Rosemary Kelanic
Rosemary Kelanic é diretora do programa do Oriente Médio na Defense Priorities.
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| Middle East Images/Redux |
Os Estados Unidos estão assustadoramente perto de serem arrastados para mais um emaranhado militar no Oriente Médio, desta vez por Israel — que parece cada vez menos um verdadeiro amigo.
O ataque surpresa de Israel ao Irã na sexta-feira quase certamente destruiu qualquer chance de se chegar ao acordo nuclear que os Estados Unidos buscavam há meses. O primeiro-ministro israelense, Benjamin Netanyahu, também colocou em risco, de forma imprudente, os 40.000 soldados americanos destacados na região, colocando-os em risco imediato de retaliação iraniana, o que poderia levar os Estados Unidos a uma guerra com o Irã.
Independentemente de como o Irã interprete nosso papel nos ataques, Israel parece ter agido sem dar aos Estados Unidos aviso suficiente para que tomassem as precauções adequadas. Embora o presidente Trump tenha reconhecido na quinta-feira que um ataque israelense poderia ser iminente, os Estados Unidos só iniciaram as evacuações voluntárias de famílias de militares e funcionários não essenciais da embaixada na tarde de quarta-feira, enquanto o Departamento de Estado começou a elaborar planos para a evacuação em massa de cidadãos americanos poucas horas antes do ataque.
O Sr. Trump e todos os americanos deveriam estar furiosos. Agora, o Sr. Netanyahu e vozes extremistas nos Estados Unidos quase certamente pressionarão o Sr. Trump para que ajude Israel a destruir as instalações de enriquecimento nuclear do Irã, algo que será difícil para os militares israelenses fazerem sozinhos e que nem mesmo os militares americanos conseguirão. Seria o pior erro da presidência do Sr. Trump.
Uma guerra com o Irã seria uma catástrofe, o fracasso culminante de décadas de alcance regional dos Estados Unidos e exatamente o tipo de política contra a qual o Sr. Trump há muito tempo se manifesta. Os Estados Unidos não ganhariam nada lutando contra um país fraco do outro lado do globo que causa problemas em sua região, mas não representa uma ameaça crítica à nossa segurança. E os Estados Unidos perderiam muito: mais tragicamente, as vidas de militares americanos, além de qualquer chance de escapar do nosso passado torturado na região.
Americans of all political stripes oppose war with Iran, presumably because they understand the two big lessons from U.S. experiences fighting in the Middle East over the past 25 years. Not only do preventive wars not work; they also have unintended consequences with lasting impact on America’s national security.
The misguided 2003 invasion of Iraq was also a war to forestall nuclear proliferation. Disaster ensued, and not just because Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. invasion triggered chaos and civil war in Iraq and tipped the regional balance of power toward Iran by allowing it to establish new proxy militias in the country. It also led to the eventual rise of ISIS.
There is no reason to think that a war with Iran would go any more smoothly — and it could turn out considerably worse. If drawn in, the U.S. military’s involvement would likely begin with airstrikes rather than a ground invasion, given Iran’s large size and forbidding mountainous terrain. But as the fruitless $7 billion campaign against the Houthis showed, airstrikes are exorbitantly expensive, entail significant risks of American casualties and are likely to fail anyway. The United States never even gained air superiority over the Houthis, a ragtag militant group with the resource base of an impoverished country, Yemen, over which it couldn’t even consolidate control.
Iran is far more capable of defending itself than the Houthis are. If airstrikes fail to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities, pressure would dramatically increase on U.S. forces to pair an aerial barrage with a ground component, perhaps something akin to the “Afghan model” the United States used to topple the Taliban. We know how that went. Despite the intent to keep that war small and brief, an engagement that started with just 1,300 U.S. troops in November 2001 snowballed into a disastrous 20-year occupation that reached some 100,000 U.S. troops at its height in 2011 and ultimately caused the deaths of 2,324 U.S. military personnel.
Even a best-case scenario, in which the United States helps destroy the majority of Iranian nuclear sites, would only delay Iran’s progress toward developing a bomb. War cannot prevent weaponization in the long term, which is why either diplomacy or benign neglect has always been better choices for handling Iran. Its enrichment program is over 20 years old, spread across multiple sites in the Islamic Republic, and employs untold thousands of scientists — 3,000 at the Isfahan facility alone. It’s probable that enough Iranian scientists know how to enrich weapons-grade uranium that Israel would not be able to kill them all, despite its airstrikes explicitly targeting them.
Assuming some continuity of technical knowledge persists, Iran would likely be able to rebuild its nuclear facilities quickly. And a defiant Iranian regime would no doubt be determined on weaponizing to deter future Israeli and U.S. attacks.
That likelihood, coupled with Israel’s insistence that Iran must never get the bomb, suggests that Mr. Netanyahu’s theory of victory could be premised on an underlying logic of regime change. Supporting that point, Israel appears to be engaging in strikes aimed at disabling the regime’s leadership in Tehran.
The Israeli leader has long embraced the desirability of regime change in Iran, and hinted in September that it could happen “sooner than people think.” As a French diplomatic source told Le Monde last fall, “The idea is circulating in certain circles that perhaps the Israelis are leading us toward a historic moment, that this is the beginning of the end for the Iranian regime.” The fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in December intensified speculation about similar upheaval in Iran. Some U.S. policy hawks and members of the Iranian diaspora now claim regime change is becoming inevitable; as Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton put it, “It’s now time to think of the campaign for regime change in Iran.”
That is magical thinking. History has shown again and again that bombing a country turns its people against the attacker, not against their own regime, despite its deep unpopularity. Images already show Iranians demonstrating in the streets — not to oppose their government but to urge retaliation against Israel. And even if the regime were to be deposed, what then? For all the Iranian government’s faults, a bad government is preferable to the chaos of no government. Do we really want to turn Iran into a failed state, like Iraq or Libya after the United States attacked those countries?
