OPINION:
I first heard the phrase “mowing the grass” years ago in Tel Aviv during a meeting with Israeli intelligence officers.
I was serving as director of the CIA’s Near East Division. The Israelis used the metaphor to describe their periodic attacks on Hamas and other terrorists in the Gaza Strip.
Unable to create the conditions for a permanent political solution, the Israeli government’s objective was to destroy the terrorists’ capacity to conduct attacks for a period of time, after which the Israel Defense Forces would need to return to “mow the grass” again.
Those periodic strikes on Gaza might be a microcosm of the massive damage the U.S. and Israel are inflicting on Iran.
Together, the U.S. and Israeli militaries have achieved extraordinary tactical success in destroying Iran’s air defenses: ballistic missiles and launchers and drone inventories. The U.S. has sunk more than 60 Iranian ships, rendering Iran’s navy combat ineffective. The U.S. and Israel decapitated Iran’s leadership, including its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, military and intelligence officers.
Intelligence has been at the core of the U.S. and Israeli precision military strikes, which rely on clandestine human sources, signals intelligence and overhead reconnaissance.
The Trump administration deployed a massive buildup of military assets in the Middle East designed to induce Iran to enter into negotiations in good faith, but Iran refused.
Left with the option of withdrawing U.S. military assets without a deal and with Iran’s military intact, the Trump administration and Israel chose to enforce their red line with an extensive and ongoing air campaign. The objectives of the campaign are to eliminate Iran’s ballistic missile and drone inventory, sink its navy, eliminate senior security officials, and destroy whatever is left of its nuclear program.
Faced with a “use it or lose it” scenario for its missile and drone inventories, Iran has launched thousands of strikes against U.S. regional allies. These are designed to drive up oil prices and inflict economic harm in the region by hitting soft targets, including oil refineries and desalination plants, while forcing the Strait of Hormuz to remain closed.
A long-term strategy to quash Iran’s threat to the region and beyond remains elusive.
Iran’s hard-liners have a high threshold for pain, especially when it comes to their fellow countrymen, on whom they inflict the most barbaric human rights abuses.
Diverting scarce resources to fund regional proxy terrorists and build a powerful military industrial complex, the Iranian regime has never shown any concern for the collateral damage it has caused to Iran’s economy, including the resulting free fall of Iran’s currency and severe water shortage.
Iran’s selection as supreme leader of Khamenei’s second son, Mojtaba, who is close to the hard-liners, is a harbinger of its commitment to carrying on the fight. The new leader is waging an existential war against the U.S. and Israel. His objective is to survive the U.S. and Israeli onslaught with enough of his security forces intact to rebuild over time, whatever our military destroys.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe is no doubt trying to determine whether internecine rivalries within the IRGC might result in a split that the U.S. could exploit to strike a deal. The CIA has likely advised President Trump that an air campaign alone would be highly unlikely to induce regime change or a change in the regime’s behavior.
The CIA is also most probably engaged in behind-the-scenes outreach to Iranian officials to open a clandestine dialogue about a potential way forward.
Ideally, the Trump administration would achieve its strategic objective by striking a deal with whatever remains of the current regime or a new one, whereby we reduce or eliminate sanctions in return for Iran’s verifiable agreement to end its ballistic missile and nuclear programs while halting support to proxy terrorists.
Yet the 100,000-man strong IRGC and the Basij paramilitary militia show no signs of surrendering, even if Iran is bombed into oblivion.
If the Trump administration decides that the U.S. and Israel have sufficiently destroyed Iran’s military and nuclear capabilities, but the regime has not changed its behavior, ending the air campaign will carry with it the risk that our forces will need to return down the road to “mow the grass” again.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. He can be reached at danielhoffman@yahoo.com.
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