Der Preis der strategischen Inkohärenz im Iran: Für Amerika werden die Vorteile des Krieges seine Kosten nicht überwiegen
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/price-strategic-incoherence-iran
Der Preis der strategischen Inkohärenz im Iran: Für Amerika werden die Vorteile des Krieges seine Kosten nicht überwiegen
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/price-strategic-incoherence-iran
6 Kommentare
Who would have thought?
“Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had.” – Trumps College Professor
It’s way too early to tell what the long-term upsides or downsides of this war will be so every article or opinion I usually read about the consequences of this conflict just feels like a random guess.
This was common sense. We literally just pulled out of Afghanistan like five years ago. After spending 20 years, trillions of dollars and sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives, we replaced the Taliban with the Taliban. All the Taliban needed was an arms dealer (Pakistan) and orphans to keep their political movement alive. They were able to recruit more people to their cause than the Northern Alliance because of corruption and the movement was stenched as a foreign export. Here, we don’t even have something like the Northern Alliance to collaborate with in country which is more than twice the size of Afghanistan with 70% mountainous terrain.
With that in mind, there is a good chance that China, Russia, and possibly even Pakistan would supply the IRGC. The latter would likely do it to combat the refugee blow back and to contain the BLA. There is also variable of geography. The IRGC is not a tinpot dictatorship like Baathist Iraq or Syria in which the regime maintains control over urban enclaves and minority support. The IRGC is decentralized and stations sleeper cells across the 31 provinces with rather substantial autonomy. So even if we wipe out the headquarters and leadership in Tehran, their political institutions will still maintain control of the majority of the country.
[Excerpt from essay by Richard K. Betts, Leo A. Shifrin Professor Emeritus of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University and Adjunct Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations; and Stephen Biddle, Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and Adjunct Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.]
Contrary to the Trump administration’s callous public relations campaign early in the onslaught against Iran, war is not a movie or a video game. Starting a war is a decision to kill real people, destroy property, and divert limited resources from other priorities. For such moral and material costs to be acceptable, they have to be for a good purpose. No purpose will be good enough, however, unless it is accompanied by a strategy that can achieve that purpose at an acceptable price. Strategy simply means a plan by which military power will produce the desired political result. The war against Iran does not have this.
A common risk in war is goal displacement, when the tactical requirements of complex combat operations achieve immediate military objectives without serving the higher strategic and political purpose. Too often, naive political leaders assume that devastating the enemy militarily necessarily equals strategic success. Purpose and strategy in Iran need to be aligned if there is to be any justification for the current war.
The benefits are no nukes or capacity to build ICBMs and drones and support terror proxies. Sure do appreciate this ‚elucidating‘ article, complete nonsense, but thanks all the same.
“Strategic incoherence” seems like the understatement of the century. We really ought to stop using language like that, as I feel it diminishes the collossal scale and destructive nature of the continous strategic blunders committed by this US administration. It isn’t a strategy lacking coherence – it is a complete absence of strategy altogether.