Independentemente de como o Irã interprete nosso papel nos ataques, Israel parece ter agido sem dar aos Estados Unidos aviso suficiente para que tomassem as precauções adequadas. Embora o presidente Trump tenha reconhecido na quinta-feira que um ataque israelense poderia ser iminente, os Estados Unidos só iniciaram as evacuações voluntárias de famílias de militares e funcionários não essenciais da embaixada na tarde de quarta-feira, enquanto o Departamento de Estado começou a elaborar planos para a evacuação em massa de cidadãos americanos poucas horas antes do ataque.
O Sr. Trump e todos os americanos deveriam estar furiosos. Agora, o Sr. Netanyahu e vozes extremistas nos Estados Unidos quase certamente pressionarão o Sr. Trump para que ajude Israel a destruir as instalações de enriquecimento nuclear do Irã, algo que será difícil para os militares israelenses fazerem sozinhos e que nem mesmo os militares americanos conseguirão. Seria o pior erro da presidência do Sr. Trump.
Uma guerra com o Irã seria uma catástrofe, o fracasso culminante de décadas de alcance regional dos Estados Unidos e exatamente o tipo de política contra a qual o Sr. Trump há muito tempo se manifesta. Os Estados Unidos não ganhariam nada lutando contra um país fraco do outro lado do globo que causa problemas em sua região, mas não representa uma ameaça crítica à nossa segurança. E os Estados Unidos perderiam muito: mais tragicamente, as vidas de militares americanos, além de qualquer chance de escapar do nosso passado torturado na região.
Americans of all political stripes oppose war with Iran, presumably because they understand the two big lessons from U.S. experiences fighting in the Middle East over the past 25 years. Not only do preventive wars not work; they also have unintended consequences with lasting impact on America’s national security.
The misguided 2003 invasion of Iraq was also a war to forestall nuclear proliferation. Disaster ensued, and not just because Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. invasion triggered chaos and civil war in Iraq and tipped the regional balance of power toward Iran by allowing it to establish new proxy militias in the country. It also led to the eventual rise of ISIS.
There is no reason to think that a war with Iran would go any more smoothly — and it could turn out considerably worse. If drawn in, the U.S. military’s involvement would likely begin with airstrikes rather than a ground invasion, given Iran’s large size and forbidding mountainous terrain. But as the fruitless $7 billion campaign against the Houthis showed, airstrikes are exorbitantly expensive, entail significant risks of American casualties and are likely to fail anyway. The United States never even gained air superiority over the Houthis, a ragtag militant group with the resource base of an impoverished country, Yemen, over which it couldn’t even consolidate control.
Iran is far more capable of defending itself than the Houthis are. If airstrikes fail to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities, pressure would dramatically increase on U.S. forces to pair an aerial barrage with a ground component, perhaps something akin to the “Afghan model” the United States used to topple the Taliban. We know how that went. Despite the intent to keep that war small and brief, an engagement that started with just 1,300 U.S. troops in November 2001 snowballed into a disastrous 20-year occupation that reached some 100,000 U.S. troops at its height in 2011 and ultimately caused the deaths of 2,324 U.S. military personnel.
Even a best-case scenario, in which the United States helps destroy the majority of Iranian nuclear sites, would only delay Iran’s progress toward developing a bomb. War cannot prevent weaponization in the long term, which is why either diplomacy or benign neglect has always been better choices for handling Iran. Its enrichment program is over 20 years old, spread across multiple sites in the Islamic Republic, and employs untold thousands of scientists — 3,000 at the Isfahan facility alone. It’s probable that enough Iranian scientists know how to enrich weapons-grade uranium that Israel would not be able to kill them all, despite its airstrikes explicitly targeting them.
Assuming some continuity of technical knowledge persists, Iran would likely be able to rebuild its nuclear facilities quickly. And a defiant Iranian regime would no doubt be determined on weaponizing to deter future Israeli and U.S. attacks.
That likelihood, coupled with Israel’s insistence that Iran must never get the bomb, suggests that Mr. Netanyahu’s theory of victory could be premised on an underlying logic of regime change. Supporting that point, Israel appears to be engaging in strikes aimed at disabling the regime’s leadership in Tehran.
The Israeli leader has long embraced the desirability of regime change in Iran, and hinted in September that it could happen “sooner than people think.” As a French diplomatic source told Le Monde last fall, “The idea is circulating in certain circles that perhaps the Israelis are leading us toward a historic moment, that this is the beginning of the end for the Iranian regime.” The fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in December intensified speculation about similar upheaval in Iran. Some U.S. policy hawks and members of the Iranian diaspora now claim regime change is becoming inevitable; as Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton put it, “It’s now time to think of the campaign for regime change in Iran.”
That is magical thinking. History has shown again and again that bombing a country turns its people against the attacker, not against their own regime, despite its deep unpopularity. Images already show Iranians demonstrating in the streets — not to oppose their government but to urge retaliation against Israel. And even if the regime were to be deposed, what then? For all the Iranian government’s faults, a bad government is preferable to the chaos of no government. Do we really want to turn Iran into a failed state, like Iraq or Libya after the United States attacked those countries?
Trump frequentemente elogia seu histórico durante seu primeiro mandato de não ter iniciado novas guerras. Esse é um histórico que vale a pena transformar em legado. Ele precisa resistir à pressão de Netanyahu e dos falcões em casa para evitar uma automutilação trágica e irreparável.
Rosemary Kelanic é diretora do programa para o Oriente Médio da Defense Priorities.
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