...it was a mistake

So just the other day we were talking about the...whatever the fuck the Trumpkins are doing in the Persian Gulf that's not-a-war.

(Here's Mike "My Balls Are In A Drawer In The Resolute Desk" Johnson today: "We're not at war, we have no intention, we have no intention at being at war. The president and the Department of Defense have made it very clear, this is a limited operation.". So it's a "limited operation"? A "punitive expedition"? A cabinet war...no, it's not! It's not a war! IT'S NOT A WAR!

Not a war. Are we clear on that now?)

Sure. Okay.

Anyway, the historical examples we discussed as looking real similar to whatever-this-is included Libya and Syria because 1) the U.S. part of those wars was largely limited to airstrikes, and because of that 2) they largely just resulted in dead and maimed people and blown up buildings and destroyed military things like tanks and aircraft, leaving behind nothing but chaotic failed states that served principally to spread disorder and violence to nearby parts of North Africa and the Levant.

Now.

Just having soldiers to occupy the targeted polities doesn't promise success, either; Iraq is the test case for how you can send a bunch of guys to walk around with weapons and still have no fucking clue how to use them effectively.

But experience (and common sense) would suggest that if the actual end state for - let's us at least be honest and call it what it is- the Fourth Gulf War is something other than "chaotic failed state" someone's are going to have to actually go into Iran and make claim to the actual physical ground, buildings, animals, and people. In war, as in any tort, possession is nine-tenths of the Law, and infantry are the bailiff's men.

Do any of these wanna-be Iran filibusterers wandering around the blanket fort at Mar-a-Lago have a plan for that?

Well...supposedly the spooks at the CIA do:

"The CIA is working to arm Kurdish forces with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in Iran, multiple people familiar with the plan told CNN. The Trump administration has been in active discussions with Iranian opposition groups and Kurdish leaders in Iraq about providing them with military support, the sources said."

If so, then we're out of Libyan territory and closer to Syria, where the anti-Assad rebellion included Kurdish soldiers aligned with the U.S. (who were then abandoned by the U.S. when they became inconvenient to U.S.-Turkish relations, so I'm not sure they'd be the right people to ask about this cunning CIA plan).

What this Kurdish Free Iranian Army idea reminds me more than anything else is the early stages of the Afghanistan incursion, when the idea was to "go in light", using only U.S. Special Forces to augment the "Northern Alliance", an outfit largely made up of - as the name says - the northern tribes in Afghanistan; Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras.

Which wouldn't have been a problem, except for that the largest, most influential, and traditionally most powerful group in Afghanistan has always been the traditional rivals of those groups, the Pashtun, who also comprised the bulk of the Taliban that were the target of the 2001 invasion.

Enlisting the northern tribes meant that even after the Taliban was driven out of the major cities into the mountains of the Afghan southeast the locals who remained behind, the population that the U.S.-led occupying force and the Afghan regime it supported, were mostly Pashtun and were unlikely to cozy up to these damn outsiders. Afghanistan might be the most extreme form of "me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the outsider" kind of clannishness.

So if the Pashtun didn't rally to the government in Kabul - and they largely didn't, for a number of reasons but tribal loyalties being a major part of them - the chance of getting far enough ahead of the Taliban counter-occupation insurgency was slim, at best.

We know how that worked out.

What's the story in Iran? What would sending a Kurdish proxy force into Tehran look like?

Here's a Reader's Digest version of the ethnic makeup of modern Iran: 

Pre-modern Iran was known a "Persia", and the people who lived and live there are Farsi-speaking Indo-Europeans (closely related to Afghanistan's Tajiks, in fact). "Persians" are about 60% of the population of the modern country.

The second-largest group of people are Azerbaijanis, a Turkic-related , that make somewhere between 15% and 20% of the country. The Kurds are about 10%, and there's a couple of percent of various smaller groups like "Lurs", Baluchis, Turks, and Arabs.

What does that mean for a Kurdish "Western Alliance" on the ground in Iran?

Not much good.

 A Iranian Kurdish-led ground force wouldn't be much different to the rest of Iran than an Iraqi or, for that matter, a Saudi or Jordanian army. Or how a bunch of Tajiks or Hazaras walking around Pashtun territory were in Afghanistan. 

They'd be outsiders.

 

And we've been there and done that, and seen how that fucking went.

"Ils n'ont rien appris, ni rien oublie'" 

Worse than a crime...

I don't really have much to add about the Fourth Gulf War to what all of you probably know by now.

Unless the U.S. and/or Israel can convince some sort of alliance of Middle Eastern allies - or, if they're really insane, on their own - to invade and occupy Iran there is...well, perhaps not "no chance", but a infinitesimally tiny chance that this latest round of killing people and breaking shit in Southwest Asia will leave the region more peaceful, less violent, and better governed that it was before the missiles and drones began exploding.

Remember "we" (in the sense of "the Bush claque of imperialists, isolationists, filibusterers, and nitwits") already tried that in Iraq, a much smaller and less turbulent polity. 

