Dean
Flairless
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User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
In my view, this is conflating regime leadership with regime type, which is what I'd consider 'regime change' to generally refer to.
This is understandable in more personalist systems, such as dictatorships built around specific individuals with minimal backbench of successors. In these cases, so much of the regime is tied to the individual that removing the individual removes a key driver of many of the distinct policies of the regime. An example here is Russia, where while whoever follows Putin is likely to be someone at least tolerable to Putin's security state, there's no institutional driver compelling them to follow Putin's desire to be a Great Man of History.
Iran has many issues, but that is not / was not one of them. Iran had a large backbench of clerics with government or military experience, just as it hard large cadres of Revolutionary old guard who could fill in if the old guard died suddenly or gradually. In turn, the system has spent a lot more time and effort trying to ensure that potential successors will be of a type. The clerical government's vetting and veto process is what has made even 'moderate' and often sidelied official opposition amount to 'I agree with your goals but think this is a bad way to pursue it,' while the IRGC is its own self-selecting force with get-along-to-get-along patronage networks.
With the IRGC's own influence now (and predictably) shaping the supreme leader succession, that is and was predictable grounds for expecting a change of leadership leading to a change of personalities, not a change in regime type.
This aligns with my thoughts in a general sense, with different caveats and less finality. Information sphere wise, easy Iranian victory. Underlying structural power factors, though... the war doesn't have to be a US 'win' to have bad effects on Iran.
My biggest caveat is that I personally don't think regime change or even a uprising was actually an early war goal of the Americans or Israelis. I think it was a sort of hoped-for outcome that served as a public justification that they wanted to encourage, and would absolutely have taken credit for if there was any sort of anti-regime movement, but I suspect it mostly was about putting people (particularly the Iranians) in a state of mind to, well, believe that regime change was actually the intention of what was basically a month-long (air) raid.
Which is a forest I think a lot (most) of the wartime discussion missed for the trees of individual leadership strikes. Almost everyone in the region had a general sense of what the US and Israelis had in theater, which was a lot of airpower and precious few maneuver formations. And yet, discussion for so long went from Kurdish invasions to Kharg island to what have you. Some people may believe the Iranians deterred and forced each invasion attempt to fail... or, possibly, there wasn't an invasion attempt at all. At which point it's not quite axiomatic to claim victory in repelling the invaders, but that's mostly because sometimes raiders won't leave on their own accord.
As far as a type of military operation go, though, raids are used to kill people or destroy things, and possibly bring something back. It doesn't seem like there was any raid of the nuclear sites to bring back uranium, but there was absolutely a lot of IRGC (and not-so-IRGC) military-industrial-economic infrastructure hit. Just how much and how severely remains to be see, but the growth curve has definitely been set back a bit, so to speak. Almost as impactfully, the most significant people killed were generally a leadership generation that had a lifetime of lived experience that waging proxy war could stay below the level of major combat operations, or at least stay largely safe themselves (at least until about a year or two prior). Their successors (probably) won't have that same mindset, even as they will have the reduced MIE-base to work with.
I think one of the more interesting potential long-term changes / harms to Iran will be what the impacts of the leadership succession will be. The previous Ayatollah had a lot of regional legitimacy with Shia because he was a cleric first, a ruler second. In so much that the IRGC took the reigns to run the country during the conflict and has become even stronger within Iran, the war has converted Iran from a theocracy with a praetorian guards to a praetorian guard with a theocracy. There are a number of longer-term implications of that, from religious legitimacy to rationalization of the security state and the increasing resilience of a state-within-the-state that is less bound to the clerics. It may take years to decades, but I suspect the revolutionary Islam cred will degrade compared to what it would have been, particularly if the IRGC-dominated Iran gets equated to with corruption and desires for wealth... which the current list of demands centering around money aren't exactly working against.
Dean
Flairless
9d ago
While I agree that there's definitely criticisms to be made of the war even from a neocon perspective, this does read like TDS. The war on Iran is easily justifiable from a Neocon perspective(we invaded Iraq over less), and there is an international coalition- it happens to be middle eastern countries rather than European ones, but it's there.
I suspect part of the issue is a paradigm difference between the sort of people who view wars as discrete, self-contained periods of violence, and those who view the current conflict as just the latest campaign of a longer war that neither started or expected to end (hence why the war is basically an extended air raid). I don't think 'neocon' implies one way or the other, but I firmly suspect Kagan is among the former and the current war leaders are among the later.
