Wounded and armed only with his service pistol, the US Air Force colonel began climbing a 7,000-foot ridgeline to signal for help. His aircraft, an F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet – call sign “Dude 44” – had been shot down over Iran on Friday (3 April). The pilot was swiftly rescued, but the weapons system officer was left stranded deep inside Iranian territory as both the US and Iranian forces raced to find him. Iranian state television announced a “precious prize” for anyone who could capture the missing airman alive.
Over the next 48 hours, the weapons officer concealed himself inside a crevice in the mountains, limiting the use of his emergency beacon in case it was picked up by the Iranian forces hunting for him. With an Iranian search party reportedly converging on the mountain, the CIA eventually located his hiding place and began a deception operation to try to convince the Iranians that he had already been found and was being transported out of the country by road. US bombers and drones attacked suspected Iranian forces approaching the area while a special operations force led by the US Navy’s SEAL Team Six, the same unit that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, mounted a complex rescue operation, finally reaching the stranded airman by helicopter.
Even then, there was another twist. The wheels of the two heavy C-130 aircraft waiting at a remote airstrip within Iran to transport them out of the country got stuck, and three more aircraft had to be sent in to rescue them. When they finally cleared Iranian airspace Donald Trump announced the news in a triumphant social media post in the early hours of 5 April. “WE GOT HIM!” the US president wrote, praising “one of the most daring Search and Rescue Operations in U.S. History” and declaring that the weapons officer, while injured, would be “just fine.” Trump pronounced the operation an “Easter Miracle.”
The extraordinary rescue, surely fated to become a Hollywood movie, seems only to have emboldened Trump. Roughly eight hours after announcing the success of the mission, the president delivered a profane threat, also on social media, calling on Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” Trump wrote. In another post he set a deadline of 8pm, US eastern time, on Tuesday (7 April) for Iran to comply with his increasingly shrill threats, including bombing the country “back to the stone age” by targeting its power plants, bridges, and water supply, which would almost certainly constitute a war crime.
Tehran, too, seems to have been emboldened by its ability to shoot down an American aircraft, defying Trump’s repeated insistence that Iran’s military capabilities have been “obliterated”. On 6 April, the Iranian regime reportedly submitted a proposal, via Pakistan, for a “permanent end to the war in line with Iran’s considerations” that would include lifting all US sanctions. Trump dismissed the proposal a few hours later as a “significant step” but “not good enough.”
The danger is that Trump’s experience with the use of force thus far has taught him the perilous lesson that choosing escalation – and placing his trust in the formidable capabilities of the US military – delivers impressive results that reflect well on his presidency. He has boasted about watching the raid to capture Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro in January as though it was “a television show,” telling reporters, “if you would’ve seen the speed, the violence – it was an amazing thing.” The weekend’s events will surely only have reinforced his conviction that there is nothing that US military power cannot achieve.
Another leader might have drawn very different conclusions from the two operations. During the Maduro raid, for instance, one of the lead US helicopters was hit by machine gun fire as it approached the president’s compound in Caracas, seriously wounding the pilot, but he managed to keep control of the aircraft and make it back to an American aircraft carrier waiting off the coast. The margin between what was celebrated as a resounding military success and a potential disaster, that could have seen a US helicopter downed, perhaps the capture of its crew, and the failure of the mission, rested on the trajectory of those bullets and the actions of a single pilot.
Similarly, in Iran, the downing of an American fighter jet, the desperate search for its crew, and the loss of multiple US aircraft during the subsequent rescue mission, might have instilled in another president a sobering lesson about how close they had come to the loss of many American lives and the remaining capabilities of the Iranian military to hit back, despite their degraded capabilities. Yet Trump shows no sign of being daunted.
Perhaps he will extend the deadline for his ultimatum to Tehran to capitulate once again, as he has done several times already. But it seems just as likely that Trump will choose escalation, buoyed by his past experience of deploying military force, which has metastasised from ordering isolated, lethal strikes during his first term, to increasingly ambitious military operations during first 12 months back in power and now full-scale war with Iran. The problem is that the most immediate issue he currently confronts – the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the looming global economic crisis this portends – cannot be solved by military force alone.
If the Iranian regime declines Trump’s offer to surrender, he may well succeed in decimating large areas of the country from the air and inflicting even more suffering on the civilians he once claimed to be preparing to liberate, but he could also become the latest American leader to learn the limits of what air power can deliver. Despite the demonstrable capabilities of the world’s most powerful military, and the daring rescue they pulled off this past weekend, there is only so much that force alone can achieve in the absence of a coherent strategy.
Celebrating the success of what he called “one of the largest, most complex, most harrowing combat searches” in a press conference at the White House on 6 April, Trump appeared to revel in reiterating the details of the mission. Then he repeated his ultimatum to Tehran. “The entire country can be taken out in one night,” Trump said, “and that night might be tomorrow night.”
[Further reading: “War is peace” in Donald Trump’s America]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment