Ariana News Agency-<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n President Trump temporarily ratcheted down tensions before raising them again with a Sunday tweet: \u201cIf Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s supporters sound just as pugnacious. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) warned that \u201cAttack= decisive response,\u201d and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said that \u201cif Iran struck out militarily against the United States or against our allies in the region, then I would certainly expect a devastating response against Iran.\u201d John Bolton, the national security adviser, didn\u2019t comment in public \u2014 he prefers to spin his plots in secret \u2014 but he hasn\u2019t disavowed his 2015 New York Times op-ed: \u201cTo Stop Iran\u2019s Bomb, Bomb Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n This tough-guy bluster is disconnected from reality. I\u2019ve spent the past week studying Iranian capabilities, and I don\u2019t see any military option that would qualify as decisive or low-cost. Instead, what I see is the mother of all quagmires: a conflict that would make the Iraq War \u2014 which I now deeply regret supporting \u2014 seem like a \u201ccakewalk\u201d by comparison.<\/p>\n The United States could, of course, bomb Iran \u2014 though it wouldn\u2019t be as low-risk as bombing Iraq in 2003. Iran has the most advanced air-defense network that U.S. aircraft have ever faced \u2014 the Russian-made S-300. The U.S. Air Force and Navy could no doubt prevail, but it would not be easy and could result in greater loss of pilots and aircraft than we have become accustomed to.<\/p>\n Eventually, after Iran\u2019s air defenses have been neutralized, the United States would be able to pound Iran\u2019s military and economic infrastructure. But to what end? In 2012, a group of former diplomats and generals estimated that U.S. airstrikes would set back Iran\u2019s nuclear program \u201cfor up to four years.\u201d The nuclear deal did far better: It imposed limits on Iran\u2019s nuclear program for 15 years and resulted in the elimination of 97 percent of Iran\u2019s fissile material. If the U.S. goal is to stop Iran\u2019s nuclear program, it would reenter the nuclear deal rather than bomb Iran.<\/p>\n But the Trump administration has laid out a more ambitious agenda. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo demanded that Iran stop its missile development, stop threatening U.S. allies, and stop its support for proxy groups across the region. It is difficult to see how bombing alone could compel Iranian compliance. The United States bombed North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos for years, dropping three times more bombs than all countries did during World War II, and still lost the Vietnam War. Air attacks are usually decisive only when combined with ground attacks.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the United States lacks a realistic ground option in Iran, which is much bigger than Iraq in both area and population. (Iran has 83 million people and 617,000 square miles; Iraq in 2003 had about 30 million people and about 170,000 square miles.) Counterinsurgency math \u2014 premised on 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants \u2014 suggests that the United States and its allies needed some 600,000 troops in Iraq. (There were never more than 180,000.) By that math, to control Iran, you would need more than 1.6 million troops. That\u2019s more than double the active-duty end-strength (656,403) of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps combined, and few if any U.S. allies would help. You could probably topple the Iranian government with a lot fewer troops. But if you leave immediately afterward, as Bolton favored doing in Iraq, the result could be either Libya-style chaos or the emergence of a new anti-American regime.<\/p>\n Even if you don\u2019t put a single U.S. boot on the ground and stick simply to airstrikes, the war would not be an antiseptic, push-button exercise for the United States. A 2011 report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments outlined how Iran could hit back with \u201casymmetric\u201d tactics.<\/p>\n Iran could employ a combination of antiship cruise missiles, drones, submarines, small boats and mines to \u201cswarm\u201d U.S. naval ships in the confined waters of the Persian Gulf. It could target U.S. bases in the region with its arsenal of some 2,000 missiles. It could cripple U.S. computer networks with cyberattacks. It could employ Hezbollah and other groups to stage terrorist attacks abroad. It could send local militias armed with missiles and car bombs to attack the 19,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. It could tell the Houthis in Yemen to unleash a missile barrage against Saudi Arabia and it could order Hezbollah to fire 150,000 rockets and missiles at Israel.<\/p>\n In response, the United States would do . . . what? Fire a few more cruise missiles, drop a few more bombs? It\u2019s hard to imagine that even Trump would unleash a nuclear holocaust to literally \u201cend\u201d Iran.<\/p>\n \u201cTell me how this ends,\u201d Army Gen. David H. Petraeus said during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The George W. Bush administration had no clue. Likewise, the Iran hawks today, in and out of the Trump administration, have no idea how a war with that country would end. Better, in that case, not to risk starting one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" During last week\u2019s war scare with Iran \u2014 as the administration leaked discussions to deploy 120,000 troops to fight Iran, and leaked intelligence claiming that Iran was placing missiles on small boats to attack U.S. warships \u2014 it sounded to a lot of people like Iraq redux.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_mat_hreflang_tags":[],"addvideo":"","video_duration":"","farsit":"","target":"0","top_stories":"0","top":"0"},"categories":[305],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia"],"acf":{"myctype":"change","target":false,"top_stories":false,"top":false,"farsit":""},"yoast_head":"\n