The following came to me with my morning coffee, courtesy of our friends at the Washington Post (9/20/12). It was written by David Ignatius, one of my favorite sources of common sense on the subject of Iran.
Lessons from an Iranian war game
Perhaps it was the “fog of
simulation.” But the scariest aspect of a U.S.-Iran war game staged
this week was the way each side miscalculated the other’s responses
— and moved toward war even as the players thought they were
choosing restrained options.
The Iran exercise was organized by
Kenneth Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s
Saban Center for Middle East Policy. It included former top U.S.
officials as Washington policymakers, and prominent Iranian American
experts playing Tehran’s hand. I was allowed to observe, on the
condition that I wouldn’t name the participants.
The bottom line: The game showed how
easy it was for each side to misread the other’s signals. And these
players were separated by a mere corridor in a Washington think tank,
rather than half a world away.
Misjudgment was the essence of this
game: Each side thought it was choosing limited options, but their
moves were interpreted as crossing red lines. Attacks proved more
deadly than expected; signals were not understood; attempts to open
channels of communication were ignored; the desire to look tough
compelled actions that produced results neither side wanted.
Let’s walk through the simulation to
see how the teams stumbled up the ladder of escalation. The game was
set in July 2013, with some broad assumptions: It was assumed that
President Obama had been reelected, the P5+1 negotiations remained
deadlocked and Israel hadn’t launched a unilateral attack.
The game controllers added some spicy
details: Assassinations of Iranian scientists were continuing; and
the United States, Israel and Britain were developing a new
cyberweapon (imaginary code name: National Pastime) to disrupt power
to Iran’s nuclear and military facilities. Even so, the Iranian
supreme leader thought that America was a paper tiger, telling aides:
“The Americans are tired of the fight, and they are led by a weak
man with no stomach for the struggle.”
Meanwhile, Iran was pushing ahead with
its nuclear program; it had a rough design for a weapon and, in three
to four months, would have enough highly enriched uranium to make two
bombs. The action started on July 6 with an Iranian terror operation:
A bomb destroyed a tourist hotel in Aruba, killing 137 people, many
of them Americans, including a vacationing U.S. nuclear scientist.
The damage at the hotel was far greater than the Iranians had
expected.
The U.S. team recommended strong
retaliatory moves to signal Iran that it had crossed an “unacceptable
threshold.” The United States bombed a Revolutionary Guards camp in
eastern Iran; launched a cyberattack that disrupted power at 40
Iranian security facilities; and warned Iranian operatives in 38
countries that they were known and vulnerable. U.S. military leaders
in the game complained that these calibrated moves were
half-measures.
Bombing the Iranians’ homeland rocked
their team. It crossed a red line, in a way the U.S. side hadn’t
anticipated. The Tehran players spurned a secret message from Obama,
delivered through Russia, warning of “dire consequences” if the
nuclear program wasn’t stopped; the imaginary Iranian defense
minister called it a “bluff.” The Iranians wanted to respond
forcefully but not so much so that they would trigger an attack on
their nuclear facilities.
Then the Iranian team made what proved
a devastating mistake. After rejecting the most aggressive options
(such as attacking Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain), they chose
limited actions, described as the “random mining” of the Strait
of Hormuz and “harassment” of U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf. The
Iranians also dispersed their stockpile of uranium, but only half, to
signal they were still willing to negotiate. But the United States
missed the message.
“They’ve crossed our red line,”
responded the imaginary U.S. national security adviser — expressing
the group’s mistaken view that the Iranians had decided to close
the strait and attack U.S. vessels. As tensions increased, oil prices
headed toward $200 a barrel.
U.S. military options were between
harsh and harsher: (a) reopen the strait by force and deliver an
ultimatum that Iran stop its nuclear program within 24 hours; or (b)
hit Iran’s nuclear facilities simultaneously with reopening the
strait. Military logic seemed to require the strongest move. The U.S.
team ultimately voted, 5 to 3, for an attack across Iran to disable
the nuclear program and destroy coastal defenses.
The unsolved puzzle for the U.S. side
was how to stop the conflict, once it started. The Iranians, for
their part, had decided to bleed the United States in a protracted
struggle. The lesson of the exercise, concluded Pollack, is that
“small miscalculations are magnified very quickly.”
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This account may -- quite understandably -- seem a bit scary to
you. Let me tell you why I think it ought to seem scarier still:
One, in the real world, there tends to
be an awful lot more interference by external factors. These may
include: competing crises (just because things are going off the
rails with Iran that doesn't mean that everything is
uncharacteristically quiet in Afghanistan or Libya or Syria or that
there aren't worrying developments elsewhere that come completely out
of left field); political pressures can be intensely confounding
(suppose the crisis intensified a week before the November elections?
Suppose it reached a climax during a new president's first 100
days?). Such factors may have been built into the game, but it's not
likely they were as bizarro as the real world often is.
Two, one might wonder who the gamers
were in this case. While Ignatios is sworn to silence on that score,
we can certainly surmise who some of them might have been. Ken
Pollack is a knowledgeable, well-connected guy, who would likely tap
some great resources within or just outside the Beltway. On the
"Iran side" of the corridor, he might have installed people
such as Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American
Council and author of two first-rate books on U.S.-Iran relations.
Perhaps he'd invite Dr. Haleh Esfandiari of the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, or Prof. Ahmad Iravani, who
graduated in Islamic Studies in Qom and who has been an advisor to
the U.S. Institute of Peace. Or Ali Banuazizi from Boston College,
who has been a member of the Council of Foreign Relations' Task Force
on Public Diplomacy.
On the "United States" side,
Pollack might have tapped Amb. John Limbert, a former hostage in
Tehran and a teacher at the Naval Academy, author of Negotiating
with Iran. Others may have
included George R. Perkovich, an expert on nuclear strategy who has
advised Vice President Biden on foreign policy during his Senate
years. A military expert, such as ret. Adm. William O. Fallon (who
headed the U.S. Central Command during the last decade) would be a
must. Some former administration insiders and a scientist or two,
and you've got it.
Why
are these fantasy football team rosters scary? Because such a group
would have a good deal more expertise, experience and wisdom than the
folks who actually would have to make all the life-and-death,
multi-billion-dollar decisions, if it came right down to it.
Remember, then, that whoever did participate, they were unable to
keep us out of war during the make-believe process.
The
ranks of our "experts" actually serving currently in key
positions in the State Department, Pentagon and National Security
Council include virtually no one with on-the-ground Iran experience.
Add to that the fact that most of our intelligence is either old or
third-hand. We haven't had diplomatic relations with Iran (hence,
very limited "listening post" opportunities) for over
thirty years. If it's a comfort (I doubt that it will be), even when
we did have an embassy and a CIA station there in 1978-79, they had
no inkling that the Islamic Revolution was about to blow.
If the
war-game fantasy seems like a nightmare, don't wake up -- it only
gets worse.
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