Movie
POST 1189
I’m writing in the hours following the U.S. attack on Iranian nuclear and missile facilities and the Iranian response of their announced-in-advance missile attack on the vast U.S. military facility in Qatar. There will surely be more surprises to come, engineered by one of the world’s most awful regimes and more surprises from the other of the world’s most awful regimes. We wait for shoes to drop.
Let’s set aside the typical Trumpian stupidities:
“We’re not at war with Iran; we’re at war with Iran’s nuclear facilities.”
His bombastic claims: “We obliterated their nuclear facilities,” which bomb damage assessment experts have shown to be false.
The idiotic flip-flopping denials: “We’re not after regime change,” then “Make Iran Great Again” through “regime change.”
Let’s instead have a look at serious issues that serious minded leaders would commonly contemplate seriously with advice from serious minded advisors. Not that such advice might be seriously considered by Trump.
Whether you think the attack on Iran was the right thing to do or you see a blisteringly dumb move that is a probable prelude to something very bad happening, that attack will have many consequences.
It isn’t at all likely that, having taken a public drubbing, Iran will let go of its hostilities and go all golden retriever puppy with love for the twin devils, Israel and the U.S. They will want to hit back and are far more likely to be willing to make war than negotiate. It’s about venting rage and proving how tough they are.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is 86 years old and is not politically strong. He’s already offered recommendations for a successor, including his son, which further complicates the possibility of negotiations and the calculus of predicting what actions that country may take. We’ll leave that speculation to our well informed intelligence people, sadly led by second-raters who owe their suck-up jobs to Trump patronage. Trump will ignore all of them.
What we know is that saving face is critically important to this Iranian regime and to the culture of the country. Nobody reacts well to humiliation and even Khamenei’s detractors in the streets of Tehran will want to hit back, especially because for them this is a holy war. Did anyone at the White House, the Defense, State, Homeland Security or the Intelligence Departments consider what would happen on Day 2?
You know this from at least as far back as Colin Powell invoking the Pottery Barn rule about war: You break it, you own it. And now we own this one.
Here are just a few examples of how the Iranians might strike back.
- Physics and chemistry tell us that their 60% enriched uranium cannot be used as is to make a traditional nuclear bomb. But it can be used to make dirty bombs – common explosives laced with radiologically hot material. They could smuggle IEDs or bombs into any country and detonate them in crowded cities. Use your imagination to identify which places would be near the top of their hit list. Dirty bombs don’t have nearly the explosive power of nuclear bombs, but they can make a huge radius of land uninhabitable for hundreds of years.
- If they have sleeper cells in the U.S., they can be activated to do damage to us physically and psychologically. If you think we distrust one another now, just wait until Iranian sabotage has occurred in the U.S., some Americans have been killed and you’re suspecting every stranger you see of being a murderer.
- They can mine the Strait of Hormuz (see these maps) to shut down shipping of gas, oil and other goods. 20% of global petroleum output travels that narrow stretch of water and shutting it down will drive up oil prices globally and likely tank Trump’s economic agenda.
- They can attack U.S. forces in the area, as they did in their retaliatory attack in Qatar on Monday. Given that no substantial damage was done, this was likely intended solely for domestic consumption, a public beating of chests and a saving of face. That may likely prove to be a self-destructive action, but proud, angry people might dismiss the cost to themselves and approve yet more attacks.
- They can fire barrages of missiles and drones at Israel, assuming they still have substantial stockpiles.
- They can task their tech geniuses to create destructive cyber attacks that disrupt our power grids, businesses, defense capabilities and more.
If they did any of those things, what would our U.S. dictator wannabe do? He’s an amoral, irrational and self-serving narcissist whose mania requires that he be seen as strong, most strongly, and always right. He would insist that any Iranian aggression be countered massively. Bigly. Like nothing anyone has ever seen. There aren’t too many choices available for an all-about-me tyrant trying to show that he can pee higher on the fire hydrant than the other dog.
- He could order massive bombing of all Iranian infrastructure. “Bomb ’em back to the stone age” was a very popular phrase after 911, when our proud, angry people wanted retribution. So was Sen. John McCain’s “Bomb, bomb, bomb – bomb, bomb Iran” in 2008, wanting for us to show the world what tough guys we were.
- Trump could order 300,000 – maybe 500,000 – troops to invade Iran. That will be a forever war that will kill hundreds of thousands of people, including tens of thousands of our military men and women. We will build an Iran War Memorial on the National Mall. Trump will get to play wartime president to burnish his orange ego. But critically, he will ignore the flag draped caskets carrying suckers and losers, as they arrive at Dover, DE.
It doesn’t appear that anyone is considering what comes next, most dangerously, the President.
Will Russia, China and North Korea supply Iran with war matériel and scientific know how? If they do, what will we do?
If we learn that we didn’t “obliterate” Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities (we didn’t), will Trump order more bombings?
Given their stockpiles of enriched uranium and scientific know how, if Iran continues to refuse to negotiate, what will we do? What will Israel do? What might Iran do?
What will we do to win hearts and minds of Iranians? We weren’t too good at that in Iraq or Afghanistan.
We’ve seen this movie before. We know the plot and that it takes decades to end this bad movie. It will cost thousands of lives and massive treasure that creates trillions of dollars of debt that will never be paid off.
Trump will be long gone when the reality of his ever-expanding war dawns on us. By then there will be someone else in the White House to blame for his war folly. Just like when Dubya was gone and Obama and Biden took the heat for exiting his Iraq and Afghanistan war failures.
Like I said, we’ve seen this movie before. The question for us now is whether we remember the lessons of that movie before a lot of people get killed and whether Congress has the backbone to dial down the madness. Indeed, have we learned anything at all?
From his post on Monday, When Incompetence Goes To War, Dan Rather, with his many decades of reporting and his experience in too many wars, gets the last word.
Truth IS the first casualty of war.
The first things you hear often are untrue, and so are many of the things you hear later.
Wars are by their very nature chaotic and unpredictable. What you most expect frequently does not happen; what you least expect often does.
Up close and personal, wars are almost unbelievably savage. The television screen and the printed word do not come close to conveying their harsh realities.
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