This isn’t the first time the US found itself on the brink of war with Iran and it most likely won’t be the last.
The attack was about to commence with warplanes in flight and warships at position to open fire before it was abruptly averted.
Trump later tweeted that he called off the strikes 10 minutes before they were scheduled to hit Iranian targets. The US military predicted at least 150 deaths on the Iranian side, which he deemed was not a “proportionate” response. He also claimed that the US was ready to hit three targets inside Iran.
Trump’s penchant for limited strikes may indicate the administration is trying to avoid a major confrontation with Tehran while simultaneously doing something to militarily reprimand it for both the drone incident and the alleged Iranian attack on two oil tankers transiting the Gulf of Oman last week.
Trump’s two previous missile strikes on Syrian targets both consisted of large barrages of cruise missiles striking a small numbers of fixed military targets – in the April 2017 case a single airbase – but came with plenty of forewarning since Trump was clearly against any escalation that would have led to a full-blown military confrontation with Syria.
Given his general aversion to starting major conflicts, these two precedents in Syria, and his tweet mentioning the planned targeting of three sites in Iran, it is quite clear Trump had something resembling his Syria strikes in mind for Iran.
Tehran, however, is much more capable of retaliating than Damascus. Consequently, it is hard to envisage the US being able to execute a swift strike against targets inside Iran without sparking a much larger conflict. The Pentagon likely explained this to President Trump.
Operation Praying Mantis, the one-day confrontation between the US and Iran in April 1988, appears on the surface to be a fitting historical analogy for recent events. Iran was attacking oil tankers during its war with Iraq and the US Navy, along with Britain, intervened by re-flagging and escorting them through the Gulf.
Then, after Iran mined the Gulf’s international sea-lanes the USS Samuel B Roberts struck one and was crippled as a result. Shortly thereafter, the US retaliated, by swiftly sinking Iran’s British-made frigate, the Sahand, and fatally crippling another frigate, the Sabalan.
Operation Praying Mantis lasted a mere day, killed dozens of Iranian personnel, and was a decisive victory for the US Navy.
The previous October, the US Navy also destroyed oil platforms used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) following a Silkworm missile attack on the re-flagged Sea Isle City tanker that wounded 17 crew members.
“No we’re not going to have a war with Iran, they’re not that stupid!” then-President Ronald Reagan loudly declared at a press conference at the time.
When evaluating Praying Mantis as a historical analogy to determine what a military confrontation between the US and Iran might look like today, it is important to remember that Iran has two very distinctive navies.
These are the conventional navy, which hasn’t changed a great deal since that 1988 engagement, and the IRGC’s naval arm.
The latter utilizes tactics very different to those employed by Iran’s conventional navy in 1988. While Iran’s regular navy uses straightforward conventional tactics, the IRGC’s naval units focus on asymmetrical warfare, hence the use small but fast craft equipped with rockets and explosives to attack much larger vessels and other similar non-conventional methods.
As a result, any engagement with the IRGC’s naval forces will be very different to Operation Praying Mantis, and possibly far more disastrous for US naval forces if they opt to engage them in the narrow confines of the Persian Gulf.
Also, the Praying Mantis analogy only really works if one is advocating for sinking Iranian Navy warships, the crews of which largely consist of non-ideological Iranian conscripts who likely had no involvement in the recent tanker attacks.
The US Navy has never had any serious run-ins with the regular Iranian Navy in the Gulf over the past 30 years, nor was it ever provoked by them. This cannot be said of the IRGC Navy, whose vessels have come dangerously close to US warships in the past.
Perhaps the best analogy for Thursday night’s incident was an event that took place during the Clinton presidency.
That administration believed Iran was responsible for the Khobar Towers bombing, which killed 19 US airmen in Saudi Arabia but could well have killed hundreds more had the truck bomb detonated closer to the compound as the perpetrators planned.
“I don’t want any pissant half-measures,” President Bill Clinton told his National Security Adviser Richard Clarke.
Contingency plans drawn-up involved attacking “a number of their military facilities that would have weakened – substantially weakened ... the Iranian navy and air force.”
In other words, a very similar series of concentrated military strikes against targets in Iran’s coastal regions resembling what Trump just contemplated doing.
The only reason this did not transpire in 1996, according to the then US Secretary of Defense William Perry, was because the US did not clearly establish whether Iran was beyond a shadow of a doubt the main culprit. Perry later became convinced that Al-Qaeda was in fact responsible.
In December 2011, a US RQ-170 Sentinel drone operated by the US military in Afghanistan accidentally strayed into Iranian airspace. Tehran captured it and gleefully displayed its new trophy.
The Obama administration did nothing in response and was criticized by former US Vice President Dick Cheney who insisted the US should have launched an airstrike to destroy the captured drone in order to prevent the Iranians examining its technology.
Tehran has since reverse-engineered that unmanned aircraft.
Unlike Thursday’s drone incident, however, the RQ-170 had most certainly strayed into Iranian airspace and therefore the US was not directly provoked to undertake any military response.
It is unclear what the US will ultimately do over the recent tanker attacks and the drone shoot-down. What is clear is that the stakes have not been this high in decades and another escalation by either side could prove lethally dangerous for the wider region.
