The USA and Iran: cautious or reckless, war or peace?

[Cuchulain]

Well, here we go folks, World War fucking 3. Thanks to all who voted for the demented man-child squatting in the White House.

[broncofan]

It's being reported that there are no U.S. casualties from the strikes. If Trump can take this as evidence that Iran deliberately planned a face-saving attack to cause minimal damage and no casualties, he can avoid getting us embroiled in a war. He's never shown intelligence before but this would require very little.

[broncofan]

This was written by Iran's foreign minister. It should give Trump a pretty good idea that Iran is done, their attack was calculated to help them save face, and we should be done as well because a war would be a disaster here.

https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1214739347959734274?s=20

[Stavros]

So Bonehead has said Iran backed down, when it was also the US that backed down from more violence. The Shi'a tend to mourn for 40 days before taking revenge, if that is what they seek. Iran has ways of undermining the US presence in Iraq, and will now be emboldened to increase the pressure on Iraq to expel the US/NATO forces in the country. Yes, to some extent Iran has been weakened by Soleimani's assassination, but this will only make the hardliners in Tehran more aggressive in their response. The US is in the weakest position for the simple reason that it cannot justify its presence in Iraq -indeed, far from seeing off Daesh in Iraq, the assassination may enable the Iranians who helped destroy the Daesh infrastructure, renew their activities at a guerilla level merely to engage the Americans in a 'war of attrition'.
In the long term, the US is done in Iraq, but the real joke is in the presssure by Bonehead on the UK/EU to publicly declare the Iran Nuclear Deal is dead, on the basis he is going to re-negotiate- and end up with what, if it is not a document that looks almost exactly like the one he has said was 'the worst deal in history' ? -after all, what does Iran want that the US is prepared to give? So when Bonehead says Iran will never have nuclear weapons -which they have said they don't want anyway- who is he to decide? Is Iran going to tell the Americans it can't have a new generation of ballistic missiles? Maybe if they gave him $25 million, as the Saudis probably did, they would get all the nuclear technology they want, as the US has 'sold' that technology to the Kingdom that produced most of the 9/11 Hi-Jackers who slaughtered thousands of Americans.
Nothing has been resolved in the region by the assassination, much has been disturbed.

[filghy2]

The Man With No Plan is continually torn between two competing impulses. One the one hand, he wants to be seen to be delivering on his promise to end US involvement in never-ending wars. On the other hand, he hates the idea that he might be made to look weak.

To the extent that has a strategy, it seems to be to try to intimidate Iran into making a deal that he can trumpet as solution to the problem. Failing that, he probably figures that conflict will help his election chances. It also serves as a useful distraction from the fact that North Korea is clearly ignoring the "deal" he made with them.

[MrFanti]

Interesting perspective from an Iranian-American.

[broncofan]

This is mostly a strawman. Of the people who opposed the killing of Soleimani, only a very small percent believe he wasn't a bad guy. The number of people in the U.S. who opposed the attack and are "mourning" Soleimani is probably close to zero, and I haven't seen a single one.

[Stavros]

Interesting perspective from an Iranian-American.

Interesting, but also wrong. Soleimani was not a terrorist, he was both a representative of the State, and an important State actor whose role was to export the Islamic Revolution to those parts of the Middle East where the Shi'a, in 1979 were marginalized, discriminated against, and, as was and is the case with Saudi Arabia, vilified for being heretics, a counter campaign that the Saudis promoted with vicious, lethal results in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Unless she understand what the Islamic State is in Iran, how will she cope with the complexity in which, yes, a lot of Iranians are pro-American and loathe the Guardian Council and its apparatus of 'security' which for many ordinary Iranians is just uniformed, or not-uniformed thugs licensed to beat people up, imprison and torture them or even kill them in the streets -while millions more, mostly in rural areas, support the Islamic regime. Snail-paced reform in Iran is the best that one could have hoped for in recent years, and Rouhani's election confirms it is what Iranians want -but who has assaulted and undermined the economy with sanctions if not the President of the USA? Who, through his military aggression, has undermined Rouhani and reform to endorse the hard-line policies of the Guardian Council on nuclear development and internal reform if not the same man in Washington DC?

It is true that Iran is now in a more difficult place than it was a month ago. It blundered in Iraq by taking on the demonstrators fed up with Iran's influence; it blundered through its lethal suppression of domestic protest, and clearly blundered through its attacks on Saudi Arabia and US installations and personnel, and with the catastrophic error in downing the Ukraine bound plane, it has now a lot of compensation to account for.

But this will embolden the Guardian Council to double down on its external missions, not retreat from then, though its direct involvement in Syria was not as great as some claim. The talks with Saudi Arabia that were supposed to take place this week -the reason Soleimani was in Iraq- appear to be on hold, but indicate that Saudi Arabia too now accepts its war policy is failing in the Yemen, just as someone in Qatar tells me that the aggressive policy bin Salman promoted toward Qatar has now dissipated.

If there were signs that regional reform is now possible, that Iran and Saudi Arabia can open a dialogue, the last thing they need is an idiot supported by cretins pursuing a confrontation with Iran at the very time everyone else wants to talk. And anyway, even if he forced the Iranians to the negotiating table, does the President really think the outcome will be any different from the Iran Nuclear Deal he called 'the worst deal in history'?

