Air power and low probability
The war drums are beating, and yet the administration is uncharacteristically reserved. Is it possible that it has learned a degree of humility at last? Even a world-straddling empire has its limits, as the Khans and Caesars learned in their days, and to ignore them can be fatal.
While there is no widespread agreement regarding the extent to which the U.S. military is taxed - opponents of the Afghani and Iraqi occupations claim that it is "exhausted," while the Pentagon insists that it is merely "stretched" - even the most hawkish neocons appear to recognize that a sequel to the Iraqi conquest is probably not in the cards. And for good reason, as there are other factors that enter into the invasion equation beyond the present state of the American armed forces.
Iran is larger and more populous than Iraq and its population is less heterogeneous, so the tactics of divide-and-conquer that worked so well with the Northern Alliance and the Iraqi Kurds are unlikely to be effective. The mountainous terrain does not lend itself to a fast-moving blitzkrieg of the sort that took Baghdad in record time, and Iranian military history suggests that its army is considerably less intimidated by mass casualties than Saddam Hussein's cardboard Republican Guard.
So, the whispers of late have been of precision air strikes launched in combination with special forces operating inside Iran. This sounds very high-tech and impressive, and while the Fox News analysts are no doubt eager to draw some imposing arrows on computerized maps (complete with little red explosion graphics indicating targets) an attack of this sort is only likely to succeed in Hollywood.
For the history of strategic bombing is a history of complete failure. Every USAF strategist since the the Air Force was called the Army Air Corp has either been deluded or deceitful about the ability to win a war from the air. With one notable exception, the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, aerial bombardments have never won a war.
There are numerous historical examples. Goering assured Hitler that the Luftwaffe could bomb the British into submission. Five years later, Germany surrendered. Knowing how little the Pearl Harbor raid could accomplish, Adm. Yamamoto wisely advised the Japanese generals against it, but he was overruled, much to Japan's eventual detriment. The USAF dropped 6.1 million tons of explosives on 5 million sorties against North Vietnam that not only left the North Vietnamese undefeated, but apparently didn't even retard their economic development. NATO's 78-day air war against Serbia did not stop the ethnic cleansing taking place there, nor, as was later learned, did it significantly degrade Serbian military capabilities.
Air power has always been overestimated by its advocates. A crucial tactical element, it is strategically toothless. In August 1941, at the request of President Roosevelt, the U.S. Air War Plans Division created a strategic document laying out the design for "an unremitting and sustained air offensive against Germany" called AWPD-1. The strategy "assumed that airpower could achieve strategic and political objectives in a fundamentally new way."
However, the AWPD planners might as well have been writing fiction. Despite launching 98,400 sorties against German industrial targets, including a 7-day bombing campaign called Big Week which utilized 3,800 heavy bombers operating around the clock, German aircraft production actually rose 279 percent from two years before. And this was despite having the benefit of Britain's earlier, failed strategic bombing campaign to serve as an example.
It seems wildly optimistic, then, if not actually insane, to assume that an air war against Iran's nuclear facilities can be any more successful than its conceptual predecessors.
The historican Carroll Quigley wrote that the centralization of government power tends to ebb and flow according to the availability of military technology. If his theory is correct, the impotence of the United States in the current situation will likely represent a watershed moment in history. The great trend of the post-World War II era has been one of increasingly centralized power, primarily due to the expense and technological expertise required to produce weapons of mass destruction. However, events in Iran appear to suggest that this 60-year trend may be nearing an end.
Precisely what that will mean for America is unknown, except that its hegemony, financial and otherwise, is likely to be challenged. One need not be enthusiastic about Iran acquiring nuclear weaponry to understand that it may - may - not be possible to prevent them from doing so.