Eve is here. I hope that readers who are familiar with American military strategy will participate in this article. I am a little perplexed because many commentators on the Iran war have said that the United States and Israel are set up for a high-intensity, short-duration, powerful air-power conflict, and that Iran is well aware of this trend and is setting itself up to wage a long war of attrition. However, I did not follow US operations in Syria or Afghanistan, so perhaps wars with insurgents fit the pattern described below.
Douglas McGregor depicts America’s failures in a very different way. In other words, the United States has not adapted to the new ISR-driven method of warfare, which he foresaw in his 2003 book Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing the Way America Fights.
The revised second edition of The War in Ukraine: Understanding a Senseless Conflict by Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies is now available. Mehdi Benjamin is the co-founder of CODEPINK for Peace and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of Iran Islamic Republic of Iran. Nicolas JS Davies is an independent journalist, CODEPINK researcher, and author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and destruction of Iraq.
US-allied South African military conducting search and destroy operations in Namibia in the 1980s. Photo: Wikipedia
A 60-day extension of the ceasefire between the United States and Iran may bring lasting peace, or it may end within a week, doomed by the dysfunctional alliance between the United States and Israel. If that happens, it could mark the beginning of a shift away from the “low-intensity conflict” doctrine that has shaped U.S. foreign policy for decades.
Talks between the US, Iran, Pakistan and Qatar began in Switzerland on June 21st. However, Iran has insisted that the United States is responsible for Israel’s violation of the U.S.-Iran Memorandum of Understanding, and has maintained that it cannot move forward with other parts of the agreement unless the United States fulfills its role under Article 1, which calls for Israel’s continued ceasefire and withdrawal from Lebanon.
If the Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the US fails, global oil and gas supplies will be drastically reduced, leaving a regional war between Iran, Israel and the US stretching from Lebanon to the Persian Gulf.
This entire crisis is another devastating outcome of the international community’s failure to tame Israeli war crimes and genocide and end its illegal occupation of Palestine and its attacks and invasions of neighboring countries, all of which the United States continues to enable and support through its military and diplomatic alliances and arming of the Israeli military.
President Trump understands that the position of the United States and Israel is rapidly deteriorating, and appears to realize that his political future now depends on extricating the United States from the war against Iran that he and Prime Minister Netanyahu have concocted. Voices of peace from around the world support the extension of the interim ceasefire and oppose efforts by politicians in Washington and Tel Aviv to disrupt it.
But to understand the roots of this crisis in American foreign policy, we need to look back. Since the 1980s, America’s aggressive foreign policy has dragged the Middle East and much of the world into what American military planners call “low-intensity conflict” or “LIC.”
Based on this principle, the United States, and now its protégé Israel, asserts its freedom of action to use military force against grave and widespread violations of international law, while preventing the rest of the world from mustering the political will to enforce international law or to hold people accountable.
The US doctrine of low-intensity conflict was a deliberate policy choice by the Reagan administration in the 1980s after the US defeat in Vietnam. After Bush II and Cheney’s disastrous all-out American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama, Trump, and Biden returned to low-intensity warfare, but its scope expanded globally.
The US choice to expand low-intensity warfare followed the example and techniques of the British Empire in its final stages in the 1950s. From the Suez Crisis to the guerrilla war against communist revolutionaries in Malaya to the Mau Mau torture camps in Kenya, the deliberate and deadly violence of British imperial policy has been hidden from its own people and the world behind a tapestry of lies.
In 1989, Michael Clare and Peter Kornbluh edited a book titled “Low-Intensity War: How the United States Fights War Without Declaring It.”
They write that the official description of low-intensity warfare is intentionally broad and vague, including the Bolivian drug war, the occupation of Beirut, the invasion of Grenada, and the 1986 bombing of Libya, as well as “special operations,” “special operations,” and “unconventional warfare.”
They concluded that the low-intensity conflict was actually a “strategic reorientation of the U.S. military organization and a renewed determination to use force in a global jihad against Third World revolutionary movements and governments.”
Today’s nominal but false ceasefires in Gaza, Lebanon, and the Persian Gulf fit that principle. They allow the United States and Israel to continue to use illegal force while appearing to comply with international demands for negotiation and diplomacy.
However, today’s US involvement in low-intensity conflicts is not limited to the Middle East. This includes a proxy war against Russia centered on Ukraine. The brutal and deadly siege of Cuba. Piracy on the high seas by the United States and Western countries. Kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro and his wife. and economic and financial coercive measures or “sanctions” affecting approximately 40 countries.
Today’s low-intensity warfare includes sending U.S. special operations forces to up to 140 countries. Since 2001, US special operations forces claim to have suffered 40% of all US military casualties, including many of the 8,492 US military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even as the United States projects military power around the world, killing thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people overseas, the fact that most of America’s war casualties are concentrated in a small force of about 70,000 men and women at a time serves to give most American families the illusion that they are living in peace.
Low-intensity warfare doctrine relies on the basic premise that the countries targeted by the United States and its allies are too weak, too isolated, or too divided to effectively resist. But that assumption is increasingly being tested.
Iran has made great strides in developing an effective military defense, demonstrating to shocked U.S. and Israeli officials that it can now defend itself. But the deadly consequences of the false ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon are concrete proof that Israel and the United States still favor low-intensity war over true peace.
While President Trump portrays himself as a peacemaker, he remains committed to funding a vast war machine that can swing the intensity of military and covert operations up and down in different parts of the world, adapting to new forms of resistance and responding to fluctuating international diplomatic pressures.
However, the genocide committed by the US and Israel in Gaza opened the eyes of a new generation of people around the world to the reality of US imperialism. Its officials lie that Underguard’s low-intensity combat is in dangerous decline. People no longer buy into the false narratives of American and Western politicians and established media.
America’s political, military, and business leaders are facing a crisis of credibility and legitimacy as they take the gloves off and ratchet up the intensity of these campaigns, from the escalation of the war against Russia and the brutal blockade of Cuba to the killing of innocent fishermen and ferry passengers in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean, to the threats against traditional allies such as Canada and Denmark.
In the United States and Israel’s war against Iran and the negotiations to end it, we are witnessing serious efforts by the attacked nation to stand up to bullies, correct power imbalances, and uphold international law.
No matter what you think about the Iranian government, its pursuit of sovereignty, security, and lasting peace based on international law deserves the support of governments and peoples around the world, including Americans.
This moment could be a key turning point in containing U.S. aggression and Israeli regional expansion. It could even give humanity a chance to end this endless cycle of war and begin working together to address the existential crisis that threatens the world in the 21st century.
As Americans commemorate our nation’s 250th anniversary and the violence of American empire returns to attack us and our neighbors in our homes and streets, we must find common cause and learn from our neighbors around the world who have resisted the violence of American empire for generations.
It is ultimately up to us to take our future into our own hands and begin a fundamental transition from empire to democracy.
That’s why CODEPINK is calling for a summer of peace and love, a time to reject fear, militarism and empire, and organize our communities around a simple but radical demand that our country stop waging war on the world and start investing in life.