It's a paradigm difference that matters because a Kagan-style neocon might have a binary view of war based on the expected ability to decisively win, but otherwise see themselves at peace otherwise. It struggles when put into a context where decisive victory is not possible (and thus would prefer peace), but also is also denied peace (because the enemy gets to vote and can engage in sustained asymmetric warfare).
This is why military science discussions over the last few decades have shifted away from war as a binary to the conceptualization of conflict continuums of degrees of intensity/lethality that can be moved between more easily. But that evolution in the literature was after Kagan established his professional persona, and there's no indication he's tried or wanted to update his own models, especially when TDS-posting gives him steady employment and prestigious placings.
Dean
Flairless
9d ago
In the mainstream (TV etc) "discourse", that US is a reliable ally and a positive force in the world used to be near axiomatic, not anymore.
I suppose if we ignore not just Trump I, but also Bush II, Reagan, Nixon, and of course Eisenhower over the whole Suez Crisis.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but praise for the US was never axiomatic even from Europe, let alone other places.
Dean
Flairless
9d ago
Thank you. I'll not hold it against someone to not know about a particular media personality's long-established personality, but it was confusing seeing the equivalent someone pointing at the The Guardian and positing it as evidence that even Britain was lost. Kagan has ever been part of the Trump coalition. A person who for a decade has campaigned for the Democrats against the current Republican, writing for a generally Democratic media outlet, continuing to do so is about as surprising as water being wet.
Heck, it's not even good TDS-Kagan stuff, and it's filled with the sort of shallow geopolitical, historical, or strategic analysis that's either unserious or seriously phoning it in. There are a lot of reasons why various people in the US support the Israeli, but we have the Cold War records and deliberations of why the US started supporting Israel when it did, and 'a sense of moral responsibility after the Holocaust' is not a particularly competent summation of them... or why the US support started after a period, rather than consistent. Again, we have records from the leader deliberations at the time. Or the bit about 'Israelis should question the US's dedication to this fight' in the short but also longer term. This not only treats as an error the rather obvious limiting factor in the air campaign that the Israelis clearly helped and advocated for the US to do- the factor being that raids are by their nature shorter in duration and have more limited goals- but also ignores the elephant donkey in the room of the changing Democratic Party establishment's, shall we say, anti-commitment to Israeli support. Which would be providing the perspective for the Israelis in any now-or-later consideration. And going by his last paragraph, you'd think Kagan thinks the US never faced shifting basing basing or overflight permission shifts or adhoc coalition making in the past... as opposed to it being the standard practice (and difficulty) depending on the state and their interests at the time.
As far as rigor goes, it's slop. Comfortable slop, depending on one's taste, but it is very much served to satiate (or instigate) an emotional state rather than going for analytic or even historical accuracy. Which has been par for course for Kagan in the Trump era, so eh.
Dean
Flairless
10d ago
Honorable mention to GuessWho the Darwin alt who got so throughly destroyed that they didn't even make a huffy flounce post, but instead slunk away in shame.
Truly the legend of Amadan lives to this day, and shall never be forgotten.
Dean
Flairless
11d ago
For whatever it's worth, and whatever else I may observe or opine on this or any other conflict in the future, I do fundamentally agree / sympathize / consider this a valid position on how it should be.
Dean
Flairless
13d ago
I think this works well enough as a response from me, so thank you.
Only if it was presented as a reason to do the war, as opposed to a consequence of how the war turned out. Since Trump made no claim that this was The Goal or The Plan, he gets no credit (and has made no claim) for it.
In theory, the Iranians could have chosen another supreme leader aligned with or signalling support for the reformist camp. That they did not, and would not, was predicted by various people, including critics of the potential war before it started. This was generally preseted as a warning, typically in the form of 'a hardliner is bad (for the US/Israel) because they'll be more aggressive,' but that is in no way incompatible with 'a hardliner is bad (for Iran), because they'll refuse reform.' Whether the 'benefits' of Iran assuming greater opportunity costs outweighs the costs of another (quote-unquote 'more') hardline theocrat just goes back to frames of reference on what time scale, and under what sort of paradigm (i.e. negative-sum versus zero-sum versus positive-sum).
Which, as you note, I'm not making a position on. This is just noting the externalities that come with various dynamics.
(And thank you for recognizing / noting openly that you were not taking my... 'jawboning'?- as advocacy. The expectation of any such observation, or critique, being advocacy / defense is one reason I've avoided commenting much on the Iran conflict while I was enjoying a video game hiatus.)
Dean
Flairless
14d ago
It's possible that the war will end in a way that makes it easy to determine the winner, but it also seems plausible to me that the war will end with both sides claiming victory and the real measure of that victory will be measured in subsequent behavior over years or decades.
