War is a continuation of politics by other means, Von Clausewitz famously said. Lot of people forget, though, that politics is a continuation of war by other means. They are, ultimately, the same thing – a person who truly understands war understands politics and vice versa. I bring this up because we have a lot of people dooming over the pending deal with Iran.
First off, we don’t really know the details yet. It hasn’t been released. Trump has outlined (for months) the broad outlines of what we’re after: no Iranian nukes, no threats to commerce, Iran ceases using proxy forces around the Middle East. Trump says he’s close to a deal to get what we want. Ok. Lets wait and see. If you really think that Trump will throw away our overwhelming victory over Iran then I just don’t know what to say: I can only assume you’re just so filled with hatred of Trump that you’ll swallow any nonsense fed to you by known liars.
Secondly, just what do you want? That is, what is your post-war?
It is a serious question and one which hasn’t been asked for a very long time. And, in fact, it is rarely asked during any war. But it is the most crucial thing to ask. In fact, if you don’t ask and find your answer, you really shouldn’t engage in war. There have been so many wars in human history and for most of them people don’t even ponder what is next – and this is true for both just and unjust wars. But if you are in any way a serious person, you have to know what you want at the end of it. I do believe Trump knows what he wants.
In any war you can have your idea outcome in mind but you must also have your merely acceptable outcome ready. You can never know what is going to happen once the guns go off. The enemy, after all, does get a say. Trump’s ideal outcome in Iran was the Iranian people overthrowing the Mullahs. I thought it would happen. I think almost all of us did. Trump certainly did. But with the Mullah regime decapitated, its remaining leaders in hiding and their goon squads running the Iranian people simply did not move. They didn’t want to risk their lives. Had they done so, US and Israeli air cover would have been available. Nothing happened. They took videos and then went home. Given this, our ideal outcome became out of reach. We will not usher in the end of the Mullah regime short of a US invasion and no sane person in America wants that. It isn’t that we wouldn’t win it is that in the post-war we’d be responsible for rebuilding Iran and you just know the Iranians would take pot-shots at us as they vie to be more anti-American than the next guy. No, thanks.
So, given that the Mullahs truly gauged the quality of their people, what next? It has got to be a deal. We could keep bombing. But to what purpose? It is still an option and Trump has repeatedly said he’d resort to it absent a deal…but, for goodness sake, you’re not supposed to want Iran reduced to rubble. Whatever else they are, they are your fellow human beings. If necessity requires you to kill them, then so be it – but if you can abridge the slaughter and still obtain your minimal requirements then it would be a crime to keep killing. Right now, Trump says he can make the deal – presumably no nukes, open seas, no proxies. Lets see if it can be done.
Will Iran break the deal? They might. You can’t trust them any further than you could throw them. But they also just found out that 25 years of military build up using untold amounts of money turned out to be a complete waste of time. They couldn’t even slow us down. That is a lesson which only a fool ignores. Might they all be fools? Could be. But, I doubt it. Given that at least some significant faction of the mafia running Iran is talking, there are at least some people there who know that it is time to lay low, rebuild and try again down the road. Long down the road. So far down the road that by the time you get there, attacking the USA might not remain a priority. In other words, it is time for peace. War might come again. War might always come again. But it is time for peace. The Mullah dream of conquering the Middle East is over. And outside some potential fanatics, everyone understands it. But, meanwhile, Iran still carries great weight. They can have strong influence in the area…if they make a deal and thus are able to rebuild. Their choice, ultimately.
But right back to it: what do you want? What do you think is best for America? In my view, what we want is us exiting the Middle East. That is, peace is secured to the extent that we don’t need to be deeply involved over there. I don’t care if some random Islamist nutter sets off a bomb – that is for the local people to deal with. What I do want – and I think America should insist upon – is the free movement of oil combined with no attempts by any Middle East party to export their lunacy to the rest of the world. Remain 7th century savages for all I care – as long as you don’t export it to the USA. I don’t want us to have to fuss every time some idiot does something stupid. I want our forces to withdraw from the Middle East. I want good relations there – especially with Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. I want to have in place various protocols for what to do if some idiot decides to set the place on fire…but I don’t want us deeply involved in the day to day. Let the people there sort themselves out.
