Just Like Venezuela
By 
The outlines of something that might be called a strategy are beginning to emerge in Trump’s war. A discussion of strategy in this context should always be prefaced by a warning that Donald Trump doesn’t do strategy in the way the rest of us do. His process seems to be the emergence of a desire or need, followed by an order to others, then perhaps modified by what those others tell him can or cannot be done, after which the others do something.
I’m not interested in that process for this post, but rather the outcome and how he and others are justifying it. That outcome is still foggy, with several justifications floating around it, but I think I see some shape.
Trump has now said several times that the outcome he wants for Iran is like what happened in Venezuela. The first thing we can take from this is that he wanted a fast and easy (for him) outcome, perhaps with more US casualties. Other comments, particularly that the people he wanted to take over were killed, point to a further similarity.
Trump’s formula for avoiding forever wars seems to be to remove the ornery top people, corrupt those just below them to do as Trump says, and call it a success. This avoids the kind of breakdown that occurred in George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. Or at least has so far in Venezuela.
The part we haven’t seen is the corruption of substitutes. This would have been easier in Venezuela than in Iran, although the details of how it was done in Venezuela are not available. There was little to no chance of it in Iran. Israel probably could have accomplished it more easily than the US, but their motivation to do it would have been low. And the US has the son of the former Shah in reserve.
The Venezuela operation was accomplished by the US alone. In Iran, Israel is also an actor, and their objectives tend more toward chaos than replacement at the top. Iran itself had a deep succession plan because they knew they were a target. That would provide potential targets for corrupters – those people who are now dead – but those targets would be less likely to be corruptible than those in the more open Venezuelan system.
Trump’s current floundering – today he said they hadn’t expected Iran to hit back – indicates that there may have been little of that attempt to corrupt, although Trump did have an analogy in his head.
Isfahan, where Iran’s enriched uranium is believed to be stored or buried, has been relatively untouched in the current campaign. Are they planning to do a special operation to retrieve it? That would be an analogy to Venezuela – bring out the uranium instead of Maduro. Isfahan is much further from US warships than Caracas, and Iran has more air defense. There’s a good chance that analogy wouldn’t work too.