Iran

Can the USA successfully engage in 4GW? (Or even 5GW whatever that may be?)

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Who was it who said “how can I know what I think until I say it?” Substitute “say” with “blog”.

I had a comment on my own post about Iran recently. I said something off the seat of my pants, which I have been mulling since then:

The United States has suffered at the hands of what are called Fourth Generation Warfare opponents for some time now. Iran presents us with the opportunity to wage 4GW ourselves. John Boyd said that war is fought on the moral, mental and physical planes, and that the physical is the least important and least decisive. The Mullah regime is morally and intellectually bankrupt. It needs to be attacked on that level. The end game is something like 1989, where there are no NATO troops on the street, but the Warsaw Pact evaporates. A strong background military threat is imperative.

Now, what I mostly see about 4GW is stuff from William Lind or his spiritual father Martin van Creveld, in which the nation state is basically doomed to lose to 4GW opponents, assisted by knowingly or foolishly complicit people in civil society who are duped and coopted by the 4GWarriors. John Robb seems to think the global guerrillas will get more and more powerful until our current political organization crumbles and is replaced by something networked and post-Westphalian. Thomas X. Hammes at the end of his book suggests at least the possibility of a 4GW type of military which could be networked and agile, but it is more of a sketch than a full-blown set of proposed reforms. Other writers suggest various sensible reforms the military might adopt — e.g. Donald Vandergriff, and sometimes Ralph Peters.

But what I want to know is this: Can the US military, with or without the engagement of other parts of the government, with our without the assistance of other countries, initiate, wage and win a 4GW campaign? More narrowly, what would a U.S.-led 4GW campaign against the Iranian mullah regime look like? or, rephrased, can the “soft kill” or the “non-kinetic kill” be a set of actual policies with a viable chance of success, rather than (potentially) a mere cover for inaction? And finally, whatever set of policies, strategies, tactics and tools are employed to do the non-kinetic kill against the Mullah regime, does the 4GW or 5GW terminology add anything of value? Does it lend clarity, cause confusion, or do nothing at all?

Say NO to Job Security for Ahmadinejad

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I have long been an advocate of the “soft kill” on Iran (i.e. here, here, here and here). The government there is at odds with its people, and has shown signs of decay for some time now. The Mullah regime that came in in 1979 is in its Brezhnevite phase of sclerotic senility, as Zenpundit recently opined. This recent piece from Foreign Policy describes in detail how Ahmadinejad’s regime is crumbling. The reason he is ratcheting up the rhetoric is that a foreign war is the only thing that can keep him in power. The conclusion:

… the only thing that could save him now is the United States. Nobody knows this better than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As his support within Iran has evaporated, he has cranked up the anti-American rhetoric, and the U.S. military has publicly accused the Pasdaran of arming insurgents in Iraq and even Afghanistan. At this point, the only way Ahmadinejad can revive his flagging fortunes is by uniting his country against an external threat. U.S. officials adamantly maintain that Washington is committed to using diplomacy to resolve the conflict over Iran’s nuclear program and its aggressive role in the region. Yet pressure is mounting in some branches of the Bush administration to take military action against Iran. That pressure should be resisted. For military action would give Mahmoud Ahmadinejad exactly what he wants most: job security.

The soft kill is the way to go in this scenario. Embrace the Iranian people. Don’t kill them. Five years ago Robert Kaplan said: “I think it is interesting that the population of Iran is very pro-American, because they have actually had an experience on the ground with an Islamic revolution and it has been terrible.” Based on lots of reportage and anecdotal evidence, these trends have continued. The Iranians have a positive attitude toward Americans and they have contempt for their own government. But they will rally to it if their country is attacked, as anybody would. We need to be patient and firm with the current regime, and let it die of its own ravaging internal illnesses. Containment worked against Russia and it will work against these idiots. Time is on our side. We should act accordingly.

I remember my Russian Civ teacher 25 years ago saying that Jimmy Carter was stupid to pull the US out of the Olympics in Moscow. Instead, he said, the US Government should have subsidized a massive influx of Americans into Russia with duffel bags full of cassettes of rock music, Sears catalogs, blue jeans, and other Western goodies. We should be doing the same kind of thing with Iran now. 50,000 American tourists would do more good than 50,000 troops shooting the Hell out of the place. I hope to God our president does not decide to throw one more Hail Mary pass before he leaves office.

‘The blogging Mullah’

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Link via a blog at the website of the German business paper Handelsblatt:

Update: Tatyana informs me in the comments that one of Abtahi’s post I’m linking to, ‘Freedom of Holding Demonstrations against America’, alludes to an old Soviet joke about being perfectly free in the Soviet Union to protest against America.

The Ayatollah Ali Mohammad Abtahi, Vice President under former Iranian President Khatami has a blog of his own. According to Handelsblatt he is posting almost daily, his subjects mostly being ‘rumors heard in mosques, indiscretions [uttered] at official receptions and inside stories from the halls of power’. Abtahi still is a welcome guest all over the Arabic world, so he has a lot of such stories on offer. He mostly blogs in Farsi, but some stories are also translated into a quite idiosyncratic English here.

Abtahi and his former boss Khatami are quite moderate as Iranian Ayatollahs go, although the latter demonstrated this April the limits of his moderation by telling some Israeli journalists to ‘go to hell’. Furthermore, even people reporting for German public TV now and then feel compelled to point out that the Iranian government under Khatami was no less intransigent as far as their nuclear program was concerned as the present one under Ahmadenejad is right now.

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An Iranian victory? I fear it is so.

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Some people are speculating as to why the government of Iran suddenly decided to release the British sailors and Marines it was holding. There are a number of reasons that have been bandied about, and the two leading contenders are that we made some sort of terrible threat, or that we caved in and bribed them. Maybe both.

I think there’s another reason. The big game here is Iran’s program to produce weapon’s grade U-235, and what they need now is time. The big danger, as they see it, is that we’ll get nasty before they have a nuclear deterrent and start bombing.

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