Very much this, and it's the decision-making process of the the subsequent decades in particular that will... not vindicate, but provide context for whose expectations may have been better grounded.
There are two general parts of state-level decision making in geopolitics: you need the resources to do it, and the sort of political leadership to choose those resources. I am far from convinced that the Iranian system will be better positioned for either in the future, even if the desires to toll the straights of Hormuz becomes the post-war status quo.
For state resources, many things are not just a matter of money, but time and capital. The US and Israel claim to have gone after a lot of military industry, and that is neither cheap or quick to replace, nor are the outputs. The nature of losing years to decades of naval or missile investments is that they may take years to decades of reinvestment to rebuild. Until you build another Navy, I doubt even the most hardline Ayatollah will, say, send a blue water task force to escort Iranian oil tankers to China in a US-china war and dare the US to start another war to stop it, with all the implications that has (or could have had in the middle east).
But political leadership matters to. The Iranian political-economic system was already strained enough that there was a 'moderate' faction of pragmatists who were willing to disagree with IRGC-aligned hardliners not in goals, but in the need for reforms to get there. This war seems to have let the IRGC step in and leave the reformists out, and over the longer term states that don't reform can still be aggressive and dangerous, but become less capable over time. There is also a point to be made about the difference between animosity and the belief of personal distance from risk. Ayatollah Khamenei and most of the Iranian high-level leadership had over 30 years of lived experience of well-justified belief that they could wage asymmetric and not-so-asymmetric warfare against the US and Israel and that they wouldn't be retaliated against. Khamenei 2.0 and his core advisors may hate the US and Israel even more than his father, but somehow I doubt they will hold that sort of belief.
None of this is an argument for or defense of the American attack on Iran, but it seems clear to me that this is a war to try and shape the trajectory of the region, and there's more to the future of the region and relative Iranian or US power than the straits of hormuz or if the Iranian theocracy stands.
Dean
Flairless
14d ago
I have heard from many a Chinese that the two decades after 1989 were some of the most profound political, economic, and social reforms of CCP-Chinese history. That Xi reversed many of these trends does not exactly change that shooting the protestors demanding such changes (and more) did not fix the issues of the Cold War-era communist economic-political order.
Dean
Flairless
14d ago
Now none of this is being reported clearly, and this all might be bullshit, and maybe one or both sides is engaging in distractionism.
Out of curiosity, what soft of things do you think the government of Iran would be saying if things were not going well for them and that they were prepared to make politically painful changes?
Remember that- at least according to various pro-Iranian positions of the last month- part of the travesty/evil of this war is that the US and Israel attacked during negotiations in which good-faith Iran was supposed to be on the cusp of making major concessions. I personally do not believe this claim, but for the sake of argument let's take the pro-Iranian claims at their word, and then take into consideration the Iranian words of the time. What narrative line pushed with the same vigor and effort by the state apparatus would you have looked at at the time and gone 'yeah, in the next few days they're going to make geopolitical concessions they've spent decades refusing'?
Or go back about 3 months ago, at the end of the January protest crackdown. This is hopefully not terribly controversial, but a government that shoots tens of thousands of its own citizens in the streets is facing things that could politely be called 'serious issues.' Hopefully also not terribly controversial, but shooting tens of thousands of your own citizens does not actually fix the issues, but tends to make them worse. Protests are a symptom, not the cause, of protests. But during and immediately after the regime, what high-level state or clerical rhetoric would you as the observer see and think 'they recognize and are going to address the underlying problems?'
Or go back further, to an event of your choice. The Iranian Revolution has had the better part of a half century to make mistakes and back down under pressure, despite the wishes of its ruling elite. At the time before the backdown was indisputably public, what sort of rhetoric were you seeing to indicate cracks within the system?
The point here isn't a claim about the current state of the current conflict, but about the ability to use certain types or sources of information to make meaningful conclusions about the state of the world. Different states lie in different ways, both deliberately and as the natural form of dissembling. For the Americans, the metaphor of kabuki theater exists for the sort of going-through-the-motions that has no real impact on the final result. For the Europeans, there will (almost) never be a diplomatic meeting that does not make positive 'progress' or that is not 'productive.' Examples could continue. There is quite often a public default position, regardless of what goes on behind the scenes.
If you want to take Iranian public rhetoric as presumptively true, and make the possibility that it's just public dissembling false the caveat, I'm not going to stop you. In fact, I will thank you for remembering the caveat. But before you feel disquiet and defeat, it might be worth considering whether Iran might have a default public persona of defiant triumphalism, and consider how that compares or contrasts if the Iranian opponent is an actor with the media objectivity and positivity that surrounds Donald J. Trump, and consider how that might shape your perception... and the information that would be provided to you.