I doubt that those pre-condemning Trump have any idea what they want. Other than to take exception to any Trump action, that is. If we hadn’t hit at all they’d condemn. If we kept hitting they’d condemn. If Trump’s deal works, they’ll still condemn. But as I’ve been saying for a while now, it is time we rejoined the real world…and in that real world we don’t have to be eternally engaged in warfare. We can make peace. Even with people we hate and who hate us. Peace isn’t love. Peace isn’t trust. Peace is…peace. It is a state where we’re not shooting at each other and are unlikely to do so any time soon. I think Trump is going to get us that – and that is good.
Update:
Blogs For Victory 
I haven’t agreed with everything Trump has done regarding Iran, but I’m just an armchair quarterback with 20/20 hindsight and zero access to lots of inside information. I thought we should have taken Kharg Island early on, but if this deal holds, it’s going to be hard to criticize the results.
I have been hesitant about Iran and hoping that the mid terms and Irans rope a dope negotiating strategy would not turn this into a quagmire, and which it still has the possibility of becoming. I can say with 100% certainty though that I am glad Trump is making these decisions rather than some bureaucrat. I do like the fact that Pakistan and other moderate Arab countries are helping to usher in peace. And don’t believe anything you read in the media … they are actively trying to undermine Trump.
IMHO, the only reason the Strait of Hormuz is “closed”, is because the majority of people in the world are cowards. I can say with 99% certainty that Iran has zero capability of actually closing the Strait, it’s simply their threats and rhetoric that has stopped all traffic and that’s a sad admission of how cowardly people are.
When threatened … real men never retreat. They attack.
Yep; the Strait was never closed – not even for a minute. Lloyds just refused to insure – probably at the orders of the UK government which was trying to provoke a 1970s-style oil crisis in order to bring down Trump. They – being monumentally stupid – didn’t understand that oil production since the 1970s has massively changed…especially in the sense that far more places produce more than they ever had before. It mostly just harmed Europeans when they did that…and also helped Russia with higher oil prices.
I’m strolling through X today and its is packed full of idiots saying that Iran won. Won what? They have no military force. Their economy is in shambles. Their regime is divided against itself. “That the regime survived is victory!”. No, it is not – victory is winning. Iran lost. Badly. Sure if the regime survives they can go on a program – which will take 20 years – of rebuilding their forces for another round. But another round of what? Completely ineffective defense? Does nobody realize that 20 years from now – given even the least bit of American effort – our military will just be even more superior? The regime can bluster and it will…but no sensible person figures the next step is Iranian aggression.
But if that is their next step – we bomb again. And I’m seeing people saying that Trump won’t bomb again. On what possible grounds can anyone say that? We just blew the heck out of the country…we bombed them severely just a few days ago as a hint to hurry on the deal. Of course Trump will immediately order an attack if he feels the Iranians are backsliding.
Bottom line: people hate Trump so much they have become incredibly stupid.
Bottom line: people hate Trump so much they have become incredibly stupid.
This is definitely a chicken/egg conundrum, one of those “which came first?” questions. Because you have to be profoundly, clinically stupid to be so controlled by hate.
LOL – there is that! The stupid was perhaps always there, but letting your life be controlled by hatred is an extra layer of stupid. Some actress who was famous (I guess) on a sitcom in the 80’s passed the other day at 77…and her family wanted us to know she’s most remembered for her hatred of Trump. What a thing to say! To have your being so controlled by hatred that you make sure your family points it out in your obituary. And the family has to be made up of total idiots! I wouldn’t care if a family member hated Trump with the heat of a thousand suns…I wouldn’t mention this at their passing. It simply isn’t important…but I guess some nitwits think it is.
When I hear of people like this actress, and her equally deranged family, I wonder just when they started “hating” Trump.
Was it when he was the darling of Manhattan, featured on Page 6 nearly every day as he was photographed at galas, fundraisers and every top social event in NYC? Even out here in the sticks I knew of Donald Trump, knew what he looked like, although there was plenty of juicy gossip about his marriages, Marla Maples and his reputation at the time as something of a player I just don’t remember vitriol, loathing, nonstop personal attacks on him. He was NYC’s own homegrown celebrity. People fawned over him, licked his boots, couldn’t get enough of the photos of him and his glamorous wife at Broadway openings and skiing in Aspen.
So when did this all change? I think it was still going on when he went down that escalator at Trump Tower and said he was running for the presidency. Like so many people I didn’t take him seriously, so I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the shift in attitude toward him, but I think it was when the Left suddenly realized he WAS serious, and posed a real threat to the established political establishment. Until then, the Left was able to use its clout, its control over the media, its moneyed donors, its posturing as the Party of Kindness, to exert a lot of control over the country. Oh, Republicans were annoying, but could always be shut down before they did too much damage, and they could be counted on to shoot themselves in their collective feet (blunders amplified by and often invented by the Complicit Agenda Media) so they were just part of the see-saw of perceived American politics. They never represented an existential threat to the Left, as it quietly built its power base of the Bureaucratic State and control over state legislatures.
