For the last few weeks, U.S. policy in Iran has been following a pattern reminiscent of the war it fought 15 years ago in Libya. That was the last time that the United States conducted an air war to change a regime in a large, oil-rich, and Muslim country.
If Iran continues to follow Libya’s pattern, then the world is in for long and dangerous days ahead. Now that the regime has survived the initial U.S. and Israeli salvo, Washington has no good options. Attacking civilian infrastructure, as U.S. President Donald Trump recently threatened to do, would end any chance of a pro-U.S. uprising in Tehran. Inserting ground forces to stem the attacks on energy markets would only compound the war’s cost. Finally, negotiating a cease-fire, while still the best choice available, would publicly confirm the limits of the Trump’s power at home and abroad.
For the last few weeks, U.S. policy in Iran has been following a pattern reminiscent of the war it fought 15 years ago in Libya. That was the last time that the United States conducted an air war to change a regime in a large, oil-rich, and Muslim country.
If Iran continues to follow Libya’s pattern, then the world is in for long and dangerous days ahead. Now that the regime has survived the initial U.S. and Israeli salvo, Washington has no good options. Attacking civilian infrastructure, as U.S. President Donald Trump recently threatened to do, would end any chance of a pro-U.S. uprising in Tehran. Inserting ground forces to stem the attacks on energy markets would only compound the war’s cost. Finally, negotiating a cease-fire, while still the best choice available, would publicly confirm the limits of the Trump’s power at home and abroad.
Amid the Arab uprisings of 2011, the world watched as Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi threatened to massacre civilians protesting in the populous city of Benghazi. U.S. President Barack Obama, urged on by France and the United Kingdom, decided to begin what would become a monthslong military campaign to prevent slaughter and oust the Qaddafi regime.
The intervention got off to a dramatic start on March 19, when allied aircraft and U.S. Tomahawks pounded Libya’s air defenses and destroyed the regime’s tanks outside of Benghazi. Within a few short days, Qaddafi’s military was flattened, NATO was galvanized, and the protesters were safe. But what was Washington supposed to do now?
Many U.S. and allied leaders, according to interviews I conducted, expected the regime to collapse under pressure. Instead, stalemate set in. Patrolling the skies above Libya, allied pilots looked down impotently on a country divided between Qaddafi and the rebels. NATO controlled the air but could do little about the civil war playing out on the ground.
Republicans in the U.S. Congress did not hesitate to criticize the plan’s lack of clear aims. “I and many other members of the House of Representatives are troubled that U.S. military resources were committed to war without clearly defining for the American people, the Congress, and our troops what the mission in Libya is,” wrote Republican House Speaker John Boehner.
Weeks soon turned to months. Frustrated and worried that the operation was losing steam, Washington and its allies added helicopters and expanded the list of targets. They began supporting the rebels more overtly from the sky and striking Qaddafi’s military command and control. But even then, the effect was minimal. There was only so much that they could do without bombing civilian infrastructure—a contradictory move given their aim was to support the citizens of Libya against the Qaddafi regime. Attempts to negotiate with Qaddafi also ran aground because he was unwilling to negotiate from a position of weakness and because he failed to grasp how dire his situation was. The war dragged on into May, June, and then July.
A similar pattern is now playing out in Iran. The U.S. military has demonstrated its extraordinary capacity to bludgeon the Iranian regime’s defenses, command, control, and infrastructure. Close to 8,000 targets have been struck from air, land, and sea—indicating a more far-reaching operation than in 2011, where some 6,000 targets were hit over the course of the entire war. But now, as back then, the theocracy in Tehran still limps on. The United States and Israel may control the air, but they will soon run out of meaningful military targets to attack. Then, the only option will be to carry out extensive strikes on civilian infrastructure, a move that would upend their aim of fomenting rebellion against the regime.
Iran shares similarities with Qaddafi’s Libya, but it also has important differences. Both countries are territorially large, oil-rich, well-educated, and Muslim. Both have bad relations with their neighbors. In 2011, the Gulf Cooperation Council, in fact, backed the attack on Qaddafi—a sign that the animosity between the Gulf states and Libya was as deep as it is with Iran today.
