Trump’s Blunder. Air wars don’t work. Iran ignores the lessons of history
· Michael West
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote George Santayana in 1905, subsequently generally misquoted as “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it”. Whichever version, Michael Pascoe writes Trump’s air war on Iran fits the bill.
Among other things, John Kenneth Galbraith, the great American economist, public servant and author, was a key director of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey in 1945. He became very unpopular with the US Air Force for finding that the Allied bombing of Germany wasn’t nearly as effective in weakening Germany’s war machine as the generals and politicians wanted to believe.
“We concluded that the great strategic air attacks had not appreciably reduced German war production. Nor had they effectively shortened the war,” he wrote in the New York Times in 1999 during NATO’s Yugoslavian intervention.
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A similar study in Japan found that country’s industrial plants were more vulnerable but it was civilians who suffered. It was ground troops and sea power, not the bombing including the two atomic bombs, that won the war.
Ditto the Korean war – air power didn’t do it for MacArthur. I could summarise JKG’s piece, but better to read it as written, as written at the time, which could almost be the present:
Twice the weight of bombs dropped on Germany did not affect the outcome of the war in Vietnam or in Cambodia. It took ground troops to recover Kuwait. Saddam Hussein has survived the subsequent air attacks and perhaps been strengthened by the public reaction thereto.
And now we are relying on aircraft in Serbia and Kosovo. In keeping with the history, it is possible that our aerial assault has, indeed, strengthened Slobodan Milosevic. For the ordinary Serbian citizen there is less to fear from him than from our bombers. And one can at least wonder whether many of the refugees from Kosovo left because of the threat from the air.
Our commitment to air power has two sources. There is, first, our hope, real but rarely enunciated, that we can have war without casualties — a clean, hygienic operation, away from the arms, shells, physical miseries, wounds and death of ground warfare. And which avoids the domestic political effect from the body bags being unloaded.
More important, technical achievement, public expenditure and industrial influence all urge the use of air power. All that is lacking is military effectiveness and tolerance from the enemy civilians who are being bombed.
What then should be our concern and that of the NATO alliance on Serbia, including Kosovo? I do not urge ground operations. These would only provoke the adverse public and political reaction that has made air power so popular. And I do not wish to consign the young to injury and death, and certainly not when there is a better solution.
The better solution is patience. We should suspend the bombing, isolate Serbia economically and use our ample resources and organizational skills to make the life of the refugees as secure, even pleasant, as possible. And we should give strong financial support to Albania and Macedonia to help with the huge burden imposed on them. Let us open the United States yet further to refugees. That has been our greatest past service to the deprived and despairing of the world, and all to our own ultimate benefit.
Time is the greatest of all curatives. If with our NATO allies we stop the bombing and are open to negotiation, eventually reason will rule. There will be negotiations, some kind of settlement. War, on the contrary, does not heal, and its effect on participants and those unhappily present is all too evident.
Galbraith could have added the examples of the Soviet Union failing to tame Afghanistan with air power, or the US and allies failing there as well with any sort of power.
(Cue the obvious line: “It took 20 years and $3.5 trillion to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.”)
Australia and the “Epstein Coalition”. Invasion of Iran a disaster
Trump and Netanyahu are not patient people. Neither seems to have any sense of history. In the case of the former, you could just leave it as “any sense”. Well, beyond self-aggrandisement.
As the US administration struggles and flip-flops on why it joined Israel’s war on Iran, inventing new excuses as it goes along, the only clarity is how random, how febrile it is.
It is possible to imagine the oppressed Iranian people who don’t support the regime rising up and taking power. It is possible to imagine anything that you can imagine.
You could even say it is not impossible that it might yet happen, but you’d be a simple, reckless and dangerous soul to go to war on just such an imagined possibility.
Trump’s blunder
But that is what Trump has done and, incredibly, the Australian Government has supported him.
As plenty of commentary has made clear, we’ve gone along with Trump, not offering a critical peep, as the US has ditched the United Nations and any pretence of the “international rules-based order”.
I suppose we should be thankful that Americano Albo and Pentagon Penny are only offering money, words and the use of America’s bases here as support, not Australian troops and their blood. Or at least, not yet.
History says Iran might be subdued for a while but its attacked people will continue to fight, wrecking whatever havoc they can as opportunity arises.
The lesson of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is that relatively cheap drones can successfully challenge superior and much more expensive weaponry. Those $4 million Patriot missiles intercepting $50,000 drones add up soon enough.
And the lesson of Iraq is that Australia aligning itself with the US military machine can make Australians targets.
How we are perceived in our region, the most important thing for our own security and future, is further damaged as we renew our Deputy Dawg status.
With elements of the American machine viewing themselves as crusaders in the Middle East – check out Hegseth’s tats – and the ratbag end of American evangelists seeking Armageddon, the company we align with makes no friends with our key neighbours.
But we know our place as a vassal state.