National commentary about the U.S.-Israeli campaign in Iran has generally been anything but jingoistic.
“I’m flabbergasted by the relentless pessimism I’m seeing in much of the commentariat,” wrote Bret Stephens in The New York Times on March 12. “We are less than two weeks into a war that will almost surely be over by the end of the month and already there are predictions that it’s ‘another Iraq.’”
In a March 13 Wall Street Journal newsletter, Matthew Hennessey similarly observed that American journalists writing about the war currently “flood the zone with negative coverage: unflattering stories, tales of waste, hints of stupidity, insinuations of corruption, accusations of ineptitude, warnings of impending doom. We’re running out of missiles. Planes are falling from the sky. We’re targeting children.”
“The hits keep coming,” he continued. Most major outlets are “hammering the same message about the war: It’s going poorly, it’s getting worse and it never should have started in the first place.
“If you think you picked up something positive or inspiring about the work our military men and women are doing in the Middle East, check again. You probably misunderstood.”
This last week, some foreign policy experts have weighed in with more hopeful observations about how the conflict is unfolding.
Mark Dubowitz and Richard Goldberg, The Atlantic:
Mark Dubowitz is the chief executive officer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, with Richard Goldberg a senior adviser to the same organization. Goldberg previously served as director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction for the National Security Council.
Although the campaign remains “unfinished,” writing in The Atlantic on March 16, they say “the outlines of victory are beginning to emerge.” Even at this point, Dubowitz and Goldberg say, “The United States and Israel have already achieved once-unimaginable strategic gains for the free world.”
- Calling Iran’s ballistic-missile program “the backbone of Tehran’s ability to coerce the region,” they note: “Israeli military assessments indicate that 160 to 190 launchers have been destroyed and roughly 200 more disabled, while perhaps 150 remain active. Missile inventories have been sharply diminished, and production lines and storage facilities repeatedly struck. Ballistic-missile launches have fallen by more than 90% since the war began.” Other statistics on attack drones have dropped by 95%.
- “Just as important,” they say, “the human system behind the arsenal is fraying. Missile crews are reportedly reluctant to leave cover, desertions are increasing, refusals to obey orders are surfacing, and American and Israeli forces continue hunting launchers daily.”
- Alongside the estimated 40 senior Iranian commanders killed in the opening strikes, they note Israeli claims of “thousands of Iranian security personnel” being killed. “Drones operating over Tehran have reportedly struck and killed IRGC and Basij personnel manning checkpoint units. For the first time, repression forces may fear for their own survival just as protesters have for years.”
- “The announced selection of Mojtaba Khamenei as the new supreme leader may accelerate (the regime’s) erosion rather than stabilize it,” they say — arguing that the visible continuation of a “harsher, weaker, more corrupt order” signals fragility, compared with a moderate leader that would “revive illusions of moderation abroad.”
- The missile-and-drone campaign against positions in Gulf Arab states, they say, “has united it against the regime” — noting how many are now lining up openly against Iran, reflected in the fact that “135 countries co-sponsored a United Nations resolution condemning Iran.”
Dubowitz and Goldberg acknowledge the unresolved dangers in Iran’s control over a “significant stock of highly enriched uranium.” And, they say, “the regime rightly sees the Battle for Hormuz as its last stand.”
Yet they add, “United States Central Command has planned for a Hormuz contingency for years” — stating that “President (Donald) Trump’s strike on Kharg Island has destroyed important threats to the tanker community and placed Tehran’s economic jugular at risk. American forces shattered military defenses, radar, and (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) protection around the regime’s most important export hub while deliberately sparing the oil terminal itself.”
They conclude, “If Central Command succeeds in setting the conditions for tanker traffic to resume — and potentially, for the United States to cut off the regime’s financial lifeblood on Kharg — the stage would be set for history-changing events to follow.”
Muhanad Seloom, Al Jazeera:
Muhanad Seloom is an assistant professor of international politics and security at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. He previously worked in roles with the U.S. Department of State and the U.K. Ministry of Defence.
Writing in Al Jazeera, he notes the prevailing view that “the United States and Israel stumbled into a war without a plan. Iran is retaliating across the region. Oil prices are surging, and the world is facing another Middle Eastern quagmire.”
“But this narrative is wrong,” Seloom writes, “not because the costs are imaginary, but because the critics are measuring the wrong things.”
“When you look at what has actually happened to Iran’s principal instruments of power — its ballistic missile arsenal, its nuclear infrastructure, its air defenses, its navy and its proxy command architecture — the picture is not one of U.S. failure,” he continues. “It is one of systematic, phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades.”
Seloom describes among his reasons for confidence:
- Iran’s “air defenses have been suppressed to the point at which the U.S. is now flying nonstealth B-1 bombers over Iranian airspace, a decision that signals near-total confidence in air dominance.” This air superiority, he says, has been “achieved without the confirmed loss of a single American or Israeli combat aircraft.”
- The second phase now underway focuses on Iran’s military industrial base, he says, including “missile production facilities, dual-use research centers and the underground complexes where remaining stockpiles are stored.” Seloom writes, “This is not aimless bombing. It is a methodical campaign to ensure that what has been destroyed cannot be rebuilt.”
- “The question is not whether the strait (of Hormuz) reopens but when and whether Iran retains any naval capacity to contest it. Critics compare the challenge of escorting a hundred tankers daily to an impossible logistical burden. But you do not need to escort tankers through a strait if the adversary no longer has the means to threaten them. That is the operational trajectory.”
Seloom argues that critics are “treating the costs of action as if the costs of inaction were zero. They were not. They were measured in the slow accretion of a threat that, left unchecked, would have produced exactly the crisis everyone claims to fear: a nuclear-armed Iran capable of closing the Strait of Hormuz at will, surrounded by proxy forces that could hold the entire region hostage indefinitely.”
At this point in the conflict, he sums, “Iran’s supreme leader is dead, his successor is reportedly wounded and every principal instrument of Iranian power projection — missiles, nuclear infrastructure, air defenses, the navy, proxy command networks — has been degraded beyond near-term recovery.”
“The campaign’s execution has been imperfect, its public communication poor and its post-conflict planning incomplete. War is never clean. But the strategy — the actual strategy, measured in degraded capabilities rather than cable news cycles — is working.”