We have covered this question before during the strikes on Gaza, the war in Lebanon, and the war against Yugoslavia, but somehow it never seems to sink in with some people. As Massie correctly argues, the failure to understand that other nations do not respond well to bombing and terror is a failure of imagination and empathy, but I think it is more and far worse than that. Certainly, it helps that supporters of air wars and collective punishment do not try to see things from the perspective of a foreign population. It helps a great deal that they seem to have not an ounce of respect for the sentiments and feelings of loyalty and pride those people have regarding their own countries.

However, after the second or third or tenth failed campaign to spark a political backlash against a given regime by means of aerial bombardment and collective punishment, some learning would have to take place, wouldn’t it? Perhaps I have too much confidence in the intelligence of the supporters of these methods, but I do find it hard to believe that someone can still honestly and seriously put forward an argument that these methods are likely to yield the intended political result. It is hard not to conclude after a while that interventionists of this kind do not have a misguided desire to help other nations living under authoritarian or sectarian rulers and just happen to advocate using counterproductive means, but are content simply to use this as an excuse and a cover for their genuine interest to inflict humiliation and destruction on these nations in pursuit of projecting power and crushing resistance to the governments that they favor.

When it came to Gaza, this was much more straightforward and clear, because there was not much incentive for supporters of the operation to pretend that Palestinian attitudes mattered to them. There were undoubtedly some supporters who were interested in the operation’s effect on Palestinian attitudes, but for the most part the analysis stopped at “this is what you get for supporting Hamas, so there!” Supporters of the operation could more or less shrug off civilian deaths in Gaza as both unavoidable and supposedly deserved (the “they brought it on themselves” excuse). If collective punishment did not have the effect of discrediting Hamas with the population, it was neither here nor there, because it was simply the inflicting of punishment and not any grand strategy of undermining Hamas that mattered. Again, there were supporters of the operation to whom this description did not apply, but I think it very fairly describes the most vocal and zealous supporters. No one could have observed the counterproductive effects of bombing Yugoslavia (causing Serbs to rally to a leader most of them had come to loathe) or starving and bombing Iraq (empowering Hussein and weakening all opposition) and concluded that these practices succeeded in bringing down the regimes in question. At some point, don’t we have to say that people who make such manifestly ridiculous arguments are using them as nothing more than window-dressing and do not really mean what they’re saying? Lack of imagination and lack of empathy are part of the problem, but can they really account for the blindness to reality on display?

As Massie says:

The problem with Abrams and co is not simply that they treat every problem as though it were the same, but that they seem to have no imagination. That is, Abrams clearly cannot imagine how an Iranian might be both opposed to the regime and proud that Iran had a nuclear capability. Yet it is not difficult to imagine how such feelings might exist. Equally, Abrams’ lack of empathy makes it impossible for him to imagine how an Iranian might hear the “good messaging” about “why we ae not against the people of Iran” and see these messengers dropping bombs on Iranian territory and conclude that perhaps the Americans do indeed have something against the Iranian people. This is elementary.

It is elementary, and even Abrams et al. cannot be so dense as to be unable to grasp the concept. Something more than being unimaginative and indifferent is at work.

When it comes to Iran, it is more difficult to portray the Iranian government as both deeply unpopular and entirely unrepresentative if state and people are conflated together too easily. Different parts of the rationale for toppling the regime come into conflict with each other. For that reason, there is more of a need to resort to the fiction that the Iranian people will turn on their government if foreign governments launch unprovoked strikes on their country. The disastrous assumption that all Iraqis would welcome their invaders or attackers would make most Americans wary of trying something similar again, so the fiction is useful in reassuring some Americans that it will be different next time.

The advocates for attacking Iran have a small problem: people generally do not turn on their government when foreigners attack, and those who actually welcome the invaders or try to overthrow their government in response tend to be regarded as collaborators with the enemy and traitors and treated accordingly. Not only has the mass rejection of a government attacked by another state scarcely ever happened in modern history, but it makes no sense psychologically or politically. It may be the case that governments that launch or enter into wars and fail are subsequently thrown out of power, but when a nation is on the receiving end of an attack the population typically stands by the government during the attack and at most scapegoats individual commanders, politicians or rulers for failure afterwards. I can think of one example when a nation has turned on the leadership of the regime in wartime, which was Russia in February 1917, and this was done in part, so the revolutionaries hoped, to be better able to fight the Germans. Even that happened only after two and a half years of one of the bloodiest wars of all time in which Russia suffered enormous, lopsided losses. No one of any importance, thank goodness, is proposing to launch a military campaign against Iran that is even remotely similar, and it is worth remembering that the Iraqis did inflict major losses on the Iranians during their war at a time when the regime was actually much weaker than it is today, and the regime did not fall then. The net effect of the experience of their war with Iraq was to solidify support for the new regime.

As I said earlier this year, one need only think for half a minute about what our response would be and what our responses have been to what we regarded as purely unprovoked attacks, and it is fairly easy to understand what the response of another nation would be under similar circumstances. Did 9/11 cause the vast majority of Americans to ask, “How did our government get us into this mess?” Obviously not. It did cause most people to ask, “Why do they hate us?” to which the official and popular answer has been, “Because they are irrational maniacs bent on destroying our way of life.” Even to the extent that it was permitted to discuss the possible role our policies had in generating hostility and resentment against us, the conclusion in mainstream circles has always been that those policies were basically sound and necessary. Of course, the public tends to accept official answers during an emergency and in the years following it, even when these answers come in the form of propaganda that insults their intelligence, and in an emergency solidarity with the government tends to push everything else to the side. So even in the unlikely event that a majority of Iranians saw the Iranian nuclear program as the intolerable danger to international peace that Washington says it is, rather than the legitimate national pursuit most Iranians actually see it as being, launching strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities would ensure that whatever dissenters there are would be radicalized and pushed into the arms of their leaders, whose oversimplified, perhaps largely false, description of the motives of the attackers would become the widely-accepted one.

It should go without saying that a more nationalistic public, especially one that has been raised with the knowledge of modern unprovoked invasions of their country (as Iranians have been), will be even more likely to rally to the government in a time of crisis, because they will not see an attack on their military and scientific installations as an attack focused solely on the government or a specific policy of that government. Instead, they will see it as an attempt to thwart their national ambition and to humiliate them in the eyes of the world, and nationalists tend not to react well to either one.

Filed under: foreign policy, politics