Analysis of Sunday's U.S. Airstrikes

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Brian Lehrer: It's Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Have you heard yet that Joe Biden has now used the military? That's right. Yesterday evening, President Biden ordered airstrikes against Iranian-backed militia facilities near the Syria-Iraq border, which the Defense Department said had been used in attacks on US personnel in Iraq. To talk about these airstrikes, possible repercussions, and why now, I'm joined by Fred Kaplan Slate's, War Stories columnist, and the author of many books, including his latest The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. Hi, Fred. Thanks for coming on, on short notice, today. Welcome back to WNYC.

Fred: Thank you. My pleasure.

Brian Lehrer: Fred, how much do we know, first of all, about what the targets were and the extent of the airstrikes?

Fred: The targets reportedly were one depot where the Iran--

Brian Lehrer: All right, hang on, folks, obviously we're having an audio problem with Fred. We're going to try to fix that and get him on a better line. I'll give you a little background on this. In the meantime, apparently these were drone facilities used by the Iran-backed Shia militia group in Iraq. Fox says, the BBC- I should say the BBC, citing the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, reported that five militia fighters were killed in the strikes. The US has been emphasizing that it was a strike on facilities, but there do seem to be at least five dead, what they call militia fighters.

The Wall Street Journal's citing a news agency in Iraq that supports the Iranian allied militias, reported that four of those killed were members of paramilitaries. SANA, the Syrian state news agency reported that a child was also killed, and three other people were injured. Let's see if we have fixed the connection to Fred Kaplan's line. Fred, are you there?

Fred: Yes. I am here now. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Let's see. To be clear, what I was just reading was from Fox News, quoting those other news organizations, just to be precise, and credit where credit was due. Is there anything you would add about what the targets were, and the extent of the damages as it's known, and human casualties?

Fred: The target, at least this was the official report, were a weapon's depot, a place where the Iranian-backed militias stored weapons. The other is a place from which they had launched and recovered drones that had fired weapons on American forces, supposedly done at one o'clock in the morning. If the targets were what they said they were, there shouldn't have been too many people killed. Information about this sort of thing sometimes dribbles out slowly.

Brian Lehrer: What US forces are left in Iraq, and what kinds of attacks had been carried out at these facilities that the Biden administration felt that was responding to?

Fred: At least as far as I know, these are entirely US forces that train the Iraqi military, and mainly train them to go after remnants of ISIS and other militias that are still in Iran or on the Iran-Syrian border. There are no, again, as far as I know, no US forces still involved in combat operations, as they call it.

Brian Lehrer: Now, the Department of Defense Press Secretary is quoted as saying the airstrikes were a "necessary, appropriate and deliberate action designed to limit the risk of escalation" and that they sent a "deterrent message," but the militia groups are threatening retaliation, I understand. Does this limit the risk of escalation or is this escalation?

Fred: It's interesting that you quote that remark, I was going to, as an example of just how enmeshed we are in dangerous cliche in talking about these things. This is boilerplate language. You might recall similar statements, going back years, even decades now. There is this notion that, okay, the bad guys attack us, so we're going to attack them back with maybe a little bit more force than they attacked us and that will make them shudder in their boots, and it will de-escalate things.

Some notion of that will escalate and that will de-escalate the conflict, I guess, because the bad guys say, "Oh my God, the Americans responded to us and we know all the firepower they have behind this, so we better stop now." It just doesn't work that way. They actually live there. I'm not saying they have a right to do the things they've been doing, but they're there and we're not. We have been escalating conflicts in order to de-escalate the enemy response for many years in this part of the world, and it doesn't work. It might be time to start thinking about another way of going about this.

Brian Lehrer: The last time you were on, I think we were talking about President Biden's plan to withdraw the remaining US troops from Afghanistan. Why is he keeping troops in Iraq, if he's getting out of Afghanistan, those wars were started around the same time in response to 9/11?

Fred: He might be wondering the same thing right now. It's worth noting that both of these attacks that he's done in Iraq, Syria, have been the minimum. It's the smallest attack option that his secretary of defense and joint chiefs of staff have recommended. We do have advisors and trainers in Iraq as part of general agreements. I guess one could rationalize an argument for wanting to help Iraq maintain good fighting capability against ISIS and things like that.

It's no accident that, although this has been true of many presidents now, during the transition after Biden was elected, but before he came into office, one of his senior advisors told me that the Middle East ranked "a distant fourth" in Biden's list of priorities of important parts of the world. The others being Asia Pacific, Europe, South America, and then the Middle East. Obama, he too wanted to pivot away from the Middle East. Trump wanted to get out of the Middle East. The Middle East is, in terms of commitments, and what things that you get weighed down in, an empire eater, it's a swamp. It's a morass.

