One of the most difficult mental feats is to take a familiar body of data and reorganize it visually or mentally to perceive it from a different perspective. Yet this is what intelligence analysts are constantly required to do. In order to understand international interactions, we must understand the situation as it appears to each of the opposing forces, and constantly shift back and forth from one perspective to the other as we try to fathom how each side interprets an ongoing series of interactions.
Richard J. Heuer, Jr, Cognitive Factors in Deception and Counterdeception
A MASK WITH A LION’S GAZE
on the morning of april 7th, 2017, the white house under the administration of Donald Trump issued orders to execute an airstrike on the Shayrat airbase in Homs, Syria. the airstrike proved to be perhaps the most memorable event in the relatively uneventful Syria policy of the administration in retaliation for the April 4 chemical weapon strike on Khan Sheikhoun. the strike was designed as an appeal to testosterone; fifty-nine Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired from offshore vessels and aimed at aircraft, buildings, and air defenses— everything there, except for the chemical weapons themselves.
behind the raw magnitude, it contained open questions: the president had until then been rather avoidant, wary of walking back his past remarks on the Syrian civil war. then presented with a decision point that largely mirrored the one that Pres. Obama had faced after the 2013 Ghouta attack, Trump made the puzzling decision to enforce the very thin red line that his predecessor had been mocked for even promising. it was, in fact, the first admitted airstrike U.S. forces ever committed against the Syrian government, an escalation that seemed largely unthinkable in the isolationist Trump system.
the media, owing to the law of the hook, only flirted with such questions, and the narrative was more interested in a focus on the magnificent, excessive power on display. MSNBC’s Brian Williams described “beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments”; the scorched aftermath was run for days. on CNN, Fareed Zakaria opined without a trace chemical signature of irony that Donald Trump “became president [that] night”.1
beneath ninety-four million dollars in warheads, he buried the lede— the ex-president’s detractors can levy a wide range of complaints, but all must unequivocally admit that Donald Trump knows what’s good on TV.
the nominal targets of the Shayrat fireworks display, the government of Syria, did not watch the strike on the tube, and so the medium’s inherent hypnotism was unlikely to ever color their perception of the event. the Assad regime would have experienced the Pentagon’s steel communication through the colder medium of the sitrep.
let us view the airstrike through the simulated eyes of Bashar al-Assad. the Russian green-men were notified ahead of time, and they likely notified Assad’s forces2. the strike avoided the chemical weapons which were the nominal purpose of the entire event, and even neglected to crater the airfield, which resumed flights within hours. both can only be sufficiently explained by a deliberate self-limitation by the Pentagon, a decision to cause only the type of damage which can be papered over with money. destroying the stores of chemical weapons could have led to a release of them, perhaps inadvertently poisoning airbase personnel and leading to potential blowback.
cratering the airfield, however, would have led to no consequences other than making the strike further limit the ability of the regime to conduct flight operations from Shayrat; their decision to avoid doing so necessarily means that the United States did not really want to stop the Syrian military from its campaign. this is not obvious. a few pundits and congressmen drummed up fears of a regime change campaign in the hours after the strike, but the details of the operation entirely preclude it as a motive. the pyrotechnic excess of the strike served only to provide U.S. media with a magnificent distraction.
the U.S. has, in the opening act of the Joe Biden presidency, again executed an air attack on Syrian soil; again the motives and impact of the strike are not obvious from first impression. the stage on which the two F-15s made theater, however, is many times more complex. to critique Lloyd Austin’s script, we will have to discuss the concept of the Grey Zone.
BETWEEN PEACE AND WAR
(section outlining the theory of the grey zone, the three-nation ‘land bridge’ of iran, iraq, and syria, the iranian use of shi’a militiamen, the rise of ISIS and the power vacuum in its wake, and the complex web of affiliations involved in the Syrian Civil War)
the Syrian Civil War has now seen the dawn of its third American administration, after three-plus years of Obama’s and four years of Trump’s. the 2017 airstrike proved to be exactly what it appeared as; there was no campaign against the Syrian regime. Syria, to appearances, has not used sarin in an airstrike since— Trump drew the red line that Obama envisioned, and it was not crossed afterwards. after the Tomahawks faded from America’s glowing television sets, the strike was echoed in faint questions about the legality of the President’s use of military force, which went nowhere, as they always do.
the war in Syria has continued to ripple outwards. in 2014, in the wake of the Iraq Army’s defeat at the hands of the ISIL, the Iran-born Ayatollah Sistani issued a fatwa. the fatwa led to the rise of a loose network of Shi’a Muslim militias, whose contribution to the defeat of the Islamic State was instrumental. the bands of fighters, armed with Iranian arms and with American weapons— handed over by the government of Iraq— never disbanded, and many of Washington’s top analysts consider them a long-term threat to the stability of Iraq. the Shi’a sect itself provides a regional conduit through which the government of Iran channels its influence attempts.
