Posted on 05/17/2019 3:29:46 AM PDT by Kaslin
Speaking on state TV of the prospect of a war in the Gulf, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei seemed to dismiss the idea.
"There won't be any war. ... We don't seek a war, and (the Americans) don't either. They know it's not in their interests."
The ayatollah's analysis -- a war is in neither nation's interest -- is correct. Consider the consequences of a war with the United States for his own country.
Iran's hundreds of swift boats and handful of submarines would be sunk. Its ports would be mined or blockaded. Oil exports and oil revenue would halt. Air fields and missile bases would be bombed. The Iranian economy would crash. Iran would need years to recover.
And though Iran's nuclear sites are under constant observation and regular inspection, they would be destroyed.
Tehran knows this, which is why, despite 40 years of hostility, Iran has never sought war with the "Great Satan" and does not want this war to which we seem to be edging closer every day.
What would such a war mean for the United States?
It would not bring about "regime change" or bring down Iran's government that survived eight years of ground war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
If we wish to impose a regime more to our liking in Tehran, we will have to do it the way we did it with Germany and Japan after 1945, or with Iraq in 2003. We would have to invade and occupy Iran.
But in World War II, we had 12 million men under arms. And unlike Iraq in 2003, which is one-third the size and population of Iran, we do not have the hundreds of thousands of troops to call up and send to the Gulf.
Nor would Americans support such an invasion, as President Donald Trump knows from his 2016 campaign. Outside a few precincts, America has no enthusiasm for a new Mideast war, no stomach for any occupation of Iran.
Moreover, war with Iran would involve firefights in the Gulf that would cause at least a temporary shutdown in oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz -- and a worldwide recession.
How would that help the world? Or Trump in 2020?
How many allies would we have in such a war?
Spain has pulled its lone frigate out of John Bolton's flotilla headed for the Gulf. Britain, France and Germany are staying with the nuclear pact, continuing to trade with Iran, throwing ice water on our intelligence reports that Iran is preparing to attack us.
Turkey regards Iran as a cultural and economic partner. Russia was a de facto ally in Syria's civil war. China continues to buy Iranian oil. India just hosted Iran's foreign minister.
So, again, Cicero's question: "Cui bono?"
Who really wants this war? How did we reach this precipice?
A year ago, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a MacArthurian ultimatum, making 12 demands on the Tehran regime.
Iran must abandon all its allies in the Middle East -- Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza -- pull all forces under Iranian command out of Syria, and then disarm all its Shiite militia in Iraq.
Iran must halt all enrichment of uranium, swear never to produce plutonium, shut down its heavy water reactor, open up its military bases to inspection to prove it never had a secret nuclear program and stop testing missiles. And unless she submits, Iran will be strangled with sanctions.
Pompeo's speech at the Heritage Foundation read like the terms of some conquering Caesar dictating to some defeated tribe in Gaul, though we had yet to fight and win the war, usually a precondition for dictating terms.
Iran's response was to disregard Pompeo's demands.
And crushing U.S. sanctions were imposed, to brutal effect.
Yet, as one looks again at the places where Pompeo ordered Iran out -- Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, Syria, Iraq -- no vital interest of ours was imperiled by any Iranian presence.
The people who have a problem with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon are the Israelis whose occupations spawned those movements.
As for Yemen, the Houthis overthrew a Saudi puppet.
Syria's Bashar Assad never threatened us, though we armed rebels to overthrow him. In Iraq, Iranian-backed Shiite militia helped us to defend Baghdad from the southerly advance of ISIS, which had taken Mosul.
Who wants us to plunge back into the Middle East, to fight a new and wider war than the ones we fought already this century in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen?
Answer: Pompeo and Bolton, Bibi Netanyahu, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the Sunni kings, princes, emirs, sultans and the other assorted Jeffersonian democrats on the south shore of the Persian Gulf.
And lest we forget, the never-Trumpers and neocons in exile nursing their bruised egos, whose idea of sweet revenge is a U.S. return to the Mideast in a war with Iran, which then brings an end to the Trump presidency.
iran should have been rubblized in January 1980. send them back to the 7th century where they belong.
Grab your gun and go. Nobody stopping you.
Plus the strategic oil situation has changed dramatically, with the US now the world’s #1 producer and a net exporter.