One can come up again with perfectly fine rationales for doing the things we're doing there, and what we're doing there is a lot less than what we were doing even a few years ago, but we're just kidding ourselves. We think that this attack will be the last one because the bad guys will then creep away in fear and trembling.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can sneak in one or two phone calls for Fred Kaplan on these new US airstrikes, along the Iraq-Syria border, if you have a question or a comment, 646-435-7280. 646-435-7280, or tweet your question or comment @BrianLehrer, with so much going on domestically in the United States right now, the story is almost getting lost.

Here we are, a new administration, a former vice president, peace camp advisor to President Obama, who was on the more peace camp side of what to do in Iraq and Afghanistan from more hawkish cabinet members like Hillary Clinton, now in office, and using the military, at least a couple of times now in the Middle East, himself, 646-435-7280. Fred, the more hawkish argument or a more hawkish argument would be, look what happened the last time the United States tried to fully get out of Iraq.

That was under President Obama, and I presume with Vice President Biden's support, it created enough of a vacuum that ISIS was able to get the stronghold that it got and become a deadly threat to Americans and others for a number of years, or at least that's the version of events that seems to have solidified in the popular mind. Do you think that is what happened? Would that be a reason for the US to continue some military presence in or near Iraq?

Fred: We have some kind of military presence in- I forget how many countries in the world, it's about 100. I do want to correct one common misconception. It was not Obama who decided to get out of Iraq.

Brian Lehrer: It was Bush.

Fred: President Bush, in December of 2008, signed Status of Forces Agreement, saying that by- and I forget the exact date, but by sometime in 2011, all US forces will be out of Iraq. That was signed as a condition of being allowed to keep any forces at all, for the next three years or so. Iraq wanted us out. Obama came up with, formulated the schedule of this withdrawal. It was signed under Bush, and perhaps under duress, but that's the way it happened.

One of the things that I would like to bring up is that the CIA invented the armed drone in 2001. It was first used in Afghanistan, it was very successful, you might remember, "Oh, my God, we can send a drone halfway around the world and you can fire a laser-guided weapon right on a target." It was thought that nobody would ever be able to do this kind of thing. Now, Iran and militias and several other groups have drones. Now, they're not quite like our drones, they don't have the satellite guidance and the command control to be able to send one of these things halfway around the world, but they can start doing it.

This has happened, another thing that's happened all through the history of arms races. When we built the atom bomb in 1945, it was thought, "Oh, the Asiatic Russians, it'll take them decades to come up with this." It took them four years. We came up with the intercontinental ballistic missile, they pretty much matched us on that. We come up with these new technologies that give us a temporary advantage. By the way, there might be very good reasons for exploiting them at the time. The armed drones combined with other things allowed us to push Al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan in ridiculously short order. It's going to come back and bite us on the other end, at some point.

Brian Lehrer: How much do you see this as a message to the new leadership in Iran, another story that barely broke through in this country, they just elected a new hard-line president?

Fred: Again, I don't have inside information on this, but it's reasonable to suspect that some of this might also have been aimed at Israel and the US Senate, Republicans in the Senate, is saying, "Look, we're trying to get the Iran nuclear deal back on track, but don't worry, we're not going to put up with the aggressive crap that the Iranians and Iranian-backed militias are throwing at our forces throughout the Middle East."

It might be, at least in part, designed to send that kind of message. By the way, in his first attack in February, and I suspect this will happen this time as well, Biden sent a message to the Iranian leadership, telling them, "Look, I'm not looking for a wider conflict with Iran, but you have to get your militias under control." This could be part of a very complicated set of signals tending both to Iran, to the powers in the region, and also to skeptics of the Iran nuclear deal, which Biden would very much like to get back on.

Brian Lehrer: That's a very interesting analysis, even if it is speculation, it makes a lot of logical sense. A few more minutes with Fred Kaplan, who writes the War Stories column for Slate. He's their military correspondent on President Biden ordering airstrikes that took place against Iran-backed militia facilities along the Iraq-Syria border last night. Let's take a phone call. Here's Miles in Elmhurst, you're on WNYC. Hi, Miles.

Miles: Hi, Brian, and hi Mr. Kaplan, longtime listener, big fan. I just want to say I don't see any substantial difference between the foreign policy between Obama administration and the Trump administrations, in regard to the specific low intensity by Iran, with security aid going to dictators in Southeast Asia, like Duterte, not standing up and doing anything with Israel invading Gaza, I don't see any substantial difference between the administration. I was wondering if you could comment on that.

Fred: I would say a lot of the rest of the world would disagree with that. If you look at these polls of what foreigners and foreign leaders think of the United States and US leadership, favorable ratings have tripled, quadrupled, sometimes even more than that, since Trump left and Biden took over. In terms of Israel and occupied territories and firing on Gaza, and that sort of thing, the new leadership in Israel has said there, they're going to try to have a much more conciliatory view toward the US. Netanyahu has gone. That could make a very big difference with what goes on in US-Israel relations.

