U.S. Airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, With Ray Takeyh and Robin Wright

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the U.S. response to the Tower 22 attack.

With me to discuss the recent U.S. airstrikes against Iranian proxies in Iraq and Syria for a drone strike that killed three U.S. service members in Jordan, are Ray Takeyh and Robin Wright. Ray is the Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council. His research focuses on Iran and U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East. He has written widely on those topics. His most recent book is The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty.

Robin is an award-winning foreign policy analyst, author and journalist. She's a contributing writer and columnist for the New Yorker, and she's a fellow at both the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson Center. Robin has written extensively on Iran in her book Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World, received the Overseas Press Club Award for the best book on international affairs in 2012. Ray and Robin, thank you for joining me on The President's Inbox.

TAKEYH:
Thank you.

WRIGHT:
Great to be with you.

LINDSAY:
Robin, I'd like to start with you we're obviously dealing with a fluid situation. Over the last several days, the U.S. military has retaliated against Iranian backed militias in Iraq and Syria for a January 28 drone attack that killed three U.S. service members at a U.S. base in Northern Jordan called Tower 22. More attacks could be in the offing and there might be actions underway that haven't been disclosed. Can you describe the nature of the U.S. retaliation that you are aware of, and what looks to have been achieved by the retaliation?

WRIGHT:
Well, the United States has taken out sites in Syria and Iraq that hosted IRGC or revolutionary guards from Iran and their militias—radar positions, command and control, weapons depots, storage facilities—to try to degrade the ability of the militias to continue these attacks against Americans. There have been almost 170 since October 7, although this problem obviously goes back a long time. And very separately, the U.S. has taken action against the Houthis in Yemen for attacks on shipping, naval and commercial in the Red Sea, a strategic waterway through which roughly a third of the world's shipping goes through bound for the Suez Canal.

In terms of effectiveness, this will have perhaps a limited short-term effect. The real challenge for the United States is the bigger problem that dates back more than forty years to the first attacks carried out by the embryos of Hezbollah in Lebanon and have played out in all kinds of attacks, not just in the countries under fire right now, tensions between Iran and the United States that deal with much bigger issues than the Americans currently deployed in the Middle East. Iran's revolution in 1979 was as much about expelling the Americans from the Middle East as it was about expelling the monarchy, and we're seeing that still play out today as ironically the revolution celebrates its forty-fifth anniversary.

LINDSAY:
Ray, I want to bring you into the conversation, and I'd like to get your take on what you see as the purpose of the U.S. reprisals in Iraq and Syria. Is this about punishing the perpetrators, sending a message to Tehran, something else?

TAKEYH:
Probably a little bit of both. Obviously the perpetrators would be the primary target in this respect, and then there is question about who the actual perpetrators are, those who pull the trigger and those who seemingly instigate them to do so. So we have focused, in this particular case on the former. And then there are essentially promise of further retaliatory reaction as a means of establishing some sort of a deterrence against this type of activity taking place. However, I think there are probably larger set of audiences as well. These attacks come at the time of a very delicate U.S. diplomatic approach to the region, which is trying to establish some sort of a ceasefire in Gaza war and rekindle the Israeli-Saudi normalization conversation.

And therefore, to some extent, the United States needed to restore credibility with its allies, the Israelis and the Saudis, by having somewhat of a robust response toward Iran. And of course, as always with American policy in the region, it has domestic aspects of it as well. There have been a lot of criticisms coming out of the Biden administration for not being forceful in the previous 170 odd attacks. So it is a multiplicity of audiences. There always is, and I think the primary ones are, of course, the local actors—the Iranians and their proxies—and hope that this essentially imposes some degree of restraint on them, and as Robin suggested, at least for a period of time.

LINDSAY:
Robin, I want to pick up this question of the role of these Iranian backed militias. I have heard them described as proxies, but I've also heard it argued that they're actually directed by Iran. So how should we think about these groups that are operating in Iraq and Syria? Are they proxies that have their own interests in latitude or are they puppets of the Iranian government?

WRIGHT:
That's such an important question, Jim. It is true that Iran has fostered-- in some cases created and armed, trained, funded to different degrees, all of these groups in the axis of resistance. There are major militias in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and in Yemen. There are cells elsewhere. The Iranians have reportedly operated as far away as Bulgaria and Argentina, and they all share a strategic goal. One is to get the Americans out of the region and the second is against Israel. But when it comes to their domestic agendas, they differ deeply. And I think the nature of their relationships with Iran vary from group to group. There are some that take more instruction or guidance. There are others that are well established, battle hardened, and pretty much do what they really want. And I'm thinking particularly of Hezbollah, even though it's the oldest and the closest to Iran. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader, has his own domestic agenda in a country that is basically falling apart. He has a constituency.