Trump did, and when this started to sink in panic hit, and the entire focus of the Left spun on its axis to be about Trump, no one but Trump, nothing but Trump. As long as Trump had power, the Left was at risk. No one but Trump had seen the dangers of a de facto extra-Constitutional fourth branch of government, run by unelected political appointees, much less talked about dismantling it–and make no mistake about it, this is the hidden power base of the Left and its ability to control the entire country. And the Left’s obedient little flying monkeys, always eager to find something at their level of intelligence and dignity, were thrilled to be told that all they had to do was be vile and vicious and no longer even try to rein in the ugliest aspects of their personas. It was the character version of a certain mentality being told that it was suddenly OK to loot stores.
And, of course, the Left simply redefined this character defect as a virtue, sending its message that people were no longer expected to act like decent human beings but that feral savagery was proof of moral superiority. But few if any on the Left remember when they couldn’t get enough of Trump, or the moment they flipped the switch to make him the target of all the mental illness in the country.
I have written recently about watching videos of interviews and podcasts with John Kiriakou. He definitely leans Left, though I still haven’t heard him give a reason for this. In what was obviously a very recent interview he was pretty scathing about Trump’s conviction that there could be a regime change in Iran. He was adamant that of all the nations in the Middle East, perhaps in the world, Iran has the most deeply held and passionate commitment to its history and is the least likely to submit to abandoning this.
I get it. I understand what he was saying. But I think perhaps he was overlooking the possibility that it could be this very passion for the history and traditions of Iran that would make its people reject the military takeover of the nation and its betrayal of that history and tradition.
What I saw in this clip was the shortsightedness that conflates a current political environment with the true and deeply held wishes of the people. He ignored the uprisings, the demonstrations, the loudly declared desire to overthrow the military and return to a more citizen-oriented government, and I think that was influenced if not dictated by a personal antipathy to the person Donald J. Trump.
After the post, above, I saw an article supporting my contention that the Iranian people do not all see the current regime as representative of the history or tradition of Iran.
““SHAME ON YOU!” chants and loud boos echoed through SoFi Stadium ahead of Iran vs. New Zealand as fans reacted to the display of the Iranian regime’s official flag, while waiving the traditional flag of Iran, the sun and lion flag.”
“FIFA has reportedly had officials at Iran’s World Cup match confiscating Lion and Sun flags and signs like the one pictured below.
This is FIFA actively siding with the Islamic regime in Iran.
The Lion and Sun flag is not a symbol of the regime. For millions of Iranians, it y, identity and opposition to the Islamic Republic.
By suppressing those symbols while allowing the regime’s representatives to participate, FIFA is blatantly taking a side instead of remaining neutral.”
“What FIFA doesn’t want you to see from the Iran vs New Zealand World Cup match in Los Angeles
Thousands of Iranian fans proudly waved the historical Lion and Sun flag during the match.
FIFA banned these flags, forcing supporters to smuggle them into the stadium, while a massive sign was openly displayed.”
Both Monarchists and Mullahs like to claim the mantle of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire – if you look at the Shah’s standard, it is very evocative of Cyrus’. But, they’re really not – a full DNA profile, if we could find some from Cyrus’ time, would likely show that genetic profile persists in Iran to this day, but its only going to be one of a hundred different strands as the land was conquered and reconquered over and over again…culturally, modern Iran gets nothing from Cyrus’ time…not language, not literature, not religion. Its all as alien to modern Iran as, say, the culture of pre-Roman Gual is to modern France. But, clever propaganda by the last Shah’s father sort of implanted the idea of succession to Cyrus in the Iranian mind (this was a means of trying to legitimize a usurping dynasty) and here we are.