In terms of a lot of other things, you're right. Trump wanted to get out of all kinds of places that we were at. He wanted to get out of Afghanistan, he wanted to get out of the Middle East entirely. He did to some degree, and very awkwardly, and there are the US, call it an empire, call it a network of security systems, call it whatever you want, they've been around for decades now, they create certain imperatives, there are certain systems and relationships between the military and intelligence agencies that are in place, there are wars going on there. We're trapped in the middle of them with forces.

In this case, we're not even fighting there. We just have trainers, but they provide nice targets of opportunity for people who are trying to pressure us and intimidate our clients. It's very hard just to get out of this, just to disentangle ourselves. This is one reason why Biden, I think, decided just to get out of Afghanistan. He'd been through all of the internal debates about that whole thing.

You can like that view, or you can like his judgment on this, you can dislike it, but I think he saw that the only way to tear ourselves out of the mess and the escalations and counter-escalations was just to get out. I don't think you'll see that in a lot of other places because the mesh is a little too tightly woven in a lot of areas. No, what the caller is talking about is a critique of large power foreign relations. During the Cold War, the same kind of critique could be applied to the Soviet Union, who knows, maybe someday could also be applied to China.

Brian Lehrer: On this being similar to Trump's foreign policy, at least in this respect, whatever happened to Trump isolationist populism, if you listened to the real Trumpian members of Congress, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, and of course, on the sidelines, Steve Bannon, the intellectual architect of a lot of Trumpism, part of it is, let's stop waging endless wars around the world so we can save our dollars for what? For the other big story infrastructure this week, but-

Fred: For tax cuts.

Brian Lehrer: -or tax cuts, and yet, here we are. I'm just curious if you have an early sense of whether Republicans in Congress support this bombing by Biden?

Fred: I would be stunned. This was put in the guise and perhaps even the reality of protecting our troops. Who's against protecting our troops? The interesting thing about the Republicans, on the one hand, being rah-rah and supporting $750 billion in defense budgets, and on the other hand, wanting to get out of any place in the world where we might have to use the stuff that's being bought with this $750 billion defense budget. I think this is true in some respect for the Democrats as well.

You might recall when Syria was using chemical weapons, and Obama was trying to figure out what to do about it, they crossed the red line. He said, "Okay, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to ask Congress to give me the authorization to do this." It was a Republican-run Congress at the time, and they would not vote him authorization. Then they criticized him for not doing anything. A lot of what Congress has been up to, for decades now, in foreign policy, is just shirking any responsibility. They passed the War Powers Act in the '70s, during the height of anti-Vietnam sentiments, and for a couple of years, they actually invoked it, and then they didn't. Then presidents were allowed to go to war while pretending they really weren't at war. Congress was fine with that because they actually don't want the responsibility. They don't want to take the blame if things go south. Really it's an obstructive force just by being there. Their attitude and their behavior, it works against the possibility of maybe a cohesive foreign policy that has some Democratic backing.

Brian Lehrer: That's a whole other discussion we can have on another day, does Congress do too little to check the war-making powers of the president, or as you implied there, does it sometimes do too much. Last question, Fred, in our last minute. We're trying to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Iran right now to get back in to the one that Trump pulled us out of that the Obama administration negotiated.

One of the conservative objections to the Iran nuclear deal originally is that it didn't do enough to curb Iran's military adventurism, that was not nuclear, and I imagine these Iran-backed Hezbollah militia fighters on the Iraq-Syria border would be an example of that. Just give us your one-minute take. I know you referred to this briefly before the attempt to get back into an Iran nuclear deal. How does this either help pave the way for or complicate efforts to strike a better deal?

Fred: Yes, I think it probably does both. Obama, in some of the early stages of negotiation, they started trying to deal with some of the other issues, and they decided, A, it just wasn't going to happen, and B, just as well it doesn't happen. Let's focus on the nuclear part of the equation. Throughout the Cold War, again, we managed to negotiate quite useful treaties on nuclear arms control with the Russians, while the Russians were still, at least ideologically, opposed to what we were doing, sending troops or support to Angola, to all over the world. You are able to walk and chew gum at the same time, you're able to acknowledge that we still have many differences.

By the way, the sanctions that would be lifted against Iran, and we got back into the nuclear deal, are not the same as the sanctions that would still be in place as a result of their ballistic missiles and supportive terrorism. Foreign policy is a complicated thing, but relations between one country and another country have very many different elements and dimensions, and you can pursue all of them at the same time. That's what diplomacy is about.

Brian Lehrer: Fred Kaplan, Slate's War Stories columnist and the author of many books, including his latest The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. Fred, thanks.

Fred: Sure. Thank you.

 

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