Dean
Flairless
14d ago
Partly because right now is a politically opportune moment, but also because a lot of groundwork had to be laid to set up a viable path to cross the hundreds of miles.
Agreed on both of these parts. One of the frustrating elements of the early-war discussion was something barely discussed at all- the fact that both US and Israel have elections this fall. Trump was already more or less doomed to lose the Republican trifecta, but Israel was also going through a potential major shakeup. This was a political window of opportunity for both parties, even aside from other elements and potentially limited opportunities.
This is not a claim that it's an opportunity that should have been taken, or was right to have taken, or any such thing. But Israeli political calculus would be factoring the potential 6+ years before the next potentially favorable US executive, and the US executive branch that's been trying to settle issues (starting with Venezuela) would be measuring the window of opportunity in even shorter time frames.
Dean
Flairless
15d ago
There should be a strong prior for widespread support of the regime in charge.
Why?
Most authoritarian states exist without widespread support. They exist with widespread acceptance / tolerance / fear of consequences if they actively oppose. I suppose we could claim passive acceptance as widespread support, but that's not how many people use the term.
Government rallies and government funerals are extremely weak indicators of popular support. It's the classic conflation of proportional versus absolute numbers issue, further complicated by the resources of a state to pay for pageantry and attendance.
Even if they're not armed, where's the arson and window-breaking, the rocks thrown at police? Even Palestinians can manage that much.
That was about 2-3 months ago. Understandable to have forgotten. It's not like the even the Hamas-Palestinians are doing much different after their own recent, uh, bad time.
Dean
Flairless
15d ago
I'd be happy to concede for someone who wants to be concerned about both, so long as it's consistent. But as you say different forms of lethal conflict is still lethal conflict. That this is hard to determine parts of the conflict because of their deliberate and systemic use of proxies doesn't change the underlying point: there is no caveat to the right of self-defense under international law that says you can only act against proxies, any more than there is a word-cell series of claims that lets someone go 'I can hit you (indirectly), no hit backs.' There is no principle under international law that the other party must accept your denials of plausibly deniable proxy warfare: the determination of plausibility, and what to do with it, has always rested with the other party.
I generally don't contest peoples personal opinions per see, so I wouldn't spend much time or interest on anyone who wants to take the position on who 'started' the conflict. But who chose to 'start' a conflict is different from who chose to continue it in certain ways, and how, and there is plenty of agency open for the Iranians on that front as well as anyone else. There are a number of regional states that fought multiple wars against Israel who have chosen other paths, and there are an even larger number of global states who fought wars with the US for whom relations are anywhere from cool to cordial. Making hating the Americans and the joos part of your raison d'être is a thing a polity chooses to do, not something their chosen enemies chose for them.
So- with those caveats- I otherwise generally agree with the point that this conflict didn't 'start' in 2026. We are watching an air-campaign that has been a series of campaigns, from both directions, for longer than most members of this site have paid attention to global affairs. It is not the start of a long-war any more than the Iranian supplied-and-directed artillery campaign via Hezbollah that displaced tens of thousands in northern israel was the start, or the airstrike on Solemani when he was on his way to engage Iranian-allied militia groups in Iraq that off-and-on attacked Americans was the start, or the American invasion of Iraq as a neighboring security treat was the start, or the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentine was the start.
It is also not going to be the end of the long war. Personally, I doubt it was ever intended to be, but that is a post for another time.
So Iran did not have the option to use its full military capability against Israel and the US. It was either fire against the Gulf states or not use some of those weapons at all except as a deterrent.
If firing against the gulf countries ends up looking very stupid in hindsight, and retaining deterrence is something useful even in hindsight, you might as well say 'It was either doing something very stupid or not using the weapons except for something useful.'
Nor is your framing a particularly well structured either-or. There is the third option of 'not use those weapons against host nation infrastructure.' Or even the fourth option of 'not use those weapons against countries who did not give offensive basing and overflight to the Americans.' There was even a fifth option, of only using it against American bases, which are typically camps in the middle of the deserts. If that had happened, the response in, and from within, the gulf countries might have been far different. There's even the sixth option of allocating all the close end-weapons against one gulf state in particular, say the Saudis. There are a lot more than six possible alternatives.
I could go on, but I hope it isn't needed. Iran was not in a use-it-or-lose-it scenario, where if they didn't use the weapons now they'd never get a chance to later. Nor was there any obligation, requirement, or military necessity to use them as they had. It was a choice, and while it may have had a reason behind it, it wouldn't be at all surprising for it to be a bad reason that will look worse with hindsight.
