Targeting the faces of evil: The US confronts a rogue state |
Targeting the faces of evil: The US confronts a rogue state
The military campaign to topple the Iranian regime, launched by the U.S. on Feb. 28, draws on a playbook over 40 years old. As President Trump looks to make his mark on the Middle East and reshape the still-murky future of this war-torn region, his strategy toward Iran looks to the past — to strategies pioneered by presidents since Ronald Reagan to combat the menace of rogue states.
This critical moment for the future of the Middle East and America’s role in molding it is a “Back to the Future” moment in more ways than one. Not only does President Trump’s strategy toward Iran build on the foundations laid by past presidents, from Reagan to both Presidents Bush, but it also traces its roots to Reagan’s strikes against the Libyans, the boogeymen of the 1985 blockbuster movie.
Reagan’s confrontation with Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi in the 1980s marked the first U.S. standoff with a rogue state — a new threat that was beginning to emerge as the Cold War ended. Gadhafi’s regime came into Reagan’s crosshairs for its bold and reckless sponsorship of terrorist attacks that increasingly targeted American and Western interests. By early 1986, at the urging of advisors such as Secretary of State George Shultz, Reagan decided that he would have to resort to military force to make progress in curbing the violence of Gadhafi’s regime.
In his public and private comments, Reagan cast the terrorist threat in the person of Gadhafi, whose eccentric appearance, erratic behavior, and vitriolic rhetoric earned him the moniker of “the mad clown of Tripoli.” Reagan’s national security team had branded Gadhafi an “international troublemaker” since late 1981, focusing its alarm on the Libyan leader’s avowed intention to produce or acquire nuclear weapons, which “would pose an intolerable threat to the security and well-being” of the U.S. and its allies.
Reagan finally unleashed U.S. air power against Libya in April 1986 following a deadly terrorist attack in West Germany that left two dead and 79 wounded U.S. servicemen. Operation El Dorado Canyon resulted in simultaneous airstrikes on targets “that play a key role both in maintaining Gadhafi in power and in directing terrorist operations abroad,” as Reagan’s national security advisor, Vice Adm. John Poindexter, explained. Gadhafi himself was not an explicit target of the strikes, but the selection of his command and control center as one of the prime targets for bombing left little doubt that decapitating the Libyan regime would have been a desirable outcome of the mission.
Gadhafi escaped from the attack unscathed, but the Reagan administration continued to keep him in its crosshairs, looking for opportunities to unseat him through overt or covert means through the end of the decade.
Soon, another international brigand took center stage as the quintessential rogue state of the post–Cold War era: Saddam Hussein of Iraq. As early as 1981, when Israeli warplanes destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, Reagan referred to Saddam as a “no good nut.” But it wasn’t until Saddam ordered Iraqi tanks across the border into Kuwait in August of 1990 that the U.S. viewed his regime as a vital threat to the global order.
Many readers today will forget that the longest phase of Operation Desert Storm, in January and February 1991, was not the famed “left hook” tank warfare through the desert but rather a prolonged air campaign against targets throughout Iraq — remarkably similar to the current effort in the skies over Iran. Then as now, American aircraft specifically targeted Saddam’s palaces, Baath Party headquarters and military command sites.
Perhaps the closest parallel to the opening phase of Operation Epic Fury against Iran — which quickly destroyed the compound where supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was staying — was the first blow of the later Iraq War under President George W. Bush. On March 19, 2003, the night before Operation Iraqi Freedom was set to begin, Bush received intelligence that Saddam Hussein would be staying at his Dora Farms compound near Baghdad. He ordered an airstrike on the compound to “decapitate the regime,” hoping that “by killing the dictator we might be able to end the war before it began, and spare lives,” as he wrote in his memoirs.
But the dictator was not there, and the ground war went on — at first spectacularly, then tragically. In Iran 2026, the dictator was home. Whether the Iranian regime will truly change its stripes without a ground war remains to be seen.
Matthew A. Frakes is the author of the forthcoming book “Rogue States: The Making of America’s Global War on Terror” and assistant professor in the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at the Ohio State University. Benjamin V. Allison is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Texas at Austin and a graduate fellow at the Clements Center for National Security.
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