It was an utter, bloodyhanded failure.

Afghanistan?

Same.

How about the other Middle Eastern countries that Israeli, or some mixture of the U.S/Israeli/Western Europe has tried to bomb (or at least claimed to be bombing) into liberal democracy?

Libya?

That's enough to make a cat laugh. 

From a post right here seven years ago:

"Well...that didn't work out very well. Libya has, since 2011, devolved into a semi- (or completely, depending on your definition) failed state. So far as I can tell there is a "government" in the old capital of Tripoli, but this "government" is, in most parts of the country, purely notional and those parts are in the best post-colonial, post-dictatorial tradition swarming with outlaws, rebels, armed insurgents, rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists."

Syria?

G'wan. Pull the other one. 

From this post, also seven years ago:

 "Update 10/14: What a fucking shitshow:

"Rarely has a presidential decision resulted so immediately in what his own party leaders have described as disastrous consequences for American allies and interests. How this decision happened — springing from an “off-script moment” with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, in the words of a senior American diplomat — likely will be debated for years by historians, Middle East experts and conspiracy theorists.

But this much already is clear: Mr. Trump ignored months of warnings from his advisers about what calamities likely would ensue if he followed his instincts to pull back from Syria and abandon America’s longtime allies, the Kurds. He had no Plan B, other than to leave. The only surprise is how swiftly it all collapsed around the president and his depleted, inexperienced foreign policy team."

Stable genius!

Update 10/16: Sweet Holy Jesus Fucking Roosevelt Christ, get the fucking net!

"Syria may have some help with Russia, and that’s fine. It’s a lot of sand. They’ve got a lot of sand over there. So there’s a lot of sand that they can play with."

What the...what the actual fuck..?

One thing I think is important is not to overestimate the rock-bottom level of Orange Foolius' actual understanding. I don't know much about the topography and geography of Syria, but right off the top of my head I don't think there really IS a "lot of sand over there". The deserty parts of eastern Syria are mostly rocky desert (the Hamad) or bare soil (the Homs desert).

But here's the thing; when this simple fucker hears "Arab" he probably really does think "Ahab, the A-rab, Sheik of the Burnin' Sands".

Seriously.

It's like having a really simple ten-year-old as a president.

Jesus wept."

So far as I know there has never been a successful internal "regime change" from a use of military force that didn't include physical invasion and occupation of the targeted nation. 

The closest anyone has come might be the 1954 Guatemala coup which was primarily accomplished by psyops and an almost-comic air "campaign" which included bizarro stuff like lobbing pop bottles from the aircraft because they made a loud noise when they broke.

But even that mess - which, remember, resulted in the assassination of the U.S.-installed caudillo and a decades-long, savage civil war - required a notional opposition invasion army to make it stick. 

And, as the specific Libya and Syria and Guatemala coup examples make the case in general, the usual result of the flyby shootings is just more chaos. Civil war, as often as not. Often dragging in neighboring states and factions.

Just as in Iraq, Iran is a polity with little or no experience, and little or no internal frameworks, for peaceful democratic governance. There's no Washington, or even a Mandela or Gandhi, to walk the people and nation from autocracy to democracy and the rule of law. There's not even a U.S.-backed potential caudillo in the wings. Not even one of the sad-act Chalabi variety.

But that's kind of the point here, at least from the U.S. citizen's view.

It's difficult to tell from the outside whether the pointlessness of the death and destruction in Iran and the surrounding area is because the Trumpkins don't actually understand this, or whether they just don't care.

Many of the people now in power in D.C. - Republicans, and particularly the Trump clique - are deeply stupid. Many of them, although not always the same people, are profoundly ignorant. A large number are implacably captive to irrational, illogical, or magical thinking, ranging from supply-side economics to Christiantist theocracy to pure Trump-Love Derangement Syndrome.

So it's entirely possible that there literally is no reason for all this beyond gullibility, short-term anger, greed, and stupidity.

Or it's possible that there's a "plan", but one, since it almost has to have been devised by the combination of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision that drives damn near all that passes for "policy" in the Second Trump Administration, that is based on nothing but some bizarre combination of credulity and ignorance. 

It's worse than a crime. It's a mistake.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope that somewhere in the U.S. government there's an actual cunning plan for this war. I'm not real hopeful, mind you; these are the same idiots who keep insisting that what the U.S. domestic economy needs is more 1890-style McKinleynomics. The bar is pretty fucking low for these goobers.

But that's all the hope I've got.

Short of a successful decapitation strike on Mar-a-Lago, We the People are stuck in the audience for this Trumpian GOP shitshow, replaying all the Dick n' Dubya's Greatest Hits only without the attempt to make them sound sensible to the normies.

In the words of a different Frenchman:

"Ils n'ont rien appris, ni rien oublie'"

 "They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing."

"That's what we're talking about. We're not talking about vast wealth. We're talking about sand and death."
~ Donald Trump on the Middle East, 2019.