in Syria itself, the war has changed immensely— and remained as it ever was, a fractal ecosystem of conflict. in 2016, a heavily simplified chart (using the broadest possible categories of belligerents, including only known attacks, and confined within the Syrian border) made the rounds, and it looked like this:
each nonstate actor on the chart is more accurately perceived as a network of smaller organizations3, complicating statecraft, and there are loose links between the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah, and the network of Shi’a militias.
the real role of Iran’s loose network is to obfuscate their chain of command. if the IRGC does anything, it is guaranteed to have been done by the Iran state apparatus (and Iran would have an even harder time than Saudi Arabia of convincing the world that top officers improvised wildly beyond the frame of the orders they were given in a given mission). by contrast, an attack by Hezbollah or a Shi’a militia is in doubt— independent organizations might be striking out to raise morale, or to show their boldness in order to raise money. in certain cases, this could make escalation more likely, like if an independent action by Hezbollah were taken as having been ordered directly by the IRGC. if, however, the opponent is habitually cautious in responding to aggression, the strategy has no downsides4.
AIR-TO-SURFACE POETICS
the rocket attacks which the airstrike purportedly retorts against are a scattered phenomenon— no single event stands out in particular, though some which occurred shortly prior to the American attack are the likely ‘instigating event’. they evidence a rising boldness of the militias, which U.S. analysts increasingly view as a threat to the Iraqi government itself. where the threat was in Iraq, the strike occurred in Syria. and the timing of the strike carries little evident significance. so, when a White House representative says the strike “sends an unambiguous message: President Biden will act to protect American and Coalition personnel”, it is difficult to read it as anything except a broad justification for American strikes across the board.
first, the groups targeted are both tied to Iran, and AAH is responsible for numerous attacks on US and Coalition forces— even without clear evidence, it would be sensible to assume they were the correct target. whether the attack targeted Hezbollah incidentally or by design is unknowable, but tying together AAH and Hezbollah strengthens the argument that both groups are parts of a regional network of Iran-linked militant groups. both organizations serve Shi’a interests, and that allows Iran to motivate them to serve its own. it is incredibly convenient that the attack leaves a ‘body count’ in both groups, their juxtaposition damning the both of them as arms of Iranian foreign influence.
second, the choice of a border crossing as the target seems unusually apt. part of the choice of location is jurisdictional— airstrikes in Syria are ‘normal’ to an extent that airstrikes over Iraq are not, and nobody5 wastes their breath arguing for the sovereignty of Syria, as there are a few dozen entities already violating Syria’s meaningless sovereignty. airstrikes in Iraq, on the other hand, are more rare, and the political situation is more delicate.
more than that, though, the porous border between iraq and syria, which the ISIL seeped through in 2014, has to it a separate meaning. with their proxy intervention in Syria, Iran has strengthened its ties with the Assad regime. their network of grateful militias in Iraq could be a sympathetic party within the nation’s political system (or, pessimistically, they could attempt regime change, and sooner than you’d think). Iran would extend its sphere of influence from the border to the Mediterranean. some imagine oil pipelines or other economic fallout from this— DC analysts are more pessimistic, but:
if the iranian proxies believe the ‘land bridge’ from Iran to Syria is important, then it is necessarily important, as it motivates their decision making and emboldens them within Iraq. a border crossing, then, is a synecdoche for Iran’s border-agnostic extension of Shi’a military influence. especially for a first action of the Biden administration, the symbolism becomes more important than the direct impact. and someone in the Pentagon certainly has a hand for poetry.
whether Biden’s influence attempt is successful will be a matter for history to decide. but of course, we have hints that the situation won’t be getting any simpler:
the perversion of this idiom seems somehow too fitting to be accidental— for a moment, Zakaria inhabits a world where the nation’s highest office is christened in blood. as women might prick their thighs to performatively bleed on consummary bedsheets, a show of violence is what it takes to turn a figurehead into an executive. truly, CNN is the surest plug for the addict seeking psychosexual obsession with warfare.
we must assume that this was intentional, of course. notifying Syria would be seen as weak, but notifying Russia who could then trivially notify Syria would be taken as a necessary precaution to avoid accidental escalation. they both amount to the same thing, from the Syrian perspective.
the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is disputable on both sides of the statement: it could be portrayed as a state actor, and it could also be portrayed as a nonstate actor which is more cohesive than, for example, the Syrian rebels.
the implication, then, is that a certain degree of brinkmanship is necessary as a deterrent to persistent harassment tactics from state-connected terrorist organizations. i, for one, expect Joe Biden to have every bit the courage necessary to play the game.