The official lies that undergird low-intensity warfare are wearing thin as Tehran challenges the underlying assumptions of the doctrine, write Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies.
Satellite imagery of black smoke rising from the Port of Salalah on March 13, 2026 during Iranian strikes on Oman. (CC BY 4.0 /Wikimedia Commons)
If it holds, it could mark the beginning of a transition away from the doctrine of “low-intensity conflict” that has shaped U.S. foreign policy for decades.
Talks between the U.S., Iran, Pakistan and Qatar began in Switzerland on June 21. But Iran was firm that it holds the United States responsible for Israel’s violations of the U.S.-Iran memorandum and cannot move forward with other parts of the agreement until the U.S. fulfills its part in Article 1, which requires an actual Israeli ceasefire and withdrawal from Lebanon
If the memorandum agreed between Iran and the United States fails, the world will be left with vastly reduced oil and gas supplies and a regional war among Iran, Israel and the United States from Lebanon to the Persian Gulf.
This entire crisis is one more devastating result of the world community’s failure to tame Israel’s war crimes and genocide or end its illegal occupation of Palestine and attacks and invasions in neighboring countries — all of which the United States continues to enable and support through its military and diplomatic alliance and arming of the Israeli military.
Funeral in Tyre, Lebanon, for a deceased Hezbollah fighter on April 21. (Megaphone News English/Wikimedai Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)
President Donald Trump seems to understand the rapidly deteriorating position of the U.S. and Israel, and to recognize that his own political future now depends on extricating the U.S. from the war on Iran that he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cooked up. Voices of peace from around the world support the tentative ceasefire extension and oppose efforts to sabotage it by politicians in Washington and Tel Aviv.
But to understand the roots of this crisis in U.S. foreign policy, we have to look back. Since the 1980s, aggressive U.S. foreign policy has dragged the Middle East and much of the world into a state that U.S. military planners call “low-intensity conflict” or “LIC.”
Under this doctrine, the United States, and now its protégé Israel, claim the freedom of action to use military force in flagrant and widespread violation of international law, while deterring the rest of the world from mustering the political will to enforce the law or hold them accountable.
The U.S. doctrine of low-intensity conflict was a deliberate policy choice by the Reagan administration in the 1980s, after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam.
After President George Bush II and Vice President Dick Cheney’s catastrophic full-scale U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Presidents Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden reverted to low-intensity warfare, but globally expanded its scope.
Following Imperial Britain
Lieutenant General Sir George Erskine, commander-in-chief, East Africa Command, in Kenya observing operations against the Mau Mau. (MOD, Imperial War Museums, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
This U.S. choice to expand low-intensity warfare followed the example and the techniques of the British Empire in its final phase in the 1950s.
From the Suez Crisis to guerrilla war against communist revolutionaries in Malaya and Mau Mau torture camps in Kenya, the deliberate and deadly violence of Britain’s imperial policies was hidden from its own people and the world behind a tapestry of lies.
In 1989, Michael Klare and Peter Kornbluh edited a book titled Low-Intensity Warfare: How the U.S.A Fights Wars Without Declaring Them.
They wrote that the official description of low-intensity warfare was deliberately broad and ambiguous, embracing drug interdiction in Bolivia; the occupation of Beirut; the invasion of Grenada; the airstrikes on Libya in 1986; as well as covert “special operations,” “special activities” and “unconventional warfare.”
They concluded that low-intensity conflict was in fact
“a strategic reorientation of the U.S. military establishment, and renewed commitment to employ force in a global crusade against Third World revolutionary movements and governments.”
Today’s nominal but false ceasefires in Gaza, Lebanon and the Persian Gulf fit squarely within that doctrine. They allow the U.S. and Israel to continue illegal uses of force while appearing to respond to international demands for negotiations and diplomacy.
But the U.S. involvement in low-intensity conflict today is not limited to the Middle East.
It also encompasses the proxy war on Russia centered in Ukraine; the savage, deadly siege of Cuba; U.S. and Western piracy on the high seas; the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his wife; and economic and financial coercive measures or “sanctions” that impact about 40 countries.
Wall of Remembrance of Ukrainian soldiers killed in the Russo-Ukrainian War, January 2025. (Estonian Foreign Ministry /Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0)
Today’s low-intensity warfare also includes deploying U.S. special operations forces in up to 140 countries. Since 2001, U.S. special operations forces claim to have suffered 40 percent of all U.S. military casualties, including many of the 8,492 American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Concentrating such a large share of U.S. war casualties in such a small force — about 70,000 men and women at any one time — helps to give most American families the illusion of living in peace, even as the United States projects military force across the world and kills thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of people abroad.
The doctrine of low-intensity warfare depends on a fundamental assumption: that the countries targeted by the United States and its allies will remain too weak, too isolated, or too divided to effectively resist. But that assumption is increasingly being tested.
Iran has made great strides in developing effective military defenses and demonstrating to shocked U.S. and Israeli officials that it can now defend itself. But the deadly results of false ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon stand as concrete evidence that Israel and the United States still favor low-intensity warfare over real peace.
Even as Trump presents himself as a peacemaker, he remains committed to funding an enormous war machine that can ratchet the intensity of military and covert operations up and down in different parts of the world as it adjusts to new forms of resistance and responds to fluctuating international diplomatic pressures.
Trump signing a memorandum of understanding with Iran at the Palace of Versailles on June 17, French President Emmanuel Macron on right, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on left, standing. (White House / Daniel Torok)
But the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza opened the eyes of a new generation of people all over the world to the reality of U.S. imperialism. The official lies that undergird low-intensity warfare are wearing dangerously thin. People are no longer swallowing the false narratives of U.S. and Western politicians and establishment media.
U.S. political, military, and business leaders face a crisis of credibility and legitimacy that only grows as they take off the gloves and ratchet up the intensity of these campaigns, from escalating the war on Russia and the brutal blockade of Cuba to murdering innocent fishermen and ferry passengers in the Caribbean and Pacific and threatening traditional allies like Canada and Denmark.
In the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the negotiations to end it, we are witnessing a serious effort by an attacked country to stand up to the bullies, redress the imbalance of power, and uphold international law.
Whatever one thinks of the Iranian government, Iran’s pursuit of a durable peace based on sovereignty, security, and international law deserves the support of governments and people around the world, including Americans.
This moment could become a critical turning point in reining in U.S. aggression and Israeli regional expansion. It could even give humanity a chance to end this cycle of endless war and begin working together to address the existential crises threatening the world in the 21st century.
As the people of the United States commemorate the 250th anniversary of its founding, and the violence of the U.S. empire comes home to attack us and our neighbors in our own homes and streets, we should find common cause with, and learn from, our neighbors around the world who have been resisting U.S. imperial violence for generations.
It is ultimately up to us to take our future in our own hands and begin the essential transition from empire to democracy.
That is why CODEPINK is calling for a Summer of Peace and Love, a time to reject fear, militarism and empire, and to organize our communities around the simple but radical demand that our country stop making war on the world and start investing in life.
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace. She is the co-author, with Nicolas J.S. Davies, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022. Other books include, Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran (2018); Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection (2016); Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (2013); Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart (1989), and with Jodie Evans, Stop the Next War Now (2005).
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist and a researcher with CODEPINK. He is the co-author, with Medea Benjamin, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
No comments:
Post a Comment