Schoolyard tactics but no strategy

Schoolyard tactics but no strategy

This post about the current mess in Iraq and Iran by foreign policy expert and experienced diplomat Wendy Sherman is well worth reading. She points out something that should be obvious but isn't.

She writes that Iraq is always a problem which we made worse with the invasion in 2003. And the strange bedfellows this created among all the various players in the region made it even more complicated.

She writes:

The U.S. troops worked alongside Iraqi and Iranian militia to destroy a common enemy, the Islamic State terrorism group. And even as Washington was confronting Iran over its nuclear program and malign behavior elsewhere, we maintained an uneasy coexistence in Iraq, where Tehran holds considerable sway.

When Trump unilaterally withdrew from the agreement he said he believed a "maximum pressure" campaign would create a popular uprising that would bring down the regime. However:

Like much of Trump’s national security and foreign policy, his Iran approach is tactical and not strategic. The results have been devastating to U.S. interests. Iran’s most extreme hard-liners, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Quds force, which never wanted the nuclear deal, have gained more power, arguing that the United States couldn’t be trusted to honor any agreement.

Iran’s nefarious activities in the region have increased, because terror is not an expensive undertaking and so is largely immune from economic sanctions. Indeed, the IRGC has happily returned to controlling the lucrative black market under Trump’s sanctions. And Iran, after complying with the deal for nearly three years, now confronted with "maximum pressure" and no diplomatic track, has begun to unwind its compliance.

And worse than just being tactical without being strategic is the fact that his tactics are all twitter bluster and empty threats.

Read the whole thing if you have the time. We are in another dangerous moment. Maybe we'll get lucky and get through it without anything terrible happening. But Trump made the huge mistake of saying that his "red-line" is any American life being lost. That was the reason they retaliated against the contractor being killed in the shelling last week. And it escalated the situation in exactly the way the hardliners hoped it would.

As Sherman says, terrorism is cheap. Sanctions don't have any effect on that. But for someone like Trump who thinks everything in this world is about money, deals, quid-pro-quos, that just doesn't compute. After all, he thought Kim Jong Un would give up his nukes in exchange for some condos on beach. He really did.

This is what happens when you elect the narcissitic fool at the end of the bar who has no experience and won't listen to anyone who does.

Update: news at this hour of the possible killing of a top Iranian General by an American airstrike in Iraq. Stay tuned. This is escalating quickly.

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