Iran has a much larger population than Libya, however, and its regime is legitimized by faith as opposed to Qaddafi’s personalistic autocracy. This factor may strengthen Tehran comparatively, despite its brutal repressions. In Libya, the United States acted at the behest of many allies—letting them take the lead—whereas in Iran, the Trump administration works mainly with one ally and remains in the military lead.
Perhaps the biggest difference between Iran and Libya is that in Libya, the United States fought in support of an armed revolt against the Libyan regime. There is no such revolt in Iran and no evidence that one is emerging. Generating one will be hard—not least because the Iranian people have the sad example of Libya’s fate to give them pause about rising up. And in Libya’s case, the revolt had already begun when the bombs started dropping. This means Iran is far more difficult.
In Libya, the war finally, and suddenly, changed course when rebel troops captured Tripoli in August. The rebels had advanced with the help of special operators from the Gulf states, who had been training them in the mountains of neighboring Tunisia. The capture of Libya’s capital boosted support for the war around the world, but Qaddafi was nowhere to be found. And so, the war continued.
For months, there had been little left of military value to attack from the air. The only hope for ending the war was that the rebels would somehow prevail. Another two months passed, with NATO still in control of the air but uncertainty on the ground.
Then, in October, seven months after the start of NATO-led military operations in Libya, Qaddafi was located in his hometown of Sirte. Rebels descended on his location, executing him as he tried to escape. Qaddafi’s demise gave Obama the chance to declare the operation successful and shut it down.
What followed is not a happy story, however. Success in killing Qaddafi did not prevent the failure of the Libyan state. The United States and its allies declined to deploy ground forces. Doing so might have given the country a chance of lasting stability, but Obama’s choice was understandable given the epic struggles that were underway to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan at the time. Without a large postwar stabilization force when the regime was eliminated, Libya faced an intractable security problem as the armed factions that had risen up to overthrow Qaddafi eyed each other warily. The result was civil war, chaos, terrorism, and a flood of migrants to Europe.
This is not to say that the same thing will necessarily transpire in Iran. But the Libyan case is a reminder of the diminishing returns of military force, especially airpower. Libya is also a reminder of the difficult choices the United States is facing now in Iran, where the Trump administration appears to be simultaneously considering options as divergent as declaring victory and deploying ground forces.
So, what’s likely to happen next? In the near future, Iran may well remain a stalemate, as the United States and Israel continue to strike while Iran targets tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. The pressure on world energy supplies could make the White House think hard about sending in troops. The U.S. military could no doubt capture Iranian territory such as Kharg Island or parts of the Iranian coastline along the Strait of Hormuz. It might even attempt something more ambitious, such as seizing Iran’s nuclear sites.
But taking territory, however dramatic, is no guarantee that the war would end. Even if a limited U.S. occupation impeded Iran’s ability to strike oil shipments, it would simply usher in a new phase in the conflict, just as the capture of Tripoli did in August 2011. The United States would hold a piece of Iran, the risk to energy markets would decline but not end, and the regime in Tehran would live on.
And what if Trump simply declares victory and leaves? From one perspective, this is an obvious choice. But here, Trump faces the same quandary that Obama faced after destroying Libya’s air defenses in 2011; quitting a war that you are winning militarily feels counterintuitive and unsatisfying. Trump said as much in recent comments. If he does go this route, recent history suggests that he will seek to distract attention from it by creating a crisis elsewhere. There is no shortage of places on the menu to choose from, including Cuba, Greenland, Canada, and the United States itself.
Declaring victory now may be the best of a bad set of options. But even a cease-fire does not promise to end the war for good—only to pause it. After everything that has already happened, the diplomatic path back toward any modicum of lasting stability between the United States and Iran will be extremely arduous.
Unfortunately, absent a powerful and legitimate replacement, the collapse of the regime in Tehran would mean that Iran really starts to look like Libya—insecure, prey to interference from its neighbors, and descending into chaos. Libya reminds us that eliminating a regime is very hard, can take far longer than anticipated, and, even when successful, does not guarantee anything better.
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