(With apologies to Jonathan Swift)
The US has issued a 15-point peace plan to Iran. Iran has sent a five-point reply. While their respective leaders are busy praying, 10 commandments for the attention of Maga-men have been issued on talk-radio, along with speaking notes.
1: When going to war with Iran, don’t tell the public, and your voters
They will believe you when you tell them it had to be kept secret. When you do tell them, dress casually, wear a baseball cap, and look as if you’d rather be in bed. True, you will have the lowest support ever recorded in US public opinion polls before starting a war, but they’ll come around when you win.
2: Don’t consult any of your allies properly, except Israel
Don’t consult the Gulf states, Iran’s neighbours, its immediate neighbours across the Persian Gulf and the straits of Hormuz, or your allies in Nato, because, after all, you despise them.
The advantage of not consulting your allies in advance is that you can later call for their naval help and ask them to put their sailors on the line, because things have become complicated.
Though they might drag their heels – even the Brits might – keep insulting your allies and imposing tariffs on them, because your last tariffs were declared unlawful by your handpicked court.
[ Israel and US accused of war crimes after striking civilian targets in IranOpens in new window ]
Also, threaten to annex the land of one of your Nato allies in the weeks beforehand: that will show the diplomats how these things are done.
3: Ignore the US constitution and international law
The US constitution requires Congress to authorise war, and international law forbids war on the territorial integrity of another state, unless authorised by the UN Security Council. In ignoring these laws, you would be following most recent US presidents: there’s very good precedent here, Mr President.
4. Make obviously false or contradictory claims to justify the war: it will confuse your allies and maybe the enemy
We all know it was false to claim that Iran posed an imminent military threat to the US. And also to claim that Iran posed any fresh imminent threat to Israel, the only state in the region with nuclear weapons – developed in secrecy, just like the Iranians have been attempting to do.
And we realise you were being cunning by claiming that Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity had been completely obliterated in the 12-day war in June – and then suggesting it needed to be completely obliterated again by February 28th. That fooled them all.
Iran’s ballistic missile programme was a real threat to its neighbours, but your pre-emptive war of choice immediately led Iran’s neighbours to experience that known threat even earlier. It just shows you were right!
5: Be different: be culpable for starting a war amid negotiations you have not formally ended, and then immediately demand ‘unconditional surrender’
It will be completely shocking to the enemy. Iranian soldiers, police, sailors and intelligence operatives will be asking themselves: to whom should we surrender? To US soldiers on the ground? To Israeli soldiers on the ground? Through Zoom – to pilots overhead? They will be mystified, and that will speed your victory, especially when there is no successor regime in place, or in waiting, when the war has hardly started, and, quite deliberately, no occupation plans have been announced.
6. Assassinate the other side’s leaders en masse, particularly if you really want to pull off a Venezuela-style operation, ie, to find a co-operative insider to run things – a Persian version of Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez
It has been known since June last year that the Iranian regime has arranged succession policies among its leadership at least three or four layers deep so it will be necessary to go through all those layers to find a Persian Delcy. It just can’t be helped, and Bibi wants to do it anyway.
Finding a Delcy of course aims at securing regime compliance, not regime change, but our practices will deepen the fog of war, a war which we need to win.
[ Nato allies must not save Donald Trump from himselfOpens in new window ]
When you announced the special military operation Mr President, you declared to the people of Iran, “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will probably be your only chance for generations.” That’s regime change – through self-help. Self-help, self-reliance, that’s the oldest American principle: it’s what made us great. We didn’t need the French to get rid of the Brits.
Never mind that Iranian clerics don’t treat women as equals – the potential Delcys will have watched that video and they will pick their moment to call you on a landline.
7. War is nature’s way of teaching Americans geography, so don’t consult the maps
The Straits of Hormuz are a known choke-point for Asian and European energy supplies. It does not take much to disrupt traffic through them. We need an excuse to send the Iranian navy to the ocean floor, even if they will use cheap drones to attack oil tankers. That will affect the world price of gas, and the stock market – which will provide excellent opportunities for insider trading. Long-term stock in Venezuelan oil will look even better.
