Trying to Understand the Dance in the Persian Gulf

It will require a lot more patience and tolerance than is normal for the American people, the Congress, or the news media.

The current negotiations to achieve a long-term truce — if not peace — between America and Iran are amazingly complex and challenging to say the least.

It seems like every other day something goes wrong, either in kinetic action or in words. Then the news media enthusiastically overreacts and frames whatever happened as a potential crisis.

Yet, the larger pattern is understandable.

I don’t have any secret knowledge, but I do have an understanding of history. This includes about the Iranian dictatorship and the way these negotiations are handled.

For example, consider the negotiations between Winston Churchill and the Irish Republicans, which ended the war in Ireland. Hundreds were killed in Ireland during the negotiations to reach an agreement which allowed the South to go free while the North remained with Great Britain.

The negotiations between the allies and the Italian government in 1943 is another example of the tension between the search for peace and back sliding into war.

The American-Chinese negotiations to get to the truce in the Korean War took 748 days. During these negotiations in Korea there were two ferocious battles around a site called Pork Chop Hill (which became a very powerful movie after the war). In those two battles the United States saw 347 soldiers killed, more than 1,000 wounded, and nine captured by the Chinese Communists. By contrast the Chinese suffered more than 1,000 killed and maybe as many as 4,000 wounded.

The Paris Peace Accords to get to a truce in the Vietnam War lasted 1,720 days, during which time intense fighting continued.

So, truce talks often involved violence as well as negotiations.

Compare these examples to today’s largely bloodless back and forth. With limited air power (including drones) the cost in lives compared to past negotiations is minimal.

Specifically, I have been watching and studying the Iranian religious dictatorship since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came back from Paris and founded it in 1979. For 47 years, the dictatorship has been pledged to defeat “the great Satan,” which was Khomeini’s term for America (Israel has since become the little Satan). During this time, the most dedicated members of the religious dictatorship have chanted “death to America” as a matter of policy.

My guess — and I emphasize that it is a guess with no concrete information to prove the case — is that a lot of the current turbulence can be attributed to a multi-faction split underway in Iran today.

The biggest long-term challenge to the dictatorship is the 80 percent to 90 percent of the Iranian people who are tired of the dictatorship and want to live in a freer safer and more prosperous country. Their challenge is they have no weapons or central organization. When the Iranian people protest, as they did earlier this year, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps simply kills them (more than 42,000 people in the last protest). However, the Iranian people are a permanent threat to the existing regime. If it weakens enough, it will be replaced.

The second bloc is the combination of politicians and business leaders. They know the path of terrorism and nuclear weapons is not working and Iran must find a way to get along with America and its Arab allies. This opposition group is vastly more powerful than the mob in the street, but it may not be able to win a direct confrontation with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has 160,000 of the most dedicated and fanatic members of Iranian society.

There are two big questions that might change the outcome of the current seemingly shaky balance of power in which no one faction has a decisive ability to decide and act.

First, will the regular army and police get fed up with the current economic and military disaster, reinforce the non-IRGC leadership, and force the IRGC to accept a compromise with America?

Second, will the sheer scale of the devastation from the American-Israeli air campaign, combined with the potential infusion of resources, lead to a “make Iran prosperous” faction which simply forces the IRGC to accept a truce which begins to turn Iran into a more normal state.

Managing the shift back and forth between carrots and sticks — diplomatic talk and kinetic violence — is going to be a complicated process. It will require a lot more patience and tolerance than is normal for the American people, the Congress, or the news media.

Just remember the human cost and length of time some of the earlier negotiations took, and you will realize what an amazing job President Donald J. Trump is doing.

Rather than being drawn into a big fight, he is calmly and steadily working to get a deal that will be better for the United States and our allies — and ultimately better for the Iranian people.

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