Why Iran raises the Iraq Syndrome spectre
My new commentary in the Business Times
Why Iran raises the Iraq Syndrome spectre
The Trump administration is opting for a policy of containing Iran, but the problem is that President Trump's mixed messages raise the risk of things getting out of hand
FRI, MAY 24, 2019 - 5:50 AM
LEON [email protected]
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/opinion/why-iran-raises-the-iraq-syndrome-spectre
IN THE aftermath of the Vietnam War in the early 1970s and the end of the American military presence in that country where the United States had suffered a painful strategic blow, a national consensus seemed to be evolving: From now on, the American people and their representatives in Washington would be disinclined to give the green light to another major US military intervention abroad.
What later came to be known as the Vietnam Syndrome then dominated the way officials and lawmakers in Washington, as well as the American people, responded to international crises for the next two decades or so.
After World War II and until the Vietnam War, American foreign policy and national security were driven by the so-called Munich Syndrome - named after the German city where British and French leaders signed an agreement with Nazi leader Adolph Hitler, which allowed the Germans to take control over the sovereign state of Czechoslovakia.
The Munich Agreement became a symbol of the policy of appeasement that supposedly encouraged the Germans and the Japanese to launch a world war. The message was that - never again will the West try to appease an aggressor, and that instead, any attempt by "another Hitler" to challenge the international status quo would lead to a devastating military response by the United States and its allies - until the costly American military fiasco in South-east Asia, when the Munich Syndrome became passé and the Vietnam Syndrome took over.
Now, the US would not be drawn into another military quagmire and would use its power only when it faced a clear threat to its core national interests, and even then, the use of American power would be limited in nature and would not lead to wide military presence abroad.
Hence, every time there were signs that an American president was planning to intervene in an international crisis and deploy US troops in a far-away land, the reaction on Capitol Hill and the press was close to hysterical: We are not going to have another Vietnam!
Then, all of that seemed to change after the US military victory in the First Gulf War in 1991 (also known as Operation Desert Shield) under which President George H.W. Bush forced Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to end his occupation of Kuwait. Americans concluded now that a limited US military operation - in cooperation with other allies and aimed at achieving a specific strategic goal - should not necessarily lead to another Vietnam, especially if Washington was able to sketch the outlines of an "endgame" for the military intervention.
So it was bye, bye to the Vietnam Syndrome, which explains why after the terrorist attacks on the US on Sept 11, 2001, the American people through Congress signalled that they were willing to give their president the green light to deploy US troops for what was expected to be a brief but effective use of military power to punish the perpetrators of 9/11.
But that was not what happened. Instead of carrying out a military operation that would have targeted Osama bin Laden and the leaders of Al Qaeda, the response by the administration of President George W. Bush was expanded into a full-blown military invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq that tried to advance wide-ranging and unrealistic political goals like regime change and nation building. This ended up with a large number of American casualties and cost trillions of dollars. In fact, the Afghanistan War turned out to be the longest in American history.
The end result of these long and costly wars has been to give birth to a new syndrome. The American people (still recovering from the worst economic recession since the Great Recession) - exhausted after the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who recognised that the wars not only failed to achieve their goals but also ended up hurting American interests - have sent a clear message to Washington: We will not have another Iraq!
The message was amplified by electing as presidents two critics of the Iraq War and opponents of new US military adventures - Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Both had vetoed plans for US military intervention in the civil war in Syria and insisted that they could deal with the challenge of an aggressive Iran without forcing the US to send troops to that country and do a regime change there. Or, to put it in simple terms, although you could replace the last letter of "Iran" with a "q" - Iran would not be another Iraq!
President Obama attempted to achieve that goal by trying to co-opt the regime in Tehran, which his advisors had suggested was moderating. They said that Iran was willing, under the right conditions, to give up its ambitions to become a nuclear weapons state, take steps to establish a stable balance of power in the Middle East and to move towards cooperation with the West.
The nuclear deal with Iran, followed by the removal of the economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic, were part of President Obama's strategy to provide Tehran with incentives to end its aggressive moves against America's allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel, and to eventually integrate itself into the US-led international order and the global economy - and to do that without having American boots on the ground in Iran.
Candidate (and later President) Trump did not buy into his predecessor's policy towards Iran, arguing that it empowered Iran at the expense of America's traditional allies - the Arab-Sunni states and Israel - and its own vital interests, and that it amounted to a form of appeasement.
Hello, Munich Syndrome!
Hence, contrary to President Obama's vision of the endgame, it would not be an accommodation between Washington and Tehran, but a more aggressive Iran that at some point would try to re-activate its nuclear military programme while continuing to use its Shiite allies in the region to threaten the Saudis and the Israelis.
From President Trump's perspective, implementing President Obama's strategy would return the US to Step One, in which it finds itself with no other choice but to send troops to the Persian Gulf and do another Iraq in Iran.
So instead the Trump administration revoked the nuclear deal which was the centrepiece of the Obama administration's strategy, and proposed an alternative policy of containing Iran. This containment strategy is based on strengthening US military ties with Saudi Arabia and other Arab-Sunni states as well as with Israel, as a way of counter-balancing the power of Iran and its Shiite proxies in the region. Iran would therefore be deterred from pursuing aggressive policies and forced to respect the status quo.
A containment policy would not seek war with Iran or a regime change in Tehran, but make it clear that the Iranians would have to pay a high price if, for example, they decide to launch suicidal attacks on the US and its allies or disrupt the oil supplies from the Persian Gulf.
It is important to recall that one of the reasons a similar containment strategy that the US employed vis-à-vis the Soviet Union during the Cold War worked and did not threaten a war between the Americans and the Soviets was that the competition between the two superpowers had followed certain rules of the game and therefore made it less likely that miscalculations on either side would trigger a military confrontation.
But such rules of the game do not exist in the context of the relationship between the US and Iran; if anything, President Trump's failure to articulate his strategy and the mixed messages that he has been sending to Tehran makes it even more difficult to ensure that things would not get out of hand and make war inevitable.
If that happens, the American people - who have yet to recover from the Iraq Syndrome - would punish Trump.-