What's really interesting about all these militias is they're not just gunmen. In virtually every place, these groups have also a significant political presence. They're deeply involved in the politics of the nation and sometimes in very decisive ways. They have members of parliament, they have cabinet ministers. The prime minister of Iraq is a Shiite and has had several close dealings with the Iranians. And the Houthis, as we've seen, are pretty much their own thing. They will do what they want, and yes, they will take any arms that the Iranians will give them, but they continue at their own pace and are probably carrying out some of the most brazen attacks in the last few weeks.

LINDSAY:
Ray, if I can, I want to flip the question on you because I suspect that when the news broke at the end of January that there had been a drone strike at an American base in Jordan that the reaction of a lot of Americans was, "We have troops in Jordan? Why do we have a base in Jordan? What are we doing there? We have troops in Iraq and Syria? I thought we left the Middle East." Help me understand.

TAKEYH:
At any point, the United States has about thirty thousand troops dispersed in the Middle East. It has military bases in a number of places, some larger than others. These are part of the anti-ISIS campaign that is still going on to some extent, and they're part of longstanding relationships in Bahrain and Qatar and elsewhere. So there are a lot of American forces. Most of them are on the periphery in terms of naval deployments. But you see some presence in Syria and this particular installation being in the Syrian-Jordanian border, they performed a task of not just keeping track of ISIS and its potential revival, but also to some extent exercising some control over the traffic between Iran and the Levant. So in that particular sense, there is a measurable operational role in them. The United States did withdraw from Iraq in a rather complete way. I think it was around 2011, but then there was a reintroduction of that presence during the ISIS campaign. And you see remnants of that and also supporting various Syrian forces which are still battling the Assad regime.

The Syrian Civil War has largely wind down, but President Assad is not in control of all this territory and his country is subject to intervention from all sides, including Turkey, Israel, Iran, the United States and elsewhere. So there is a very substantial residual American presence in the region, which might have come as a surprise to many, but that's been a longstanding one, and it continues to this day, which kind of tends to disrupt the narrative that United States is leaving the Middle East in order to focus elsewhere. There are people that probably do want those assets redeployed to the Asia Pacific frontier, but that's going to be a difficult case to make at the time when the region is so turbulent and the American presence is required if for nothing else but to give some confidence to its allies from which it may be asking for some substantial sacrifices.

LINDSAY:
Robin, do you detect any movement in Washington to want to reduce the U.S. footprint in the Middle East in the wake of these attacks? Because obviously one potential response, if you're worried about troops being vulnerable, being hit by drone attacks from local militias, you could redeploy them elsewhere.

WRIGHT:
Well, the United States has 900 in Syria. It's a very small presence. I've traveled with them across that frontier. They're in different bases, very small numbers, and they're very important both militarily and psychologically in propping up the Syrian Democratic Forces, which hold some of the greatest oil assets in Syria, a big part of what had been the Syrian economy. And if-

LINDSAY:
So is this all about oil?

WRIGHT:
Well, no, it's not all about oil, but that just happened.

LINDSAY:
I have to ask.

WRIGHT:
Sure. But that's an area that the Syrian Democratic Forces still hold. And if the United States left, then that would almost certainly lead, not just the Syrians, but also the Iranians and the Russians to spread their wings further and deeper into Syria. And there is still an ISIS presence in Syria. The small cells engage in kidnappings, bombings, extortion and so forth. And the United States has only 2,500 in Iraq. These are not fighting forces. These are advising the Iraqi army or the Syrian Democratic Forces on both sides of the border on how to deal with these remnants strategically, providing intelligence, and so forth. And again, if the Americans left, it would symbolically signal that Iran won in both places. So there are different layers of importance and messages that come along with our presence in the region.

Can I just add one thing to what Ray said? And that is that the Americans who have come under attack are there for a totally different purpose, unrelated to the Gaza war, to the Palestinians, to the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is really about dealing with the remnants of ISIS that collapsed, the Islamic state collapsed in 2019, and they just want to make sure that ISIS doesn't come back. Too often campaigns end up with the return of the bad guys. And what's striking about the tensions we see play out across the Middle East in ten different front lines is that all of them today are now merging into one bigger war. The definitions of those conflicts have shifted in ways and they ripple over into each other. And the danger is that there's such momentum now that it'll be very hard just to diffuse one of those conflicts and think that'll ripple through and have an impact and change or end all the others.

