As the war between the United States and Iran enters its fourth week, attention is turning from how the conflict is being fought to how it has been understood.
In Washington, the dominant narrative has framed the war as one of attrition, degraded capabilities and a steadily weakening adversary. But in a conversation with Leila Bazzi, Editor-in-Chief of Alhurra, retired U.S. General Mark Kimmitt offers a different interpretation: that Iran is waging a war of endurance rooted in patience and asymmetry.
More significantly, he describes what he calls “economic decapitation”: using the Strait of Hormuz to pressure global oil markets, where even a single mine, missile or speedboat can have strategic consequences. As talk of a possible endgame grows, a central question emerges: if the two sides have been fighting different wars, what would it mean to win?
– We’ve been hearing for some time now that Iran is breaking. The first question, is that true? How can you explain the gap between the public narrative and the battlefield reality?
– Well, it’s very simple, and I’ve written about this. I believe that we are fighting two types of wars. The United States is fighting a war of what we call attrition, where they think that by reducing the number of rocket launchers, by reducing the number of tanks, by reducing the number of radars, as those numbers go down, Iran gets weaker. But that’s not the war that Iran is fighting. Iran is fighting a classic war of resistance. Now in that type of war, and I’ll mispronounce these words, but there are two elements of that kind of war, which is Mukluwama resistance, and Sabour, which is patience. And as you can see from Lebanon, the Lebanese just wait out the Israelis. You remember in 2006 when the Israelis were worn out, they withdrew and Hassan Nasrallah came out of his hole, and they held a victory parade even though the entire land was destroyed. And in that type of war, you only have two kinds of people. You have the martyrs who have died, and you have the Mukwamen, the resistors who are alive. You look at all the damage around you; well that’s just the physical representation of resistance. It all comes down to patience. And where the United States is not patient, the Iranians are patient.
– So, I like the comparison that you made. So, what Iran is doing now, you have Hezbollah also operating back again out of Lebanon, just to drain out the patience. So, if there’s no winner, no loser, they believe in the al-muqawama and the martyr things. So, it’s exhausting and tiring the other party, which is the US and Israel.
– The Americans are fighting a war of attrition where they think it’s all about numbers. Iranians are fighting a war of exhaustion and they’re just waiting for the Americans to get tired of this and leave as we did from Afghanistan, as the Israelis did from Lebanon, as we did from Vietnam.
Okay, so here this takes me to the other question to the Strait of Hormuz. It’s about 21 miles wide and it has narrowest point with shipping lanes squeezed into even tighter corridors. How does geography limit any future US military options?
Well, it doesn’t limit the options. It’s just that right now, the United States does not have the capacity to keep it open. Now there’s military capacity and then there’s commercial capacity. Even if the United States was able to keep it open militarily, it may not be enough for the commercial insurance companies to still want to ensure those tankers on the chance that they may get shot up. You’re too young to remember, but from 1981 to 1988, Iraq and Iran fought a huge war. And we call it the Tanker War because the United States became involved as a non-belligerent, but they knew how important the oil was back then. So they reflagged the Kuwaiti tankers, made them American tankers, and took them through the Strait of Hormuz. During that time period, about 22,000 ships went through the Strait of Hormuz. About 500 were hit, and about 63 were sunk. So even with the United States being a non-belligerent, it was a costly operation. So you can imagine how difficult it will be with the Americans as belligerents, as fighters. And even if we come up with a military solution, that may not be a sufficient commercial solution for the ships to go through again.
From a military perspective, Iran controls the northern coastline of the Strait of Hormuz, with proximity and direct lines of sight over key shipping lanes. Given U.S. military capabilities, is there any realistic scenario in which Washington would consider putting boots on the ground to resolve this?