So, sure: there is national pride. But, is there a desire for liberty? That sort of self-sacrifice which provided liberty to our shores? Can there be an Alamo among the Persians? I’ve said many times that every Iranian I’ve ever met I’ve liked…but, OTOH, I’ve only met heavily Westernized American Iranians. I might be getting a very distorted view and really have zero clue how the actual average Iranian is. I suspect, now, that the people who rolled over for a usurping Shah, then rolled over for a Mullah simply lack any of that civic militarism which the prerequisite for liberty. You’ve got to have people who will stare down a line of guns and not run away, even when it looks hopeless. The only people in the modern world who have ever shown this sort of metal are Americans, French, British, Australians…and outside the USA it is rapidly being burned away by enforced ignorance and cowardice. Probably if we had dropped the 101st Airborne on Tehran the Mullah regime would be gone…but we’d be holding the bag trying to sort through a pack of Iranians to find the least objectionable…which in Iraq and Afghanistan meant we had to deal with the most craven, immoral and thieving bastards imaginable. And we’d be told that Iranian national pride requires them to shoot at us…even though they don’t seem to have a hankering to shoot the Mullahs who are hanging them for showing too much ankle. I begin to feel there’s no pride…just a base and greedy desire to be on top.
As for FIFA – of course they are craven. That is built into modern institutions.
Speaking of stupid—-as a self-professed Word Nazi with great reverence for language, I often wonder why it sometimes gets so distorted. A perfect example is the new movement to replace the word “dead” with stupid, elaborately complex and clumsy substitutions.
“Dead” is a perfectly good word. It is precise and concise. OK, I understand that for some reason some people, particularly people in or dealing with the media, felt that it was too blunt, and went looking for more genteel ways to say that someone has died.
So a press conference that might have said something like “Two people died in the accident” could be fluffed up a little to say something like “there were two fatalities” or “two people were deceased”. Unnecessary, but no big deal. It’s kind of the linguistic equivalent of cocking a pinkie finger while drinking from a teacup—an affectation.
But then a bizarre development popped up, with the word “unalive”. It sounds weird, and it does nothing to paper over the fact that it refers to the lack of life, but evidently someone somewhere came up with this and decided it conveyed literacy. Or something. So every now and then there would be a reference to someone being “unalive”.
Then, as if that is not bad enough, this goofy effort to pretend to be more educated (or something) made this oddball concoction morph from an adjective to a verb. The first time I saw this was from a woman whose female relative had melted down in a fast food restaurant, activating an ongoing heart condition, and died on the scene. Her comment was something like “You don’t expect to go into a restaurant and get unalived”.
A shared language is a scaffolding which supports a shared culture, which is the foundation for civilization. Language can be enriched by evolution but true evolution of language is reasonable and adds to its richness and texture. Purposeful mangling like this serves no purpose but to undermine language because it is not a natural progression, and all it does is contribute to the false conviction that it indicates a higher intellect.
In 3 days, Trump closed the framework peace deal with Iran, dominated the G7 meeting letting the other countries leaders know exactly who’s running the show, collaborated the continued backing of Ukraine while being unified in continued sanctions against Russia, held 5 separate bilateral meetings with India and Mideast country leaders strengthening the future architect of the Abraham accords, and attended a gala dinner. All of this while Trump’s critics claiming he’s alienating our allies and destroying the US.
Both the demoncrats and the neocons are trying to portray the deal with Iran as a failure, each for different reasons. The left because they are adamant in opposing anything Trump does, and the neocons because of their never-ending need for war profiteering. Iran is in a highly disorganized state of flux with competing factions trying to exert control, so there will almost certainly be straining moments over the next 60 days as the US and Iran work out the remaining details of the peace deal. In the meantime, our relationship with the other Mideast countries has solidified, ships are now moving freely in the Strait of Hormuz, and oil prices have already dropped significantly. Trump understands and plays this game at a totally different level. In a matter of a few weeks, Iran’s military has largely been destroyed, their nuclear weapons ambitions set back a decade or more, and the top echelons of the IRGC has been rendered “unalive” – all without putting any boots on the ground. No president since Carter has dared to make such a move against Iran for fear of staggering oil prices and world destabilization. The Euro weenies wouldn’t help, even opposed using their airspace, saying; “This isn’t our war”. Others tried to frame this as yet another endless war. All were wrong.
Trump continues to fight on so many fronts it’s hard to keep track of them all. There are still many more battles and he’s facing them all head on with his vast experience and endless energy, taking us forward to a place few thought possible, especially in such a short time. May God continue to guide him and keep him strong.
” All of this while Trump’s critics claiming he’s alienating our allies and destroying the US…” as well as being so mentally compromised he can’t stay awake during meetings. My feeling is, I hope he IS grabbing a few seconds of power naps during boring meetings, if that is what it takes to recharge his batteries.
As for “alienating our allies” our true allies are signaling their ongoing allegiance and support while the remora “allies” are fluttering around trying to figure out how to take every position at the same time.