The Biden administration’s decision to strike dozens of Iranian-linked targets across Iraq and Syria this week was a long time coming, and I think you can make basically two contradictory arguments about that:
For as long as no U.S. soldiers were killed, there was no real reason to escalate and risk a wider war;
A stronger response to earlier attacks, though they were non-fatal, would have put Iran in its box sooner and might have prevented the deaths.
I’m not sure which of these arguments is true. The way that parts of the “Axis of Resistance” have fallen over themselves to promise not to attack U.S. troops again and to withdraw from Syria immediately after last week’s fatal attack on a U.S. base suggests that 2. might actually be the stronger point. Iran is certainly not acting like it is seeking a war with the United States, although it is willing to let its proxies make sacrifices. Maybe it would have blinked sooner if forced to. Or maybe what looks like blinking right now is just an illusion. It’s hard to know what would have happened if things had unfolded differently. This type of warfare is all about sending messages, but the problem is that the message you think you sent is often not the message that the other side receives.
In our political and media discourse, these complex matters often get boiled down to a question of “credibility”, which is assumed to be something you either have or you don’t. There’s a certain type of observer who is obsessed with the question of credibility and thinks that only frequent applications of violence can preserve it. A lot of Republicans criticize the Biden administration for either taking too long to respond to the deaths of U.S. service members or not responding harshly enough. Donald Trump himself blamed Biden’s “weakness and surrender” for enabling the Iranian attack and claims it would never have happened on his watch.
There’s an almost comically easy response to this, which is to point out that actually it did happen on Trump’s watch - and he didn’t just delay responding by a few days, but actually never responded at all. In 2020 Trump ignored an escalating series of attacks on U.S. service members in Iraq which left two American and one British service members dead and many more injured. Trump’s supposed “credibility” did nothing to stop these attacks, and the administration’s eventual response wasn’t to strike back, but to whine that if the Iraqi government didn’t do more to stop the attacks, it would close the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and withdraw all American personnel back to safety.
Nearly every invocation of “credibility” in political debate is just petty rhetoric which papers over this sort of complicated history. But sometimes it can be more galling than others. And given what the Republican Party is currently doing to Ukraine, right now it’s very galling indeed.
A few hours before I wrote this post, Speaker Mike Johnson made an announcement which seems to effectively kill the chances of the U.S. House of Representatives passing a new aid package for Ukraine this year. Things can change quickly - Johnson might be out of a job in a few months thanks to the House GOP’s ongoing inability to fund the government - but the window of opportunity for new Ukraine aid before the 2024 elections seems to be closing.
It’s remarkable that this could happen with so little reflection on what it means for American “credibility”. The U.S. has never made any specific commitment to stop Iran’s secret services from running a network of Shia militia in Iraq and Syria, but it has pledged itself numerous times to defend Ukraine. The 1994 Budapest memorandum, George W. Bush’s pledge in 2008 that Ukraine’s future was in NATO, and the substantial quantity of aid that Washington has funnelled to Kyiv since 2021 - all surely put American credibility on the line in defense of Ukraine. Yet Trump and MAGAworld see absolutely no problem arising for America’s “credibility” if it just pulls the plug on Kyiv.
There’s a credibility problem, alright. I’m just not sure it’s where they think it is.