And that's what I'm worried about. I think this is a really historic juncture where these conflicts that involve Yemen in three different wars, Israel facing four different conflicts with the Hezbollah to the north, Hamas to the south, Iran further away, but also there's sixteen Arab countries that still haven't recognized it and the United States with its two different deployments in Iraq, Syria, and then you have the bigger issue of Iran in the United States looming out there, and it has for decades. So this is a really big moment in trying to understand what the hell is happening in the Middle East. It's complicated.

LINDSAY:
So Robin, do you see this as a coordinated and concerted effort to stress the United States at a time at which it has major foreign policy challenges elsewhere? Think of the war in Ukraine, think of concerns about the future of Taiwan and growing importance of China.

WRIGHT:
I don't know that it was well coordinated by the revolutionary guards, for example. The game plans have been drawn out for years. The kinds of attacks are not original. All of them have happened before the last few weeks or even before the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. We were headed in such a different direction before October 7 with normalization on the table between Israel and Saudi Arabia. With the Abraham Accords having brought in four more countries in recognizing normalizing relations with Israel. The Middle East was increasingly off the table. It was Hamas' attack, which U.S. intelligence believes Iran did not orchestrate, did not know about, and was surprised when it happened. Not to mean that they're not complicit in it, their hands go deep in the fostering and arming of Hamas, but just a reflection of how some of these forces carry out their own agendas and at their own timing and when they think they're ready and there's a moment.

But it is interesting that all of this happens at the same time we're dealing with Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the world will be paying attention to how long the U.S. holds out, what role the U.S. plays, and how attentive is it to everything. Because right now, as you know, American commitment to Ukraine is, at least in terms of arming, is waning. People will pay attention to it. Does the U.S. stick it out and keep going after these groups until they're not a threat? Because that's a very long campaign and understanding what winning actually means is rather difficult.

LINDSAY:
I certainly agree on the issue of how you define winning. Ray, one of the things that's notable about the U.S. retaliation for the Tower 22 attacks is that the U.S. military operations have been in Syria, in Iraq, not in Iran. Why hasn't the United States attacked targets in Iran or Iranian leaders given the belief that Tehran at a minimum enabled these groups to go after American soldiers?

TAKEYH:
I suspect the logic for that is what has been the logic for the past, at least, two decades. Namely at the time when the Middle East is turbulent and chaotic, you don't want to introduce another possibility of a war that could get out of hand. Should there have been an American retaliation against Iranian facilities within Iran? The regime would be compelled to respond, and we would have been on an escalatory dynamic. Now, you can make a case that the United States has escalation dominance and it can't actually prevail.

LINDSAY:
What does that mean, Ray, for people who don't study military strategy?

TAKEYH:
What it means is if Iran escalates, the United States is also prepared to do so, and eventually as you go up to this escalatory chain, one power has to blink. And given the disparity of power between these two states, it's likely to be Iran. As you can see, there is a lot of possibilities where that sort of thing can get out hand. And so the decision was made to remain within the existing parameters of the United States policy that were laid out, as I think Robin indicated, as early as 1980s, where the United States did not respond directly to Iran for attack by its proxies, whether that was 1983 in Beirut, which I think Robin was there, or whether it was Khobar Tower bombing in late 1990...

LINDSAY:
1996.

TAKEYH:
Yeah, exactly. And of course, Iran's relentless attacks indirectly against the American forces when they were in Afghanistan and Iraq. So the administration state within the prevailing logic of our policy, which is actually a bipartisan one, both governments have adhered to this particular prohibition.

LINDSAY:
But how do you establish deterrence with the Iranians, Ray, if they know there is a red line that you will not cross?

TAKEYH:
Well, that's the criticism. The criticism is these strikes may actually buy you a little bit of time and create some sort of a confusion and paralysis in the other side, but eventually the proxy wars will resume. By the way, they have by the Houthis. They have not adhered to that particular injunction. So that's been the criticism. It's not an unreasonable criticism that this immunization of the Iranian territory validates the Iranian government's claim or understanding that the Americans are too tired of their forever wars, and therefore, as long as our territory is immunized, we can inflict pain with a measure of immunization. 

I would say the attack on the proxies actually probably does provoke some fissures in that relationship. You can call them proxies, you can call them surrogates, you can call them allies that share the same objectives. In all of history, including our own, there has always been tensions between patron and ally, between patron and the surrogate, between patron and the proxy. There are tensions between United States and its closest allies in the Middle East, the Israelis. So the question for those surrogates is, as they get bombed and take the brunt of this criticism and this attack, what are they saying to the Iranians about the fact that the Iranians insist that they had no role in this, they do not wish for a wider war, and even get Kata'ib Hezbollah, one of the Iraqi militias, to issue a statement exonerating the Iranians. That would seem to create some kind of a tension in those relationships.

