Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 07/19/2025 11:38:37 AM PDT by jfd1776
Did we hit Iran hard enough before we stopped?
This is always the question, anytime you engage in diplomacy, warfare, or a combination of the two. When it becomes necessary to do something, the question is “How much?”
Israel has led the effort against Iran, as Iran has been the chief aggressor against Israel. For 46 years now, the mullahs who rule that poor country have not only threatened Israel (and the USA too) on a constant basis, they have also funded, trained, and directed numerous terrorist organizations in the region, chief among which are Hamas of Gaza, Hezbollah of Lebanon, and the Houthis of Yemen.
The United States joined in recently, for one specific priority: the destruction of Iran’s uranium enrichment abilities, which were nearing a crisis point. The Trump administration engaged in a brief and overwhelming attack, specifically limited to those nuclear arms development sites, successfully obliterating them and setting the mullahs’ nuclear war ambitions back many years, if not decades.
But was that enough to teach Iran’s mullahs the lesson they needed? Was it enough to encourage, perhaps even enable, a popular revolution by the oppressed Persians so they could take their country back at last?
There are many ways to judge; one worth looking at is this indicator:
Are Iran’s client actors still acting, still attacking, still destroying, still disabling the region and the world? Or are Iran’s client actors hiding in the corner, broke and directionless, licking their wounds as their sponsor is laying low?
Well, the place for us to look is the one that has been threatening not only Israel, but its entire region, and the entire world, for the past two years: the Houthis of Yemen.
The Houthis are many things – a rebel force fighting a long civil war in Yemen, currently in control of a large part of the country, a terrorist organization firing missiles (over Saudi Arabia airspace!) at Israel, engaging in piracy, and conducting a complete naval blockade of the Red Sea and Suez Canal, thanks to their control of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait (the point at which the Gulf of Aden meets the Red Sea).
A considerable amount of global shipping – both intermodal container shipping and bulk vessel activity (such as oil tankers) must go through that point in order to utilize the Suez Canal. Asian cargo headed for Europe, European cargo headed for Asia, and a significant amount of trade between other continents as well has taken advantage of this wonderful trade route for most of the past half century.
The Houthis’ attacks on commercial shipping for the past two years have caused all those trade lanes to be disrupted. Ships have to sail around the continent of Africa, which adds thousands of miles of transport, and therefore massive costs that are borne by the entire world: weeks added to every transit time, capacity shortages in multiple transportation lanes, and huge overconsumption of fuel, all of which add up to billions of dollars per day in hard and soft costs to the global economy.
As we are now coming up on two years of this Houthi-run blockade, the accumulated cost to the world economy is almost incalculable, but a trillion dollars in economic damage is a low estimate so far.
It’s easy to say “let’s not meddle in foreign wars,” as our Founding Fathers wisely counselled, and it’s good advice in many cases, but this war isn’t foreign to us.
American businesses own some of those ships; American businesses own the goods on many of the others. American companies do business in that region; American individuals are physically or economically put at risk by this ongoing abomination.
And that’s without counting the economic damage to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, each of which depend on trade in their Red Sea ports, and Egypt in particular, which depends on the Suez Canal tolls that have dried up thanks to the Houthis’ behavior.
Israel and the United States both hit their sponsor hard, in Operation Rising Lion and Operation Midnight Hammer. They accomplished part of their goal beautifully.
But did they stop Iran from being an immediate threat?
Their clients – the Houthi terrorists – are still holding international shipping hostage. Still attacking ships in the Red Sea, still barring the Suez Canal from global commerce. And that leaves us with only one possible conclusion: we did NOT hit Iran hard enough, and we did not hit their clients hard enough.
The global economy – of which we are an important part – cannot afford the ongoing loss of billions of dollars a day from the Houthis’ action.
We have used up far too many missiles already, far too many expensive bombs. We need to put an end to this problem, as expeditiously and affordably as possible.
Gentle Reader, I must admit that I am not an expert on the relative costs of our many forms of weapons; I wouldn’t pretend to micromanage such an operation by demanding the use of GBU 43/Bs or GBU-57s or anything else. Surely our Department of Defense knows what the right weapons are for the task, and when we say the word, we will have plenty of allies to join in the effort.
But it’s time to act. The Suez Canal may be an Egyptian property, but the free flow of commerce at market prices through that channel has been a global good for a century and a half, and the world needs to unite – under American leadership – to return this global good to the world.
It is time to send every Houthi rebel to hell.
And while we’re at it, that just might send the necessary message to their bosses in Tehran, too.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
The leaders of the muslim countries like Iran need to be killed for terrorism to stop and 100’s of millions of people freed.
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.