Striking Iran Shouldn't Be on the Table | Opinion

If you didn't know any better, you might think the United States was on the precipice of a war with Iran.

That's what some commentators and lawmakers are certainly hoping for after this weekend, when a drone targeted a small U.S. military outpost just inside northeastern Jordan. Three U.S. troops were killed and more than 30 additional soldiers were injured. The drone apparently exploded near the facility's sleeping quarters, which explains the high casualty rate. This is the first time a militia attack against a U.S. military location in the Middle East has resulted in American fatalities since Tehran's proxies accelerated their assaults in mid-October. "We know these groups are supported by Iran—make no mistake about that," White House national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters today before claiming that the attacks will require a response.

That a military response is in the offing isn't surprising. If President Joe Biden authorized retaliatory airstrikes after U.S. troops were wounded in drone and militia attacks, it's guaranteed that he would authorize them after Americans were killed. The decision has been made.

The scope of it, however, is extremely important. Calls for going above and beyond proportional retaliation, to targets inside Iran itself, will simply create more problems and compel the Iranians to respond directly. The U.S., then, would be juggling multiple adversaries simultaneously at a time when the White House apparently wants to prevent the cycle of violence from getting even worse. Biden himself would have to justify to the American public why he thought it was necessary to widen the conflict, and in effect, plunge the U.S. into a war that Congress hasn't debated, let alone authorized.

Those counseling war with Iran need to answer two critical questions.

First, what was Iran's connection to the attacks last weekend? We all know that Iran has been funding, arming, and supporting militias in the Middle East for decades. This isn't in dispute. Tehran's proxy network is extensive, ranging from Hamas in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen, to the Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. Many of those militias are already fighting the U.S. and have been doing so for months—if not years. U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria have been attacked more than 150 times over the last three months; U.S. warships in the Red Sea, meanwhile, have been shooting down Houthi drones and anti-ship cruise missiles at a feverish pace for the last few weeks.

Yet it's important to note that funding and arming non-state groups does not necessarily mean Tehran controls them. Proxy-client relationships are extraordinarily complex endeavors. As the U.S. learned both during and after the Cold War, proxies can be very difficult to restrain because they have interests that don't match up perfectly with Washington. To take one example—despite providing support to the so-called moderate Syrian opposition during the last decade, those rebels often ignored Washington's wishes and sought to use the weapons sent to them to fight Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad instead of ISIS.

The Iranians aren't immune from complicated proxy-sponsor dynamics either. In 2014, the Houthis took the Yemeni capital, Sana'a, even after Tehran advised against it. In Gaza, Hamas was happy to take Iranian cash and military technology but ultimately ran its own mini-state and made decisions based on what it thought was best for their own interests. The U.S. intelligence community and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) assess that Iran didn't even know Hamas was going to execute the Oct. 7 attack in Southern Israel. Iran has had to restrain their militia allies in Iraq on more than one occasion as well. If the U.S. wants to strike Iran, it ought to at least find a concrete connection between Iran and the attack in Jordan.

The second question is equally vital, if not more so. Can you guarantee Iran wouldn't respond to U.S. military action? So much of the commentary suggests that a forceful U.S. military operation inside Iran would scare the ayatollahs straight.

Yet the evidence in support of that conclusion is weak to nonexistent. Iran has retaliated to previous U.S. and Israeli attacks repeatedly. After the U.S. assassinated Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, Iran sent about a dozen ballistic missiles into a U.S. base in Iraq. After the Trump administration withdrew from the Iranian nuclear deal and re-imposed sanctions against the Iranian economy, Tehran responded by attacking oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. And after Israel started striking Iranian vessels in regional waters, Iran retaliated with strikes on Israeli-owned ships—the most recent of which took place in November.

The notion that Iran would just sit idly after a U.S. attack defies recent history. The reality is quite the opposite. The idea that the U.S. can escalate until Iran blinks and de-escalates voluntarily is a complete misunderstanding of how the country has operated.

There's no question the U.S. will use the military hammer. The discrete, precision strikes the U.S. has conducted against militia sites in Iraq and Syria will be deemed insufficient this time around. We should expect a bigger target list over a wider area. The administration might even be considering the option of hitting Iranian personnel inside Iraq and Syria.

Striking Iran directly, though, shouldn't be on the table.

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.