So I think even these strikes, which did not molest Iranian territory, probably created some tensions within the Iranian government and the axis of resistance, many of whose components have their own agenda and their own emeties, but also their own national concerns. The Iraqi government is very displeased with this war taking place in its territory, and that would obviously cause some tensions between the Iraqi government and the United States at the time when it was trying to get the American forces to potentially leave, but it also will create tensions between Iran and Iraq. The Iraqis have taken an unprecedent step of condemning Iran's recent attack on the Kurdistan area and even withdrew their ambassador. So this has created some tricky situation for Iranians in terms of their own alliance management.

LINDSAY:
Well, this gets back to Robin's point earlier that this is a very complex situation with a very large cast of characters whose interests may overlap, but don't always align. Robin, I want to ask you the same question about deterrence. Do you see the attacks reestablishing deterrence? I keep seeing that phrase a lot in much of the media coverage, but also the flip question of what Ray alluded to earlier about credibility, that the Biden administration is hoping to restore its credibility with its allies in the region. How do you see those issues?

WRIGHT:
Well, the retribution for the deaths of three Americans at an outpost in Jordan will have short-term impact. Again, it doesn't answer the big question of what does the United States do about Iran long-term? We've tried diplomacy, and unfortunately, American administrations have been inconsistent, to put it mildly, about how to deal with Iran. One wants to do a nuclear deal, the next president abandons it, and Iran resumes its program and advances in very significant ways in enriching uranium and working on the technology of actually pulling together, building a bomb.

On this issue of deterrence, I think one of the problems is we don't recognize how much Iran has advanced not just in its nuclear program, but its missiles now. Its missile arsenal is vast, and some of them have a range of over two thousand kilometers, which it's the first country in the world to have that kind of range of a missile without a nuclear weapon. When I toured with the head of central command a couple of years ago, he was explaining to me that the Iranians have reached what the military calls overmatch, which means that the United States or Israel couldn't defend if Iran unleashed all that it has. And-

LINDSAY:
But the same is also true in reverse.

WRIGHT:
Oh, well, the United States obviously has foreign excess, but Iran also has capabilities of defending itself if it's attacked, and if it does more in its nuclear program, if it crosses the political threshold of deciding to build a bomb, it would too. And of course, originally went back to building a weapon. The program initiated during the shah's era as a deterrent against Iraq because Iraq had invaded, used chemical weapons in Iran, didn't have a means of telling countries "don't do that," because the dangers of what we'll do are too overwhelming. So I think that Americans don't quite understand that, or those who advocate a war with Iran, or engaging in regime changes we did in Iraq, don't understand that a war with Iran, or a regime change operation would be far more complicated, far deadlier, far costlier than either of the campaigns in Afghanistan, which was our longest war, and we didn't come out so well, and in Iraq where we didn't come out so well either. And it's so easy to slap around terms like "let's bomb them" or "engage in regime change." Iran's regime is deeply unpopular, but it's also deeply entrenched.

LINDSAY:
Ray, I want to pick up Robin's question that has bedeviled U.S. foreign policy for four decades now, and that's the question of what to do about Iran. Given the situation we're in, obviously we have the near term crisis of the attack on Tower 22, but there's a broader set of issues involved in dealing with Iran. What is it the United States should be doing given Robin's caution, which I think is wise that a war with Iran would be very difficult to execute and to win if only because Iran, it has a much larger population than either Iraq or Afghanistan?

TAKEYH:
Well, that is a very interesting and important and threshold questions to which there have not been satisfactory answers, including by me. What to do about Iran has, as you mentioned, bedeviled successive administrations. The diplomatic outreach has been exhausted, and at this point in terms of addressing the nuclear issue, it's unlikely to be revived in a significant way. Obviously, war with Iran, which I'm not sure if anybody really wants, would have its own ramifications. One of which is, I don't know if the United States has the resources or the national domestic consensus for such a thing? The phrase, "regime change" is a problematic phrase because it assumes the United States can change the Iranian regime. The relevant question would be, can the United States materially assist the Iranian people in their quest to change the regime? And on that hand, it's likely to be a secondary, if not a limited power.

So the question, therefore, has to come to, why is it that Iran is not crossing the nuclear threshold? Are there technological barriers? They probably can overcome those. Why are there restraints because the restraint is largely self-restrained today? And I suspect it has to do with the fact that the regime is too concerned about its domestic situation and how tenuous that is, and also introducing such weaponry in a turbulent region where at least the Israelis are growing concern about existential threats may invite the kind of retaliation that will constitute a disadvantage to it domestically.

