Iran, the Latest ‘Cakewalk’

A little over 24 years ago, Ken Adelman, a former assistant to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, took to the pages of the Washington Post to explain how easy it would be to knock over Iraq. “I believe demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk,” he wrote.

Readers may be surprised to see me say: He was right. On the fundamental question of beating Hussein’s regime, he was correct that since 1991 Iraq had become weaker, we had become stronger, and we would not suffer serious casualties bringing down the regime.

It’s what came after that was difficult: rebuilding an Iraq in which the religious-ethnic power structure would be reversed by “democracy” — empowering a Shia majority, likely stripping protections from Christian and Yazidi minorities, and disempowering a Sunni minority, which would fertilize the ground for Sunni extremisms, of which half a dozen varietals were on offer in the region. Suddenly we had a government that was penetrated by Iran, and a Sunni uprising, followed by a secessionist ISIS.

President Trump understood that the American public would not have abided another major deployment of ground forces to the Middle East. But his decision to take on Iran was informed by a certain overconfidence bred from several sources. First, the seeming smashing success of the extraction of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela. Second, intelligence briefs, foreign policy influencers, and briefings by Israel that convinced the president (if not Marco Rubio or JD Vance) that Iran could be taken over by protesters, disarmed quickly, or at the very least brought to the negotiating table in a beggarly status with relative ease.

While there is much chest-beating about how the Israelis and the U.S. were able to decapitate the regime, kill the ayatollah, and degrade its military capabilities, Iran has since shown an ability to sustain operations under pressure, to exercise its “economic nuclear weapon” in closing the Strait of Hormuz, and to continue to launch missiles throughout the region at Israel and the U.S. Gulf allies.

U.S. and Israeli coercive tools did not produce capitulation or regime change. They did not inspire a wave of domestic opposition. Now, Washington is trapped in a dynamic where further escalation risks global economic blowback, but de-escalation requires concessions that strain our relationship with Israel and undercut claims of victory or having achieved a deal better than the one brokered by Obama.

These are real costs in prestige, but more worrisome are the expenditure of munitions and the exhaustion of forces. Iran proved more resilient and resourceful than anticipated, preventing the U.S. from achieving full air superiority and causing the U.S. to expend more defensive countermeasures.

Carrier groups operating in the Gulf are working at a high tempo in contested waters, which means that repairs and maintenance backlogs are likely to ripple through the entire global naval posture. Precision munitions, already depleted by their use in Ukraine, are being expended at a faster rate than our industrial base can supply them. Some analysts suggest that the Iran operation is going to result in $29 billion in cuts for training, recruiting, and readiness in other theaters. Congress can appropriate more money from thin air or from creditors, but the factories and supply of skilled labor and material do not expand at the same rate as the supply of money for them.

Ken Adelman at least understood which part was the cakewalk. This time there is no cakewalk at all — only the hard part, a bigger and more complicated job than Iraq, in a narrower strait, with fewer resources and a country that has already decided it isn’t willing to pay the price.