Dean
Flairless
16d ago
If true, it would be one of the bigger own-goals of a national defense strategy in recent memory.
While attacking a state you've already deterred from joining into a war coalition is certainly a bold strategy, it does have a few potential drawbacks. Such as providing a basis for more direct and open military ties that previously had to remain secret.
But there's also the throughput implications. Anyone familiar with the graphs of the strikes per day should remember that Iran basically front-loaded most of its launch capacity in the opening days, and was followed by a week of exceptionally suppression. Those first days were going to be the most significant opportunity Iran had to overwhelm the established defenses at known targets. Well, there's a rather significant difference in the military disruption if you throw 600 missiles in 3 days at 3 states or if you spread it around 6, or 9, and so on.
Of course, the war isn't over yet, and however it ends I'm sure there will be no shortage of people insisting it was fought the more reasonably way possible by their favorites. But absent a reduction of the arab states into Iranian tributaries at the end of this, I suspect that- if those basing denials were true (and communicated)- the costs to Iran over time may not be seen as worth the gains they thought they'd get.
I've seen a lot of discussion online about whether or not Iran would mine the strait, and it looks like it's happening.
Mate, not to put too fine a point on it, but CNN was publishing on this 2 weeks ago.
I'm not one to condemn people for not paying attention to ongoing conflicts. But if you have seen a lot of discussion about whether Iran would mine the strait or not over the last two weeks, you were seeing a lot of discussion by people who were either low-information, in denial, or falling for (admittedly generally widespread) efforts of international governments and their media-allies to downplay true-but-inconvenient facts. Update priors, and past questions, accordingly. If you are wondering how the mines would change the conflict, you've had the last two weeks to observe the impacts. If it was a game changer, the game changed about half the length of the conflict ago.
Now, there's certain some interesting questions or discussions that could be raised from this media report... such as why is there a press surge now of 'old' news? Why did so many states and media try to smother the initial information in the first place, including CNN not revisiting it? Is there an actual new development on the ground, or is this part of DC kabuki theater as the Trump administration tries to move towards closing the conflict while the Iranians deny there are talks?
An international attention surge might have utility to someone. Or maybe something else has happened.
I'll offer a measured apology if this came off as being too harsh at the start. However, treating old news as new is a pet peave of mine, in part because it is such a classic propaganda technique used by the originators (which are not you) to get people to react rather than remember context.
Dean
Flairless
16d ago
Dean
Flairless
27d ago
So where does their good reputation come from?
The mid-2000s successes of their proxies that they trained/equipped/advised in frustrating / stonewalling the Israeli's in Lebanon and the US in Iraq. These were cases where the larger conventional force made deliberate efforts to win a decisive battle, and failed to reach any sort of conclusive victory. This translated into prestige for the groups that won-by-not-losing against world-leading professional militaries, and prestige-by-proxy for the IRGC.
The best example was the 2006 Lebanon War, which started when Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers and the Israeli's launched a conventional invasion into southern Lebanon. In the month-long war that followed, Hezbollah fought with guerilla tactics the entire time and was not cleared by IDF forces, launched over 4000 rockets with the IDF being unable to stop it, and kept the war goal of the captives away from the Israeli reclamation efforts. It's debatable how well / long Hezbollah would have lasted had the war not been brought to a quick close after a month, but the war did conclude and Israel certainly did not achieve its objectives in that time. Hezbollah went toe to toe with one of the more respected militaries in the world, won the war it set out to do, and almost certainly would not have without IRGC efforts.
A later but still IRGC-coded example was the Huthis in Yemen. While the Huthis are their own entity who are more partners than pawns, cultivating that relationship was an IRGC effort, and it provided major frustrations to Iran's adversaries. The Saudi war in Yemen for one, the later closure of the red sea shipping, and the US inability to stop that as well. It provided the durability of a missile force focused on area denial, which is what the
The IRGC reputation has never rested on the ability to protect people and infrastructure, so its failures in that respect don't really work against their reputation. The Iranians have pursued a proxy-war-abroad strategy for decades, basically since their foundational experience in the Iran-Iraq War, and that has generally worked from a premise of having other people bomb militants and infrastructure anywhere but Iran.
The strategic wisdom / competence of the IRGC strategy is an entirely different question, one where I have a dim view that boils down to 'they lost the plot on how a proxy strategy works,' but the IRGC's current (recent) reputation derives mostly from its proxy warfare capacities abroad, which are significant.
A Democratic media organ presenting a highly inflammatory allegation with salacious details without source and treating it as credible despite no one else seemingly able to verify?
Say it ain't so.
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