– Well, first of all, I think it’s important to understand that in many ways geography doesn’t matter except that it’s 20 miles. But the great threat to the ships is not having to do with the geography, but it has to do with the capabilities that the Iranians have. They can drop mines and more importantly, they can use missiles. And even more important, they have a huge speedboat fleet, which we call them Boston whalers or cigarette boats. Every one of them can run up against the ship and fire its missiles like happened with the USS Cole. So, the real issue is the threat to the shipping is in some ways the missiles, but very much the mines and the speed boats. So how do you defeat all of them? The easiest to defeat are the missiles because we have anti-missile. It is more difficult because they have thousands of speedboats and we need a persistent, unblinking eye of intelligence to let them know when they’re coming. But in the mines, it’s remarkably because the United States doesn’t have the capability to do mine clearance operations. We have very few ships, four to be exact, that have the capability and you need far more. And I just finished writing an article about why we need the allies and we need the allies primarily because they have the mind countermeasures ships.
– This is a very interesting element, needing the allies for that. Would you elaborate a little bit on that part?
– Sure. first of all, American ships are warships for the most part. To clear mines, to do mine countermeasure, your ship, so it doesn’t magnetically attract a mine, it has to be a wooden hull. And the US Navy just had 14 of these ships in the Tanker War. We only have four of them now, and three of them are in Japan. The Germans, the French, and the British have very, very large number of these ships that can not only identify where the mines are but can actually do the countermeasures to blow them up, to get them out of the way, so on and so forth. We have helicopters that can fly over the water and identify them, but we only have one or two ships that once you identify them, can’t get close enough to remove them without them getting blown up as well. So it’s a very, very technical type of military operation. And even though you say the US military is strong, it really is short of the capabilities it needs to be able to keep open militarily the Strait of Hormuz on its own.
One final question. And I really thank you for your time. What does victory look like in a place where a single missile, a single drone or even a false alarm can move global oil prices?
Well, victory in this war, that’s a longer question because for me victory would be that we stick to our original objectives in this war, which are to eliminate the nuclear program, to eliminate the ballistic missile program, and to eliminate the proxy program. But the Iranians have been very intelligent about this. They’ve shifted the war from those core issues of importance to the United States, and they’ve said, we’re not going to talk about that, we’re not going to fight you on your terms, we’re going to fight on our terms. That means closing the Strait of Hormuz. And you are right. One missile, one speedboat, one mine can disrupt international oil supplies. We talk about the war of decapitation that the Israelis have been used going against the key leaders. So, they’re fighting a war of regime decapitation and the Iranians are smart. They’re now fighting a war of economic decapitation by taking the Strait of Hormuz and putting that pressure on the world oil price.
– OK, so what you’re saying is very interesting because how I see it, they did kill most of the leaders in Iran. But Iran system is it originated horizontally, not vertically?
– Well, I think the best comparison there is what the Israelis did to Hezbollah. They did that same process. They took out the highest layer, getting Hassan Nasrallah, getting Yahya Al-Sinwar, worked through that. And now they’re going down layer through layer through layer. I mean, the worst job in the world right now would be to be Mojtaba Khamenei’s driver, because I would suspect that even though it doesn’t appear to be that way in Lebanon with the fighting going on, the Israelis really got rid of the hardliners and their work with Naim Qassem, who is a little more pliant. And I think that’s what has to happen in Iran. Not what will happen, what should happen, but will happen. I think the Israelis are going to continue to slice through those different levels taking out leaders and as a new leader comes up, they’re going to (illuminate him). So yeah, I think the only reason they haven’t done that with the new supreme leaders, they can’t find them. Now we can argue whether that’s the why strategy or not the regime decapitation. I don’t know how that gets us to convince the Iranians to give up their nuclear program. But I haven’t lost sight of what this war is about, and it’s about the nuclear program, the proxies and the missiles. And just because the Iranians have diverted that goal of the Americans down to the strait of Hormuz, and other objectives keep coming up, regime change, so on and so forth, I think we’ve got to keep our eye on the ball for why we went into this war so that when we finish, we achieve those objectives, not other objectives.
Leila Bazzi
Leila Bazzi is Editor-in-Chief of MBN
