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?
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."
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.Stable genius!
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."
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.
I think the Libya example is a good comparison - not perfect, obviously, there was an actual rebel ground force to support in Libya to take territory, which predictably fell apart once Qaddafi was gone.
ReplyDeleteBut the lesson that you highlight with that and many other examples is that it's really difficult to control outcomes from the chaos of war, and that is doubly true when only airpower is involved.
In terms of strategy and war goals, Trump has been all over the map - it's clear that, like everything with Trump, it's all pretextual. The justifications will come after the fact, whatever narrative makes Trump look best.
But I think the true hidden goal is that this is a punitive expedition. I think the actual goal is to just destroy, as much as possible, Iran's government, its military, and its ballistic and nuclear industrial base. There is an old rule of thumb in the intelligence world: Threat = Intent + Capability. This is a campaign intented, IMO, to go after capabilities and once Trump thinks the conflict doesn't benefit him anymore, he'll declare victory and end it.
In a sense it will be like Libya where we wash our hands of any aftermath and if the aftermath is bad (and bad is by far the most likely scenario) then the whole thing will be never spoken of again, just as the supporters of the Libya expedition take great pains to never talk about that mistake.
I think the people who will suffer the most are Iranians. The two most likely scenarios, IMO, are a continuation of the current regime, just like Hamas and Hezbollah have endured. The second most likely scenario is civil war in which case it likely won't be the liberal democratic forces that win, but whoever has the most guns and is the most brutal.
WASF
Yep. That was the point of bringing Libya in at the top of the list, because I see both the geopolitical/military situation of the current war in Iran and the range of likely outcomes as almost identical. There's absolutely no structure - social, civil, political - that gets Iran from where it is now to something resembling non-chaos, much less civil governance and decent social peace.
DeleteThe aftermath of this clusterfuck - whatever else that ends up being - is likely to be just as destructive to the wider region as the lingering effects of the Soviet disaster in Afghanistan that included funding and encouraging the takifiri Islamists that spread troubles that have reached out worldwide. I agree that the people living in and around Iran will pay the highest price, but, like the unholy mess that spread from the Pashtun homelands, I can see this leading to even more bloodyhanded events all over, from Tehran to Tucson.