WAS BULL RUN AN ESCALATION TRAP?

A lengthy post by Bret Devereaux, who appears to be a historian of some sort, provokes the title of my post.  As he develops his thesis, he offers the following origin story for the war.

The current war is best understood as the product of a fairly extreme gamble, although it is unclear to me if the current administration understood they were throwing the dice in June of 2025 rather than this year. As we’re going to see, this was not a super-well-planned-out affair.

The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant, along the lines of the regime change operation performed in Venezuela that put Delcy Rodriguez in power. By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing.

I note before we continue that National Command Authority anticipated an air campaign in excess of a month, that the United States and Israel have goals that align but are not congruent, that no battle plan survives its first encounter with the enemy, and that had the United States and Israel clobbered the mullahs on the basis of actionable intelligence that they would be meeting somewhere in Teheran without any coherent follow-on operations, somebody would probably already have leaked that to one of the legacy newspapers.

It is to that "solid blow" that I wish to turn.  Recall, in the summer of 1861, how the Georgetown cocktail party set packed picnic baskets and headed into Virginia to watch Gen^l McDowell and his forces smash up the secesh, march On to Richmond, and settle that hash once and for all.  We know that McDowell's plans came a cropper and that the cocktail party set got caught up in the ensuing skedaddle.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Federal forces had prevailed and been able to occupy Richmond.  Mr Devereaux's essay works as an explainer for how occupying Richmond, with no forces in Memphis or New Orleans or Atlanta or Charleston would have failed.  The original capital city of the seceded states was in Montgomery, and it would be straightforward enough to return the political class there: and until something like Gideon Welles's Anaconda Plan closed the ports and reopened the Mississippi for the Union and wrecked the secesh's industrial base the war would go on.  If you think cartoonists of the era slagged on Abraham Lincoln for pursuing the war the way he, with Grant, Sheridan, Sherman; and Farragut and Porter did it, imagine those cartoonists with Richmond occupied and yet the war continuing.  Consider, also, that even with first Lee and then Johnston surrendering in April 1865 and with New Orleans, Atlanta, Charleston, and Richmond occupied, unreconstructed elements (in the manner of Iran's revolutionary guards with free rein to act locally) could continue the fight for years.  That's how the "Southern" "Poverty" "Law" Center made its civil rights bones, back in the day, litigating against such elements.

The escalation trap Mr Deveraux develops involves Iran trying to drag other powers into the war in a way ole' Jeff Davis never could.

While the United States can exchange tit-for-tat strikes with Iran without triggering an escalation spiral, once >you try to collapse the regime, the members of the regime (who are making the decisions, not, alas, the Iranian people) have no reason to back down and indeed must try to reestablish deterrence. These are men who are almost certainly dead or poor-in-exile if the regime collapses. Moreover the entire raison d’être of this regime is resistance to Israel and the United States: passively accepting a massive decapitation attack and not responding would fatally undermine the regime’s legitimacy with its own supporters, leading right back to the ‘dead-or-poor-and-exiled’ problem.

Iran would have to respond and thus would have to try to find a way to inflict ‘pain’ on the United States to force the United States to back off. But whereas Israel is in reach of some Iranian weapons, the United States is not. Iran would thus need a ‘lever’ closer to home which could inflict costs on the United States. For – and I must stress this – for forty years everyone has known this was the strait.

Which raises the prospect of much that can go wrong.  Perhaps, as Nicholas "Liberal Currents" Grossman contends, Iranian commanders, in the manner of those unreconstructed rebels, think they have more to gain by not quitting.

Trump could order U.S forces to cease all fire tomorrow, much as he ordered them to attack. Others can urge him to keep going, but the power is the president’s. He could take whatever agreement Iran is willing to give, lie that it’s a great victory, pretend Iran gave him what he wanted, pressure Israel to stop, and claim he deserves the Nobel prize.

But that’s very unlikely, at least in these conditions. No matter how hard Trump lies, the war would be an embarrassing loss for the world’s premier power. At the start, the president talked of regime change and unconditional surrender. Then America and its local ally bombed for a few weeks, killed top leaders, found the regime more resilient than expected, started offering to deal, and got nothing.

Stopping there would end America’s status as the dominant military power in the Persian Gulf, which it has held since WWII. Iran’s successful resistance to American attack would establish this geostrategic region as contested, altering the international system.

Israel, and now the Gulf states, might have something to say even if the United States recalibrates.

It's early, according to Victor Hanson.

We’ve only been here two weeks and the much more formidable enemy is in shambles. And we’re left with just three alternatives.

Either the regime is going to be replaced now or in the next few weeks as the people come out of their homes and see what their country is like and what the theocracy caused.

Or there’s going to be some Venezuelan solution where a strongman comes forward.

Or maybe that won’t happen at all and the United States, under political pressure, will stop.

But if it stops, they have destroyed the Iranian military and its nuclear and missile programs for years. So this was all preferable to the situation pre-war in which Iran was still working on the bomb, still had 3,000 missiles and more drones, and was boasting that anytime it wanted it could close the Strait of Hormuz.

They’ve tried it, and they will not be successful.

Red State's Ward Clark takes a more tragic view:  sometimes, the only way out is through.  "The most effective way to deal with this drone threat is to win the war. The most effective way to win the war is to weaken the regime, to continue to remove leaders, to the point where the Iranian people can deal with the regime and set up a new government. We can support them, but they have to do the job."  Again, mission planners had a time frame of up to six weeks for the air campaigns, and nobody has said anything about possible battlespace preparation for dealing with the Strait of Hormuz or the oil terminals.  It's probably too late already to give the mullahs a final shove, notes Power Line's John Hinderaker.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the Democrats and their press minions are rooting for the mullahs. They fervently hope that our efforts in Iran will end in catastrophe, and anything short of a grand victory will be portrayed in the press as a disaster. If ground troops are committed on even a limited basis, I think the midterm elections are over. The House is already lost, and the Senate could follow.

My own feelings are mixed. The real takeaway from what we have seen so far is that we waited far too long to confront the Iranian regime. They have fanatically and assiduously been assembling military force far beyond what most of us understood. If we had waited another five or ten years, it likely would have been too late to take on the single biggest threat to our security. The mullahs would have been too strong.

That might be par for the course if you're of the academy or a Democrat, as Noah Rothman contends.

It seems now that rendering a pessimistic assessment of U.S. and Israeli progress in this war is the price of admission into sophisticated [c.q.] circles. If you’re not hopelessly melancholy, you’re not a serious person. At least, you’re not availing yourself of the news from the front.

That dour outlook seems wholly divorced from an objective appraisal of the war in its fourth week.

He repeats a point I offered above, that the air campaign is battlespace preparation for reopening the waterways.  "Opening the strait to maritime traffic — which U.S. commanders repeatedly assured anyone willing to listen would happen sequentially, following the significant degradation of Iran’s military capabilities — will follow the clearing of the strait’s mines and the elimination of the Iranian road-mobile anti-ship missile threat."  That might be why A-10 aircraft and Apache helicopters are at work.  Moreover, if it's an escalation trap, Tom Knighton would just as soon bring the escalation.

The only reason Iran isn't begging for a peace deal isn't that they're holding their own. It's that they're too fanatical in their faith to accept the harsh reality that we're simply better at this than anyone else. Their radical Islamic beliefs won't let them accept anything but victory, so they've warped their perceptions to reflect anything but reality.

If this is losing, though, they'd better hope we don't decide to step things up so they accept we're winning.

Our President is again answering "You'll drown in your own blood" threats with threats of his own.  The next week could be stressful.