If that's correct, and it's just a speculation, is the weaker it gets at home and the more robust American deterrent and Israeli deterrent policy, the less inclined it will be to cross the threshold. I would suggest deterrence is a phrase that's used around in a rather undefined way, because you have to say, what are you trying to deter? Are you trying to deter attack by the proxies? Are you trying to deter this or that? So we tend to use it as an undifferentiated mass, but it's a question that you ask to which there has not been a satisfactory answer. And maybe because not every problem is susceptible to a satisfactory clear cut answer, and to anticipate that is part of the American creed that's not shared by many other places. And I realize that's the unsatisfactory answer to your question, but that's the limit or indication of my intellectual poverty.

LINDSAY:
Let me actually dial it down and ask you a smaller version of the question. Do you think it's likely that Iran will escalate the current conflict?

TAKEYH:
Not in the immediate term. I don't think that Iranians want escalation of the conflict in a matter that will invite greater degree of American retaliation, which could even traverse its territory. So I think you're going to see some degree of calm prevail for a little while, and then presumably they'll have to instigate those attacks again or get their allies to do it.

LINDSAY:
You're describing a lather, rinse, repeat cycle.

TAKEYH:
Yeah, but the Iranians need to instigate those proxies in order to inflame Israel's periphery because their entire strategy of having internationally imposed civil pause on the Gaza conflict requires an intensification of tensions. But the intensification of tensions obviously can potentially lead to further American casualties and invite the type of retaliation they don't welcome. In this particular crisis, everybody is improvising, and the problem is things can get out of hand. If there is an Iranian instigated attack that has further American fatalities, then I think the rules of engagement by the United States will necessarily have to be loosened.

LINDSAY:
Robin, I want to come back to you and ask you the question that you yourself posed. What do we do about Iran? What is your advice to the administration on how it should handle the current crisis, which is self-embedded in much bigger context of rivalry and competition between the United States and Iran, as you've laid out?

WRIGHT:
Well, the bottom line is that no war ends simply militarily. There is always at the end some kind of political engagement to come to terms, whether it's a surrender, whether it's an understanding of who's going to take control. And this is one of the problems with the Gaza war, since the end game and the post-war game isn't very clear. But when it comes to what the United States is trying to achieve in dealing with the Iranian backed militias and dealing with the bigger picture of Iran, I think the United States and Iran eventually have to talk. I talked to Ryan Crocker, a member of the Council, former ambassador who actually started his career in Iran, served in Iraq, Syria, Kuwait, Lebanon, was in the embassy during the first suicide bombing by the embryo of Hezbollah in 1982 in Beirut. So he knows this question very well, and we had a long conversation last night and he said, "Look, we at some point need to come to an understanding. It doesn't mean we reopen embassies necessarily, but we have to come to an understanding."

And there are issues that both sides care about. They actually cooperated during the five years of the caliphate in Iraq and Syria in trying to beat back ISIS. So there are issues in which we share some concerns, stability in the Persian Gulf and freedom of shipping. So there are issues, and Ryan was all for saying, "Look, we have to deal with them diplomatically." He actually led a round of talks with the Iranians when he was ambassador in Iraq in 2008, and they didn't come to any great conclusion or any new pact, but this is where you open the door and you diffuse tensions.

The Iranians are very stubborn and they're going to be very territorial when it comes to their interests. They look at us being in their area as we would look if Iranians were running around in Cuba, Venezuela, Columbia, or in Canada. And I think that's not a bad idea that even if you're pounding the proxies, that doesn't mean that cuts off the ability to set the stage for whether it's major diplomacy or just a common understanding. And in Washington, it's often either/or when sometimes both work.

LINDSAY:
I'll just note on that point, Robin, obviously it helps if the Iranians want to talk as well. It takes two to tango, so to speak.

WRIGHT:
Well, there have been many times, just to point out, that Iran has made overtures, whether it was Khatami talking for bringing down the wall of mistrust or Rafsanjani offering Conoco the biggest oil contract in Iranian history. We tend to be going in different directions at different times. They're interested, we're not. We're interested, they're not. Remember they honored the Iran nuclear deal for fourteen months after Trump walked away from it before they started working on their own maximum pressure campaign by going back on some of their obligations under the nuclear deal. So the timing has been wrong.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest have been Ray Takeyh, Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle East studies here at the Council and Robin Wright, a contributing writer and columnist for the New Yorker. Ray and Robin, thank you for joining me.

TAKEYH:
Thank You.

WRIGHT:
Thank you, James.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you listen, and leave us your review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those are the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting, Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.