceivable that the fallout of a military campaign would not be limited to the territories and peoples targeted.
None of the predicted scenarios have come about. The conflict is rattling energy markets. There are already forecasts of a “rare global economic recession” in the case of prolonged war. Donald Trump has failed to recruit European and Gulf allies to take part in the offensive or in the effort to reopen the strait of Hormuz. And the Iranian regime remains unvanquished, inflicting rising costs in US military equipment and personnel.
These are all misreadings based on over-confidence in the power of the American will. When the attack on Iran was launched, cheerleaders became gripped with the intoxicating thrill of an American-made world, again. The war was a “generational move”, said the New York Post’s editorial board. The Wall Street Journal declared that the war “carries risks as all wars do, but it also has the potential to reshape the Middle East for the better and lead to a safer world”. Those who did display reservations that these beliefs were misplaced were told to get their act together. “I’m flabbergasted by the relentless pessimism I’m seeing in much of the commentariat,” said New York Times columnist Bret Stephens. “We are less than two weeks into a war that will almost surely be over by the end of the month.” Reader, it was not. Flabbergasting.
And so now that the mental lag is over and we are all caught up, the talk is of quagmire, of possible off-ramps and face-saving measures that Trump can take to extract himself without humiliation. The question now isn’t how quickly this will be over; it is the one that Gen David Petraeus posed in 2003 about the Iraq war: “Tell me how this ends?” What is heaving into view is the fact that Iran has subjective complex dynamics that cannot be flattened into the simplistic story that the war was launched on – a bad regime will become weakened through systemic degradation and its people will bring it down once its foundations begin to creak.
The first mistake was in underestimating Iran’s appetite and capability for asymmetric warfare. It does not have to be in possession of overwhelming military capabilities in order to paralyse and destabilise the Gulf. Not in ways that are dramatically devastating, or that claim large civilian casualties, but that can suspend normal life, compromise energy facilities, haemorrhage economies, and raise the cost of war to the US’s allies and the entire global economy. A barrage of cheap drones, combined with missiles, dispatched over days and weeks have achieved that objective.
The second was in the bizarre expectation that Iran would not deploy its most valuable weapon, closing the strait of Hormuz and exacting an even higher cost for the war. Even during the 12-day war last year, the possibility of closing the strait was raised internally, and in conversations with Qatari officials at the time, the main concern expressed to me was not the missiles that Iran had sent in Qatar’s direction, but the threat of the strait’s closure.
And the third was in expectations for popular uprising, something that has not come about because of all sorts of conditions, the most obvious of which are the madness of coming out on to the streets while you are being bombed, the response on the part of a government that only months ago killed protesters, and the polarising of public opinion that is already complex and varied, under an external attack that is itself killing Iranian civilians and striking civilian infrastructure.
But all these miscalculations flow from the one basic error: the failure to understand that the Iranian regime, for all the denunciations you might level at it, has a huge capacity for pain, and for prolonged escalation without a clear scenario of military victory against a superpower, something the American regime finds inconceivable.
So much of the region’s politics has been defined by countries falling in behind American power. The story of the Middle East and wider Arab world over the past four decades has been one of domestication, of cultivating closeness with the US, and so benefiting from its economic aid, investment and security umbrella. It is, in fact, why Iran sees its Gulf neighbours as fair game, as countries that through hosting American security bases and normalising relations with Israel have rendered themselves proxy powers that are tacit participants in the war even if not offensive ones.
In this regard, the US has been lulled into a sense that all roads lead to surrender, either through an embrace of the benefits of American power, or capitulation to its supremacy. This is not a logic that applies to countries that have other calculations that cannot be reduced to costs and benefits. Or indeed to countries that have been blockaded and sanctioned for so long that they have created a whole tactical modus vivendi, both economic and political, where power is not about domination, but staying in the game. Iran’s proxy groups, from Hezbollah to the Houthis, are proof of how much relevance Iran can maintain far beyond its borders, in a way that advances its interests and prevents outcomes that weaken or isolate it even further.
What Trump is up against is an adversary that he does not understand because he is ignorant, but also because it is an anomaly – a regime that has for decades constructed a domestic and regional framework, and an entire ideological and intellectual one, where success is about maintaining viability on its own terms in the face of American hegemony. The fact that the war is weeks longer than intended, with no clear end and escalating costs to everyone, is because this is a fight not between the US and Israel and Iran, but between parties that have two different definitions of victory.
