The Powell Doctrine and Our War on Iran

In my most recent essay, I criticized our press and the Trump Administration for citing the Powell Doctrine (inaccurately) and for failing to credit its source: our late General, Joint Chiefs Chair, and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Comments pushed back on the ground that Powell had made unrelated mistakes, in matters over which he had no authority (the Big Iraq war and the ultimate resolution of the My Lai Massacre). No one, including me, mentioned the obvious: the My Lai investigation should have been run, from the outset, by a JAG officer, not a young, rising Major with combat experience but no legal or investigative training. If there was any fault in Powell’s My Lai work, it lay with his superiors, who (perhaps deliberately and cynically) assigned the wrong guy to the job.

Anyway, those comments and my responses were a distraction from the main point. The Powell Doctrine is one of those very rare instances in which a military leader comes up with a useful universal truth and states it concisely and memorably for history. In this respect it’s like Von Clausewitz’ famous observation that “War is politics by other means.” But Powell’s insight is far more granular and therefore more useful: it’s a recipe for making war successful and reducing its cost and suffering to a minimum.

After all, the Powell Doctrine let us recapture Kuwait’s oil fields from Saddam’s Iraq in just two months of combat. That compares to our losing or stalemated “forever wars” in Vietnam (10 years, 8 months, and 20 days), Afghanistan (19 years, 10 months, and 23 days), and Iraq (22 years, 11 months, and 14 days). Think maybe that difference might be practically significant?

Reduced to bullet points (pardon the pun), the Powell Doctrine had three: (1) a clear objective; (2) overwhelming force; and (3) and a clear exit strategy. In Gulf I, which Powell essentially commanded, those points became: (1) kicking Saddam’s Iraqi troops out of Kuwait’s oil fields; (2) taking five months to bring to the theater 500,000 US troops—with tanks that had special, artillery resistant armor (depleted uranium shields); and (3) getting out once the oil fields were recovered. When you compare this paragraph with the previous one, it’s hard to argue that Powell wasn’t a military genius.

So how do, or can, we apply this brilliant Powell Doctrine to our current war on Iran? Satisfying point (2) is, to quote lying ex-CIA director George Tenet, a “slam dunk.” We have the strongest military in the world, not to mention the biggest GDP, and our military is specifically designed to project power worldwide. Also, we wisely took our time to position our most useful military assets, including two aircraft carrier groups, in the region. Not only that: our ally Israel is the Gulf’s strongest and most advanced military power, quite apart from its nuclear arsenal, and it’s right there. Point (2) is not an issue.

Our stated aim in point (1) is to “degrade” Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons and to (credibly) threaten, and continually make and maintain, low-level war on its neighbors. A secondary aim is to “decapitate” Iran’s utterly mindless religious regime, which makes perpetual war and declares “death to” entire nations based on wholly abstract, ivory-tower “reasoning” from millennia-old scriptures. That kind of stuff is a recipe for species self-extinction, so both aims are reasonable. (I’ve argued for decapitation in a separate essay.)

But on looking closer, a problem appears even in point (1). How do we know when we’re done? Iran can continually rebuild its missiles, its drones, its other heavy weapons and its nuclear laboratories. It can always recruit more “proxies” in neighboring countries, some of which seem to have a steady supply of strong young men to be trained in extremism and the use of automatic weapons. And as long as the religious schools in Qom keep churning out religious extremists, and Iran’s leaders keep putting them in control of hardened soldiers and heavy weaponry, there’s no guarantee of an end to any of this.

So, apart from nuking Iran utterly to radioactive rubble, or nuking Qom, there’s no simple solution to point (1). I don’t recommend committing genocide, or doing something that might convert all the surrounding Islamic nations into indignant jihadis. So there’s no clear solution, even in theory, to point (1) besides “cutting the grass” every so often, as it grows up. Doesn’t that sound like the very definition of a “forever war”?

The crux of the matter, of course, is point (3). When, if ever, do we (and the Israelis) get out? Is there any reliably foreseeable end to this conflict?

The key here is the word “reliably.” Any idiot can conceive of an end in which the young people of Iran take their futures into their own hands, throw out (or kill) the nutcase Mullahs, and put the Mullahs’ students back in their ivory religious towers in Qom without any secular or military authority, so Iran becomes a modern, free, secular democracy that never threatens its neighbors, including the Sunni Gulf states. Wouldn’t that be nice?

But it’s hard even to conceive of a way to get from here to there. If someone can figure out how to do that, let alone with minimal violence and turmoil, he or she should get a Nobel Peace Prize, relabeled as a prize in Peace through War. I doubt anyone can, for precisely the reason that Von Clausewitz articulated. “Politics” is complicated. Maybe his aphorism is the most granular our feeble minds can get on the subject.

So if we are honest with ourselves, we have to recognize that today’s Iran is not a candidate for application of the Powell Doctrine. If we want to “degrade” Iran’s ability to harm its neighbors with missiles, drones and armed extremist proxies, we are going to have to do the “degrading” over and over again. We are going to have to become a better global policeman, not by making yet more endless wars with no clear strategy, but by learning to make a “decapitation” strategy more focused (at least not killing the leaders we think we prefer, as we did just recently), and by training a whole new generation of young Iranians to work hard and fight for their own rights.

At very least, we are going to have to learn to do “active measures” as well as the Russians, who so far have managed to divide our own nation against itself and elect the stupidest and most divisive chief executive in our history. Maybe we should make the CIA’s and our military intelligence units’ budgets open line items in our national accounting, just to show the Russians and Chinese that we mean business. Continuing with our present “policy” of making perpetual war, when we need to upgrade our clandestine measures and organize, train and arm Iran’s own best people, as much as off the worst, is not a fruitful option.

The broad outlines of an effective strategy in Iran are clear. As far as we know, the majority of Iran’s people, especially young people in cities, want a democratic, modern Iran not ruled by Mullahs and not in a perpetual, senseless war with its neighbors. Our task is to help them, organize them (or teach them to organize themselves), train them and (as necessary) arm them, even while eliminating the worst obstacles to their success.

This is a worthy but long-term project. Our problem is that the likes of Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem (who’s still in government!), among many others, simply don’t have anywhere near the patience, let alone the brainpower, to get the job done. So it’s going to have to be a semi-secret project within our military and intelligence communities (preferably blessed by Congress). You can calculate the chances of that happening under our current regime as well as I.