Iran is big, super-bigly, twice the size of Texas, nearly four times the size of Iraq. And it’s a multiethnic empire, larger than the combined size of Germany, France, Spain and the UK. Indeed, it’s three-quarters of the size of Greenland, but without so much inconvenient ice – lower case ice.
Since we want the Iranian empire to collapse, an advance conference with the Kurds, Azeris, Baluchis, and Persian liberals is unnecessary. Like Iran’s neighbours, they prefer unplanned demolitions.
8. Mr President, don’t ask the Kurds to do anything for you: you have shrewdly betrayed them three times already, and previous US presidents have done likewise
Just weeks ago, you allowed the new Syrian regime, headed by a former al-Qaeda operative, to crush Kurdish hopes of an autonomous “Rojava”. What foresight. What amazing brio in strategic thinking.
In 2018, just after the same Kurds of Syria helped defeat Islamic State, you gave the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a green light to invade and expel Kurds from the canton of Afrin (Efrînê in Kurdish).
In 2017, your administration successfully co-operated with the Baghdad government, pro-Iranian Shia militia, and Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in their joint repression of the Kurds of Iraq just after they had voted in an independence referendum.
Yes, team Trump co-operated in pushing the Kurds out of the territories the US had been pleased to see them take when Islamic State was on the rampage. True, you later assassinated General Soleimani, because you could: that has kept the Persians on their toes, not sure on whose side you really are.
Previous US presidents have also betrayed the Kurds – Nixon in 1975, George HW Bush in 1991 – so Maga-men would not be the first to do so, but we can always go one better.
The Kurds couldn’t do it on their own, outside their own lands. Yes, it’s called Kurdistan. No, they’re not in the UN – more’s the pity. With luck, they could control four Kurdish-majority provinces in Iran, perhaps two with some ease, but they would need allies, and preparation, and, very smartly, these have not been arranged by Marco, our specialist in Latin American politics, who is perfectly suited for understanding the Middle East, and a useful fall guy.
9. Declare ‘I don’t have the yips to put boots on the ground’
The golfing jargon has really put the wind up them. The “yips” are for losers and chokers, those who miss an easy put, and don’t know how to cheat.
When you put marines and/or paratroopers onto Kharg Island, they will know what’s hit them. A hole in one.
Don’t let them know how long you intend to stay, but keep saying “three or four weeks” – it will create further market opportunities.
The Persian Gulf is about 600 miles (970km) in length. Astonishing beachfronts for hotels. But if you are going to occupy, I suspect you will need to plan some regime-change; yes, we know market forces are good, but only when we can easily manipulate them. Any such plan can’t include that Pahlavi prince who thinks he can be the “Shah of Shas”, and spend half his time in California – on that we all agree.
Democracy, federalism or confederalism, power-sharing, and human rights promotion, are not your shtick, and we’ll avoid all that. Getting a Delcy out of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards will be easier if you manage to control some of their oil supplies.
10. As a great power, always initiate a war at the behest of an unreliable ally
Remember those TV documentaries on the start of the first World War: don’t start a war unless it’s against your long-term strategic interests.
Let us not ask whether this is the US’s war or Israel’s war, or Netanyahu’s war. It is Trump’s war. But don’t worry, when the Democrats blame Israel and Netanyahu, our friends will call them anti-Semites and resume witch-hunts in universities which lack Maga professors. But we can also blame Netanyahu and Israel if things go wrong; it’s very smart to have it both ways.
After all, the annexation of southern Lebanon below the Litani river; parts of Syria beyond the Golan Heights; and further creeping annexation on the West Bank, are so obviously in US interests. Turning southern Lebanon into a mirror image of Gaza also serves “America First”, Mr President. It’s even in the Bible: Armageddon is somewhere in northern Israel, near southern Lebanon.
Brendan O’Leary is Lauder Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania