We should not pretend that it is costless to leave these regimes standing.
American military strikes on Iran last summer made eminent sense. They did not topple the Iranian regime, or seek to do so, but neither were they a purely symbolic or punitive use of military force. The goal was to seriously degrade, if not eliminate, Iran’s nuclear program, which of course is a nuclear-weapons program. So far as we can tell, they were a significant success in that regard, and at a comparatively modest cost. The result has been to weaken the strategic position in the region of Iran’s regime, a deeply ideological government implacably hostile to, and actively at war with, the United States for 47 years and allied in a new axis with its enemies. (Not for nothing were there reports this week of plans for joint exercises between Iran, China, and Russia in the Gulf of Oman, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf.)
There was a case for the American operation earlier this month that removed Nicolás Maduro, an anti-American tyrant who has allied with our enemies, enmeshed his regime with drug cartels, and so immiserated its people that it has flooded America and the region with refugees. But the Trump administration never made a case for regime change in Venezuela, and while removing the head of an autocracy is a significant strike, the one man is not the entire regime, and it increasingly looks as if the rest of the regime has been left in place, just chastened and under ongoing American threat that pressures it to decouple from our enemies and grant us more favors and access to Venezuelan resources.
Now, we seem to be teetering on the brink of new strikes against Iran, or maybe even in the process of launching them. But are they too little, too late to topple the mullahs — and will the administration even try for that, or just go for Venezuelan half-measures? There are, of course, arguments of prudence about the costs of a full commitment in either country to a course of overturning the ruling regime. But we should not pretend that it is costless to leave these regimes standing — to shoot at the king, aiming to miss.
In Venezuela, an obvious cost to leaving the same basic economic and political system in place is that we’re not doing anything to end the refugee crisis. If the goal is to stop Venezuelans from flooding into this country and destabilizing Venezuela’s neighbors, that requires at least establishing some mechanism by which the nation’s people can turn the country away from the narco-socialism that has destroyed its economy and terrorized its people. Moreover, the posture of replacing Maduro with another hostile tyranny and hoping to keep it on its best behavior by continual threat of force means that we have to maintain a permanent forward posture in the Gulf, backed by unflagging political will. As we saw when we left Saddam Hussein in place in 1991, this prescription for a forever half-war is expensive, has unpredictable collateral consequences and no exit strategy, and generates unresolved pressures to go back and finish the job.
In Iran, removing a revolutionary regime that is immensely unpopular at home would present an enormous strategic opportunity. Perhaps that is not worth the costs that would be required to achieve that end. But further strikes on Iran are likely pointless if that is not the goal — we already made our point, and war is too serious a thing to deploy just to make a point if it is not one that will avert future bloodshed. We do not necessarily need Iran, or Venezuela for that matter, to become an American-style liberal constitutional democracy in order to make a big difference. (That’s still a work in progress in the old Warsaw Pact states, let alone in Iraq.) Nor do we need to purge the ranks of everyone who’s been complicit in their repressions. But if the mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remain in the driver’s seat, we will never be done with the conflict.
There is a great and chilling dialogue early in the TV series Breaking Bad, between the morally fallen ex-cop and drug-cartel enforcer Mike Ehrmantraut and the morally falling teacher-turned-drug kingpin Walter White, in which Mike neatly summarizes the moral quandary of taking half-measures against the incorrigibly violent:
Mike: I used to be a beat cop a long time ago. I’d get called on domestic disputes all the time, hundreds, probably, over the years. But there was this one guy, this one piece of s**t that I will never forget: Gordie…big boy, 270, 280, but his wife or whatever she was, his lady was real small, like a bird, wrists like little branches. Anyway, my partner and I’d get called out there every weekend, and one of us would pull her aside and say: “Come on, tonight’s the night we press charges.” This wasn’t one of those “deep down, he loves me” setups. We got a lot of those but not this. This girl was scared. She wasn’t gonna cross him, no way, no how. Nothing we could do but pass her to the EMTs, put him a car, drive him downtown, throw him in a drunk tank. He sleeps it off. Next morning, out he goes, back home.
But one night my partner’s out sick, and it’s just me. The call comes in, and it’s the usual crap. Broke her nose in the shower kind of thing. So I cuff him, put him in the car, and away we go. Only that night we’re driving into town, and this sideways a**hole is in my back seat humming “Danny Boy.” And it just rubbed me wrong. So instead of left, I go right out into nowhere. And I kneel him down, and I put my revolver in his mouth, and I told him, “This is it. This is how it ends.” And he’s crying, going to the bathroom all over himself, swearing to God he’s gonna leave her alone, screaming, much as you can with a gun in your mouth. And I told him to be quiet, that I needed to think about what I was gonna do here. And, of course, he got quiet, goes still and real quiet, like a dog waiting for dinner scraps. Then we just stood there for a while, me, acting like I’m thinking things over and Prince Charming kneeling in the dirt with s**t in his pants. And after a few minutes, I took the gun out of his mouth, and I say, “So help me if you ever touch her again, I will such and such and such and blah, blah, blah.”
Walter: It was just a warning?
Mike: Of course. Just trying to do the right thing. But two weeks later he killed her, of course. Caved her head in with the base of a Waring blender. We got there, there was so much blood you could taste the metal. Moral of the story is I chose a half measure when I should have gone all the way. I’ll never make that mistake again. No more half measures, Walter.
Breaking Bad was good enough television to capture the moral difficulty of both paths, as well as the implicit warning in Mike’s downward moral arc. And even moving from fiction to reality, dealing with psychopathic governments that rule 92 million people (in Iran) or 28 million (in Venezuela) is much more complicated and fraught than dealing with a single psychopathic wife-beater. But the lesson is one that we see play out over and over in domestic law enforcement and in the history of international affairs alike: half-measures against criminals and tyrants never finish anything.