Iranian Imbroglio. By John Carter.
Yet again?
Certainly this has happened before. Trump has bombed Iran’s nuclear research facilities a few months ago, and assassinated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Qasem Soleimani a few years ago.
Low level war been going on for 47 years
Every time this kind of thing happens there are panicked shouts that thermonuclear Ragnarok is imminent, alongside outraged cries that Zion Don has betrayed MAGA by engaging in precisely the foreign interventionism that he repudiated, that he has been captured by the Neocohens, and that We Will Not Die For Israel.
In each case, nothing much happened. Iran raised the red flag of revenge, or the gold flag of implacable annihilation, or the black flag of this time we really mean it, all of which amounted in practice to a few rockets being fired ineffectually in Israel’s general direction, to be absorbed by an Iron Dome that really seems to work quite well. There was no World War III. There were no boots on the ground.
Israel?
As I saw someone observe recently, We Will Not Die For Israel has become the groyper version of the Handmaid’s Tale: no one is actually asking anyone to die for Israel; there are no imminent plans for mass conscription; therefore protestations that one will resist a non-existent draft amount to the same kind of lurid masturbatory fantasy as declarations that one would never, pant, allow oneself to be confined in a harem, pant pant, and turned into, pant pant pant, breeding stock.
Maybe that will change. Maybe a year from now I’ll be ruefully eating those words, as American boys are being shipped off by their hundreds of thousands to run around blinded by Russian electronic countermeasures in the cold mountain passes of the Zagros, getting picked off by snipers and shredded by Chinese drones.
But I doubt it. …
None of this should be taken to imply that Israel hasn’t played a massive role in orchestrating and precipitating this war. They clearly have. Marco Rubio let this slip when he admitted that part of the reason the US attacked when they did was that Israel had signalled that they were going to attack with or without America’s blessing or assistance. …
Republicans more sensitive to antisemitism than anti-white prejudice:
Republicans who shrug off open anti-white bigotry systematically directed against America’s core population in essentially all of its universities react with fury to campus anti-Semitism, threatening to withhold funding from any institutions that tolerate hurt Jewish feelings….
Mossad trick or wishful thinking?
There’s an unconfirmed rumour that, as a parting shot, the Mossad wiped the morality police’s databases, so that they no longer had any record of which of their women have a habit of letting their hair down in public. …
How many in Iran hate the Mullahs?
If the reactions of Iranian expatriates living in the West are anything to go by, the Iranian people — particularly the Persians — loathe the mullahs. They’ve been celebrating in the streets, flying the variant of the Iranian flag with the lion instead of the ridiculous Islamic scimitar onion.
But then, is their reaction representative of public opinion in Iran itself? Expats are self-selected to be dissatisfied with their home country; that’s why they’re expats in the first place.
On the other hand, the protests that rocked Tehran in January are certainly indicative of widespread discontent, and one constantly hears that the Iranian people — at least the urban, educated portion — barely tolerate the theocracy. Zoroastrianism is rumoured to be making a comeback amongst Iranian youth, as a repudiation of Islamic mind-control via conscious reconnection with their deep ethnoreligion. …
Iran, like the West, suffers from low fertility, with a Total Fertility Rate of around 1.5. This is probably downstream of Iran’s high rate of female education: well over half of university students are women (peaking at around 70% in the 2010s), and over half of Iranian women enrol in higher education. …
The mullahs are a council of conservative old men holding onto power over a restively bucking youth bulge via the judicious application of welfare with one white-knuckled grip and terror with the other. They are acutely conscious that if their hand grows too heavy they will be overthrown by youngsters who barely tolerate the imposition of religious ideals that they do not share…
Air power alone cannot conquer a country:
So far the war has been entirely an air war, and American air power remains unassailable. On the first day the bombing was conducted with B-2 stealth bombers. Within a few days, Iran’s air defences had been so thoroughly broken that the USAF was able to send in its refurbished WWII-era B-52s, which have giant Las Vegas style neon signs for radar cross sections. Zero American aircraft have been lost. Iran’s skies are American skies, from which America can bomb Iranian facilities at their leisure. The pilots must be enjoying the hell out of themselves. …
Regime change?
