A Monumental Change in U.S. Strategy

Are you tired of forever wars?

When the news broke early Saturday morning about the our strike on Iran, Trump’s domestic opponents did not delay in gearing up their “resistance.” Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen may have been the first out of the blocks. With lightning like reflexes, honed by years of attention-seeking, he managed to get an early morning booking for himself on MS Now (née MSNBC) to condemn Trump for having acted. Of course he acknowledged that Iran had some bad actors who had done some things, but dadgummit, Trump had not asked for his permission to launch the strike. And he had no strategy! What a moron to attack Iran with no strategy in mind!

Others followed, quickly sprinting to the microphones to claim that the President had no strategy. Numerous other left wingers chimed in on social media and elsewhere to make sure that everyone knows they hate, just hate Trump. Can we call them “strategy deniers,” sort of akin to “climate deniers?” That has a certain appeal but I prefer something even shorter. These people can be described in one word: ignoramuses.

The President has a strategy — his enemies just don’t like it. Most of them don’t like it because it is in their DNA to disapprove and undercut everything he does. Do you doubt me? Just re-watch how they warmed their hands with their buttocks during the President’s State of the Union address when he introduced true American heroes, and when he asked all the lawmakers to show whether they would prioritize ordinary American citizens over illegal immigrants. If Trump discovered a cure for cancer tomorrow, the talking heads on MS Now would lament the increase in available jobs for oncologists.

Trump’s strategy involves a remaking of alliances and the world order. Contrary to Iran’s strategy and contrary to the hopes and expectations of many TDS – afflicted commenters in our own country, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Jordan are coalescing in a cooperative effort against Iran. Saudi Arabia, which had hope to keep its distance is now supportive and will be a key player. They even have aligned themselves with the U.S. and Israel against Iran. Hezbollah has a case of the quiets. Have we ever seen that before? The far leftist British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, at first vehemently opposed any use of British bases or the critical base at Diego Garcia to support the attacks. He has now come around.

These countries are not rallying around the strategy of Kamala Harris, Tim Kaine, Ilhan Omar, Hakeem Jeffries, or any of the other reactionaries whose instinctive and immediate response is to oppose everything that Trump does. Resist! Resist!! Resist!!!

A key component (among many) of this strategy is the employment of what we may call “punitive expeditions” These operations are characterized by highly focused violence directed at specific targets. They are not massive invasions by ground troops and do are not focused on “nation building.” They are not intended just to punish our enemies, although they will do that, but to neutralize them with overwhelming force focused on a specific objective (such a neutralizing Iran’s nuclear program and military threats to us and our allies). Such operations do not involve carpet bombing entire cities or targeting civilian populations as the Allies did to Germany and Japan in World War II, and as Iran is attempting today with its missel strikes on hotels and other civilian targets. They are limited. They are focused. And they are marked by overwhelming force. Venezuela is an obvious example, as are the strikes on the drug-running boats. And now Iran.

The nonpareil Commander Salamander explained this today in The Rise of the Punitive Expedition & the Repudiation of the Era of Errors. It is a must-read.

The good Commander recounts the history of our prior strategy, including Colin Powell’s flawed advice, “If you break it, you own it.”

Fortunes were made, institutions funded, and employment justified for legions under the old and failed post-WWII process swamp and GWOT nomenklatura that gave us unending and stillborn conflicts. To go that route again wouldn’t just be folly, it would be a self-destructive folly to refuse to change in the face of evidence.

I’ve seen older versions of OPLANS for Iran. Huge, bloody, and frankly undoable. They were only that way because they met the requirements of an old system that everyone nodded their heads to because all the smart people from Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Princeton and all the usual places said we had to do it this way.

Enough. Bollocks to all that. They have been measured the last quarter century and have been found wanting.

We’ve been here before with Iran. . . . We’ve played slap-n-tickle with them here and there while they have brutalized us at every turn when they are not brutalizing their own people.

Yes, it’s personal—but part of the reason we have been hesitant is that our national security intellectuals have been stuck in a world view that prevented action, by design.

Though not exclusive, the Powell Doctrine’s “Pottery Barn Rule” (that it appears he got from one of Thomas Frack’n Friedman’s columns), made it appear that we could only take action if we took the entire country and then remade it in our image.

We know how that operationalized over the last couple of decades.

Taking on Iran would be so bloody awful. So what can we do? Just throw up our hands and weep? No. And the Commander explains why.

As mentioned above, I spent enough time in CENTCOM back in the day to know how hard the nut of Iran would be to crack.

Big, ugly, bloody.

It did not matter how much Iran deserved to be checked, it was just too costly to try.

Nation building OPLANS again? No. Not any more. Breaking their things and killing their worst leadership that endangered the USA and her allies? I’m in.

When we do not have a declaration of war with the goal of unconditional surrender, then we need to be clear what our real options are; punitive expedition, targeted assassination (drones seem to do this well), consequence management, etc. Our operations should be nasty, brutish, and short. "No better friend, no worse enemy"; that works for me. If the locals can't take advantage of a chance to improve their lot; not our problem. Leave a calling card that if they irritate us again, the next time we hit harder.

Nation building was the soul of our strategy for the last half century, from Vietnam through Iraq and Afghanistan. It bogged us down in forever wars because we were willing to fight forever wars. The smartest people endorsed and supported this. It seems not to have occurred to them that it was a fools errand to try to persuade a people imbued with a tribal culture, a tradition of tribal warfare, illiteracy, and denying women any of the freedoms that the West regards as fundamental, to adopt something resembling a Jeffersonian democracy.

Trump has changed that. The change is a major part of his America First strategy. Little wonder that his enemies at home and abroad don’t understand that.