What total nonsense, thank God, President Trump has ended this foolishness and dressed down those idiot war mongers Bolton and Pompeo...
Read My Lips—
NO WAR WITH IRAN.
Mr Trump, when we voted for you it was a vote against the GOP establishment and their never-ending wars.
Do not betray your voters and your country.
Bears repeating.. allows tens of th thousands Per Month cross our border. The kabuki shitdown did nothing becausexhe flinched and the left got their way again.
The Iranian people, that’s who.
Let them do it.
Bears repeating... Who knows, if we got out of the way maybe someone else could get a chance to stomp on them for a while...
Saudi Arabia can’t even beat Yemen. And why on Earth would India want in?
—
Exactly. And Saudi Arabia won’t even pay their share if we did go to war in their behalf.
We’re already at war with Iran. Ever heard of Hamas or Hezbollah?
Hamas, otherwise known as Harakat al-Muqawana al-Islamiya (Islamic Resistance Movement); Al-Tiar Al-Islami (The Islamic Stream); or Harakat al-Muqawana al-Islamiya (Islamic Resistance Movement); an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, is responsible for the deaths of over a thousand people to include Americans.
Hezbollah killed, among others, 241 Americans in a truck bomb attack in Beirut as early as the 1980’s, and have worked together with Al-Qaeda. As early as 2002, A report from the council on foreign relations stated that fifty to one hundred Hamas and Hezbollah agents had infiltrated the United States and were involved in fund-raising and low-level intelligence gathering. Hezbollah supports al Quaeda with explosives and supplies. European intelligence reports that the two groups were collaborating in such activities as money laundering, gun running, and training.
So we are already at war with them. This is how islamic terrorist groups work.
rwood
“The people who have a problem with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon are the Israelis whose occupations spawned those movements.“
The antisemitism of Buchanan never gets old.
A report from the council on foreign relations ...
LOL. Is this like a report from John Brennan and James Clapper?
European intelligence reports that the two groups were collaborating in such activities as money laundering, gun running, and training.
Oh, boy -- they sound awful ... like an organized crime family here in the U.S. Maybe this is why Europe doesn't even consider Hezbollah to be a terrorist organization -- and even recognizes Hezbollah's leadership to be a legitimate political organization.
no big mystery at all.. the world’s bankers as always do...when the world economy is in the crapper...its time to launder all the debt through war...when its soaring they launder all the profits through the markets..all to keep the sheep sedated and unawares of their seasonal fleecing
I see it like this:
Learn the lesson: There is nothing in the middle east that we need. Nothing whatever.
“It’s time to rid the world of this simmering cancer” = “Make the world safe for democracy”
100% stupid
“When do we invade the EU?”
As soon as the Muslims are finished trashing it.
“If we wish to impose a regime more to our liking in Tehran, we will have to do it the way we did it with Germany and Japan after 1945...”
Nope. We just need to support the Iranian people who want to overthrow the Mullahs.
Not that the next guy in charge will be any good. Frankly, the model that worked best for everyone, including Iran, was when we installed a puppet strongman like the Shah. He was horrible, yes....but MUCH less so than the Mullahs.
War is a failure...
of diplomacy, or of politics, or of trade, or of imagination. It has been said.
There are certainly better and cheaper ways to get under their skin than war.
And the earliest unfortunate consequences of such a war would be that, among those people who are most promptly affected on either side:
a. in America, popular opinion would recoil from the current administration and its policies;
b. in Iran, popular opinion would coalesce in favor of the existing government. (See any history of Stalinist Russia in WW2.)
Just what we don’t want. A flash-bang war, about as controllable as a deliberate biological plague.
(Reads the article...
Feels dirty afterward.
Yes, yes, of course. Once again, it’s all about t3h j0000z.
Oh, FFS.
Every time I hear a story of some nitwit who responds to a terrorist attack in the U.S. by assaulting a Sikh at a gas station in Illinois or Nevada, I cringe because I half-expect to learn that the attacker was a regular poster on FR.
I have never met an Iranian who wanted to overthrown the Mullahs. Maybe it's because I've never been to Iran, and the Iranian-born Americans I know here in the U.S. simply don't give a sh!t about Iran anymore.
Maybe those people exist, but I am long past the point where I believe any of the bullsh!t that is peddled by our government anyway.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.