Fw: what do we know about Iran

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General McChrystal on the Myths Misleading Trump in Iran

The president may have been seduced by the idea of an easy victory, warns the Iraq and Afghanistan war commander on “The Opinions      Video: Opinion | General McChrystal on the Myths Misleading Trump in Iran

Video: Opinion | General McChrystal on the Myths Misleading Trump in Iran The president may have been seduced by the idea of an easy victory, warns the Iraq and Afghanistan war commander...

There are three great seductions that happen to American administrations and to military. The first is the idea of covert action. And a new president comes in and he’s told by the intelligence community, we can create this great effect, and it will be covert. No one will ever know who did it, and it’ll just be a good outcome. And in my experience, it never stays covert. And it rarely works. But it’s seductive because it seems like an easy approach to a knotty problem. The second seduction is, which I lived as a part of, is the surgical Special Operations raid, and that is probably epitomized by the Maduro raid. And I would argue that we demonstrated extraordinary competence that night, but not much changed. I don’t think that we actually demonstrated the ability to change the facts on the ground to any extent. Which gets to the third great seduction, and that’s air power. And we all love air power. In World War II, we went into the war with the Douhet theories that air power — the bomber will always get through and therefore air power will be dominant. And it was certainly very, very contributory. But it was never dominant. Then we got into Vietnam, which was the classic case, and we developed a strategy that said, for North Vietnam, we will have a rheostat and an escalation strategy, and we will raise the pressure on them until we hit the point at which they’re willing to quit — it’s not worth it anymore. What we didn’t perceive is there was no point for North Vietnam. They were asymmetrically committed to the outcome. And so we entered Iraq in 2003 with shock and awe, and then we spent a decade there fighting after it. I think in this case, there was a — again, we fell for the seduction that if we bomb key targets, that we will produce the outcome we want, but the outcome’s in the minds of the people. And unless you’re going to kill all the people you may not affect that outcome. So we may be at a point — you use the word in your article today “quagmire” — but we may be in a point where we’ve run into a country that has an extraordinary capacity to be bombed.