The Iranian people may well hate the Iranian regime, but this does not mean that they will rise up against the regime when America and Israel are bombing them. For one thing, the Iranian people already rose up, and were slaughtered. For another, it is one thing to take to the streets during peace time, when one can plausibly claim to be a revolutionary motivated by liberal ideals of humanitarian justice or whatever; it is quite another to take to the streets when the enemy’s munitions are blowing up your country, and the government’s inevitable argument that you are all nothing more than the enemy’s traitorous catspaws will inevitably carry the day. …
So it seems unlikely that the Iranian people will revolt against the Islamic Revolution, at least as long as the bombings continue. The Trump administration seems to tacitly agree: initial declarations that one of the goals was regime change appear to have been quietly dropped, or at least de-emphasized. …
No sign of the much-threatened sleeper agents:
Over the years we’ve heard a lot about Iranian sleeper agents infiltrating the US, ready to sabotage US infrastructure or initiate terrorist attacks. So far none of that has happened …
Oil is already up to $100 a barrel, which is great news for countries whose economies depend on oil exports (such as Canada and Iran, not that it will do Iran much good), but not so great for everyone else. Whether prices rise more and bring on a global recession depends on how long the Straits of Hormuz remain closed. Currently the US Navy is planning to escort tankers through the straits.
UK and Canada out of the loop:
There are rumours that the US is going to try and steal the business of insuring global shipping from the City of London, which has dominated it for centuries. These rumours imply that the one of the advantages enjoyed by Lloyd’s of London was back-channel intelligence connections to the American security state, which have recently been closed.
Certainly America’s erstwhile partners in the United Kingdom appear to have been taken completely by surprise, suggesting that Washington is no longer sharing intelligence with Five Eyes partners it now views as adversarial and compromised by foreign influence. I’m sure that had nothing to do with Westminster inviting the Chinese to build the world’s largest embassy in the heart of their city, or giving away the Chagos Islands and its strategic Indian Ocean airbase to a Chinese client state.
Canada was similarly blindsided, which surely has nothing to do with our parliament being heavily infiltrated by Chinese intelligence, or with our prime minister having announced a ‘strategic partnership’ with the People’s Republic. …
A Eurabian Union will not be a reliable ally, as the sympathies of Muslims will naturally lie in the Dar al-Islam rather than the Dar al-Harb. Already in the Yookay there are mounted Islamic vigilante patrols chasing down Persians protesting in favour of the air strikes. …
Young Americans:
Much of Trump’s base, particularly the younger voters, are furious: they elected him to deport a hundred million people, not to start another pointless desert war for Sheldon Adelson.
Attempts to paint the mullahs as barbaric reprobates for forcing women to wear hijabs, signing off on marriages to 9-year-old girls, or forcing gay men to get sex change operations fall quite flat when young American men are living in the romantic wreckage of MeToo’s male purdah, American schools have been trooning American children for a decade as a matter of government policy, and not a single member of the American elite has been arrested in connection with the Epstein files. Younger voters are in a bad mood in any case due to the economy: however well the stock market is doing, however much manufacturing is reshoring to America, it doesn’t seem to be turning into jobs yet. …
Trump is hogtied at home, but Caesar abroad:
Trump’s mandate was to fix America’s domestic problems, not embark on new foreign adventures. …
Perhaps there’s a domestic upside in this, though. It has not escaped notice that Trump can stride across the globe like Zeus, but is forced into the role of a fiddling Nero when at his burning home, were he’s tied down like Gulliver by a thousand judicial strings, while a recalcitrant GOP sits on his chest, slow-walking his every reform.
Patience with this state of dysfunctional affairs of state has become as thin as the onion-skin paper of an old pocket Bible, and a lot of American voters are carrying that Bible full of enumerated grievances around in their back pockets everywhere they go. If a Caesar is effective abroad, how effective could a Caesar be at home? Many are asking this question. …
Prognosis:
As furious as MAGA is about Iran, it’s worth emphasizing that we’ve been here before. No one wants ‘boots on the ground’, but there’s nothing Americans like more than watching their air force pound the ever-living snot out of someone.
Trump’s style so far has been more gun-boat diplomacy and less hearts-and-minds nation-building. He seems to prefer the punitive expedition to the occupation, and if he holds to that pattern — and, just as importantly, if it does not spin out of control into catastrophe – it’s likely that voters will forget all about it by November, which is forever and a day away in news cycle terms.
It also shouldn’t be forgotten that a huge part of Trump’s base are not angry young radicals who want to burn it all down, but grumpy old boomers with Cold War nostalgia for Top Gun training montages and a chip on their shoulders that’s been itching since 1979. That part of his base is loving the bombardment porn.
Islam conquered Iran (Persia) centuries ago. It would be nice if it were liberated — like Spain in 1490. But that’s very unlikely.
