US Military Assets Are Heading Toward Iran

It seems, for now, that President Trump has been talked out of a military strike on Iran, but that doesn’t mean this is over. Fox News reports that military assets are currently heading for the Middle East.

At least one U.S. aircraft carrier is being moved toward the Middle East as tensions with Iran continue to build, military sources confirm to Fox News.

It is not yet clear whether the carrier is the USS Abraham Lincoln, currently operating in the South China Sea, or one of two carriers that departed Norfolk and San Diego earlier this week. Transit to the region is expected to take at least a week.

U.S. military assets from air, land and sea are expected to flow into the region in the coming days and weeks to provide the president with military options should he decide to carry out strikes against Iran, sources said.

It did seem, as recently as Tuesday, that Trump was gearing up for a strike on Iran but then something changed his mind. The WSJ reports that Trump was told a military strike was unlikely to succeed in taking down the regime.

The U.S. would need more military firepower in the Middle East both to launch a large-scale strike and protect American forces in the region and allies such as Israel should Iran retaliate, the advisers told Trump, the officials said.

The U.S. officials and Middle Eastern partners told the White House the regime was unlikely to fall after a massive bombing campaign, which could instead spark a broader conflict. Smaller assault packages, meanwhile, could boost morale among protesters but ultimately not change the regime’s crackdown, the officials said.

Trump, without making a final decision on which action he would take, asked for military assets to be in place should he order a big attack, the officials said…

U.S. allies in the region including Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have urged Trump in recent days not to attack Iran. Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan, who has been calling and meeting regional leaders including Iranian officials, said he was working to avoid a military escalation. “We do not want an intervention here,” he told a news conference in Istanbul on Thursday.

Trump isn’t interested in a symbolic gesture. If he’s going to risk a strike, he wants it to be decisive. It probably also mattered that Iran appears to have backed off of plans to execute up to 800 people for participating in the protests. Trump seems convinced his pressure worked, though how long Iran will hold off seems like anyone’s guess.

There’s also another possibility which Trump may be considering. Even if he can come up with a strike which devastates the current Iranian regime, there’s no guarantee that what follows will be an improvement.

Iran has no single, unified opposition movement that can slide in and take charge if the regime’s leaders are suddenly assassinated. Instead, Iran’s opposition is divided, and its leadership is largely in jail. What’s more, Iran would lack a clear head of state if the entire regime were to suddenly disintegrate from just domestic pressure.

“The Islamic Republic does not have an alternative to it,” Vali Nasr, a professor of Middle East studies and international affairs at Johns Hopkins and a former senior adviser to the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told me. “There is no force out there that can actually take over in a day-after scenario.”…

Iranians who are opposed to the supreme leader — which, today, is most of them — still make their voices heard. That includes through mass street protests, like the ones happening now. Some particularly dedicated and courageous foes have even built followings and platforms. But the regime cracks down on protests once they reach a critical mass, and it jails opponents that get too much attention. It has thus made it hard for Iranians to build organized opposition movements that can grow and endure.

Without an organized opposition, the power vacuum created by a collapse of the Iranian regime could lead to someone even more extreme seizing power. And that’s still not the worst case scenario. The worst case would be a power struggle in which the death toll we’re seeing now is exceeded by factions fighting for control.

In short, a military strike is a risky proposition. Trump was willing to do it to stop the regime from murdering people wholesale, but short of that we may be better of looking for some kind of longer-term, Iranian-led transition which won’t result in immediate chaos.

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