On April 14, 1986, President Ronald Reagan ordered the US bombing of Libya. This mission, code-named Operation El Dorado Canyon, was in retaliation for the Libyan government’s involvement in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque ten days prior. Two US soldiers had been killed in that attack.
In April 1986, I was a senior in high school. We discussed the retaliatory strike on Libya in one of my classes. This led to the kind of back-and-forth you might expect, from any group of callow teenagers debating complex world events.
There was a peacenik faction, of course, who thought that we should merely turn the other cheek and make nice with the Libyans. There were also students who declared that the Libyans had gotten off lightly. (There was a case to be made for this latter position. The US bombed a series of Libyan military targets on 4/14/86. The Libyans suffered about 40 casualties.)
But one student’s comment stuck in my head:
“You’ve got to play hardball with those guys over there,” he said. “If they’ll bomb night clubs filled with innocent people, they aren’t going to listen to reason.”
Hardball. Certainly a case can be made for playing hardball in the Muslim Middle East. That is, after all, a brutal part of the world filled with brutal leaders.
But here’s the problem: The American version of “hardball” never seems to work in the Middle East. Nor does any version of American “softball”.
Nor does it much matter who happens to be in the White House. Consider the history of roughly the last 50 years:
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter, a peacefully inclined US President, if ever there was one, was in the White House during the Islamic Revolution of Iran, and the resultant Tehran hostage crisis. In November 1979, Iranian student radicals overran the US Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage.
Jimmy Carter bluff, cajoled, and negotiated for the hostages’ freedom. He even attempted a limited military operation to rescue the hostages: Operation Eagle Claw. This resulted only in the deaths of eight American service personnel, and the loss of seven American aircraft.
The Tehran hostage crisis was one of the factors behind Carter’s landslide defeat in the 1980 US general election, making him a one-term president.
Ronald Reagan
Some would say that Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, did a good job talking tough to the Soviets. But Reagan was baffled by the Middle East. In October 1983, Iranian-backed radicals bombed the US Marine barracks in Beirut. Two-hundred forty-one US personnel were killed in the suicide bombing. In 2004, the Iranian government established a memorial in Tehran—to the suicide bombers who carried out the attack on the US Marines.
Throughout the 1980s, Reagan famously aided the mujahideen in Afghanistan, where the USSR was attempting to establish a Soviet-style Marxist state. The American military aid grievously undermined the Soviet Union. It also facilitated the rise of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, two groups that would cause America much larger problems in the twenty-first century.
George H.W. Bush
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush used military force to oppose Saddam Hussein’s takeover of Kuwait. The resultant conflict, the Persian Gulf War, was relatively short and bloodless, as wars go.
But the presence of American infidel troops on Saudi soil would serve as a rallying cause for Islamic radicals everywhere. This was one of the primary casus belli cited by Osama bin Laden as his inspiration for the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001.
Bush drove Iraqi troops out of Kuwait, but he did not drive Saddam Hussein from power. This left America with a wounded, vengeful foe who would continue to make trouble until his removal in 2003—which brought even bigger problems.
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton brought about a [temporary] respite in the Israel-Palestinian conflict with the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Clinton did not adequately foresee the dangers arising in Afghanistan, where the Taliban was rapidly taking control, and Osama bin Laden was planning 9/11.
The first al Qaeda strikes against American interests occurred while Clinton was still president. In October 2000, al Qaeda operatives carried out a suicide attack against the USS Cole, killing 37 Americans.
George W. Bush
President George W. Bush involved America in one of its greatest foreign policy disasters ever: the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Bush’s intentions were probably good, but the costs—for America and the people of the Middle East—were unacceptably high. More than twenty years later, Iraq is still not secure, and still not a safe place for Americans to visit.
Barack Obama
Barack Obama came into the White House with the ambition of establishing a new relationship between the United States and the Muslim world. In his 2009 Cairo speech, he was notably apologetic of past western transgressions—both real and imagined.
Obama ended up being criticized for his extensive use of drone strikes in the region. ISIS came into existence on Obama’s watch. President Obama’s critics charged him with being too easy on Iran, which was then making strides in its nuclear program.
Nor did Obama protect us from Islamic terrorism. While Obama was in office, Islamic radicals perpetrated numerous terrorist attacks in the West, including the 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.
And then there’s Israel
Almost 80 years ago, the United States became the de facto guarantor of Israel. This really should not have been the case. The Jewish state came into existence because of Ottoman and British imperialism, and centuries of virulent antisemitism throughout Europe.
But America took on this burden in 1948, because all of the nations of Europe were still devastated from World War II—a conflict in which European antisemitism played a significant role, in the form of the Holocaust.
Since then, Americans have sometimes liked to think of Israel as our “special friend” in the Middle East. The Israeli government has often taken pains to demonstrate that this is not necessarily the case, pulling—and threatening to pull— us into one conflict after another.
***
And now, barely one week after Israel bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, it turns out that the United States has bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, too.
I’m not here to second-guess President Trump’s historic decision, nor to laud it. There were plenty of arguments against taking decisive action against Iran. There were plenty of arguments against allowing Iran to continue with its nuclear program, while the Islamic Republic ran circles around the feckless Europeans, and negotiated in bad faith.
But we can all agree on one thing: President Trump is certainly “playing hardball”, in the words of my long-ago high school classmate.
Now comes the hard part of hardball.
In an ideal scenario, the Iranian regime falls in a matter of days, or a few short weeks. Some form of democratic, secular government comes to Iran—perhaps under a constitutional monarchy, or perhaps under a different form of secular republican government.
But this is the Muslim Middle East, where everything can—and usually will—go wrong.
-ET