Now consider what she says about Iran that is true: no freedom of religion, no freedom of speech, punishment for protest -all three standard features in the daily life of Saudi Arabia, the closest ally the US has in the region other than Israel, and the source of much of the President's personal wealth. And if bin Salman now calms down and looks for more diplomatic solutions, what is his 'brother Arab' Zayed in the UAE doing, boasting he has the crooked Kushners in his pocket? There are too many ambitious men in the region who in any other context would be considered crooks or Mafiosi, only this lot have billions to spend.

Lastly, where were all those happy Iraqis who were supposed to flood into the streets waving portraits of Bush and Blair when Saddam was overthrown? Do the Americans really think the Islamic Revolution is about to end with happy Iranians dancing in the streets? Rudolph Giuliani Jr and John Bolton have both been paid to appear and speak at rallies in the US organized by the MeQ which has a record of marching around Tehran chanting 'Death to America' and actually killing Americans too. Are these the favoured replacements for the Guardian Council, just as Ahmad Chalabi was America's boy in Baghdad having received millions from the US tax-payer to 'fight Saddam', who then used his position in the Government to renege on the agreement they had with the US, sacking every Sunni Muslim from public duties, meaning every Sunni refuse collector, tax collector, teacher, doctor, dentist, army officer and so on, paving the way for the ascendancy of Daesh?

As ever in this militant region, one solution often gives birth to another crisis: we can all hope that one day Iran will be free of its religious extremists, just as we hope the same for Israel, Saudi Arabia and the USA, where spooky 'Christians' are at war with the Constitution, and seek to replace it with the Holy Bible.

Take the next best step, remove the impeached President even if it means opening a dialogue with semi-comatose Pence, who should at least sack Mad Mike Pompeo, and the crooks with their noses deep in the swampy trough -Carson, Chao, de Vos, Mnuchin -and the crooked Kushners with their private email servers set up to help them run their businesses from the White House...

[Stavros]

In the dying days of the Presidency, Mike Pompeo met with the Prime Minister of Israel and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, and days later Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was murdered. As the 'guru' of Iran's nuclear programme, this was both an audacious and clever operation, as Fakhrizadeh was closely guarded, his location and movements often secret, so either Israel got a tip off, or has been monitoring the man for some time. My guess is that the people responsible are Iranian by birth, possibly Israeli citizens, though one could speculate that they are Arabs, only Saudi Arabia seems mostly only capable of murdering its own ciizens, usually in broad daylight on a Friday after Jama'a Prayers, or in the protected confines of their Embassies and Consuates.

Strategically, Israel has merely delivered an embarrassing blow to Iran, the point being it was unable to protect so important a man on its own soil -but does this mean Iran will halt its nuclear development? No. Does it mean the people will rise up and overthrow the Islamic regime? No. So in strategic terms, if Israel is determined to halt Iran's nuclear development, it has failed -again.

The danger, is that this single assassination is but part of a broader plan to strike Iran's facilities at Natanz, and that it also fits into Trump's personal vendetta against the man who defeated him at the ballot box, to leave him with a Middle East crisis in which Biden will be asked to renew the USA's historic choice in the region: supporting Israel no matter how risky or costly or plain stupid its regional behaviour is. Biden is known to be cooler on Saudi Arabia, so MbS appears to be riding side-saddle with Israel just to provoke Biden.

Here are the contradictions, and the perils ahead:

1) Israel, having made so much of its 'Peace Treaties' with Bahrain and the UAE, in fact merely formal acts of recognition, must explain why it also seems so determined to go to war with Iran, when it is a war that cannot be won. Even if Natanz and every component of Iran's nuclear programme were to be destroyed, Iran would just start over.

2) MbS might be one of Democratic Israel's new 'best friends' -Israel seems keen to make friends with brutal dictators who would -indeed have- murder any citizens asking for the same democracy in their Emirates and Kingdoms Israel has- but most Arabs in the Kingdom would rejoice if Israel were wiped off the map, much as they contributed most of the 9/11 Hi-Jackers -but as Saudi Arabia begins its own nuclear journey, will it at some time have to contemplate murdering Saudi engineeers, blow up their facilities?

3) As noted above in earlier posts, Iran has a history of retaliating against attacks -so far there was no major retaliation following the assassination of Qasem Suleimani, but I wonder now if the Republican Guard is demanding the right to take action, something Rouhani would probably caution against, even as he can see why the Guardian Council feels it must act. But if so, would the attacks punish smaller places like Bahrain, where the majority of the population is Shi'a and looks favouraby on Iran?

4) The real danger is that the US is planning, directly or using Israel as a proxy, to attack Iran again, either individuals, or facilities it claims are part of the nuclear programme. Pompeo, Giuliani and John Bolton appear to or have explicitly called for 'Regime Change' in Iran, so it would be another act of hypocrisy for the man who claims he was opposed to regime change in Iraq, to support it in Iran, and not least when I assume he only approved the sharing of nuclear intelligence with Saudi Arabia because he was paid to do so- one of the many crimes that Trump must answer for when he leaves the White House.

5) But what do the Generals think? Israel's Generals have tended to warn Netanyahu off direct military strikes, and I would hope the USA's Generals can also see the risks involved, but if it is the case that everyone is so terrified of Trump they say yes to everything, could he be about to 'go out with a bang'? Oddly, I think he might not, because he has staked so much on not getting the US dragged into foreign adventures -but with his temper fraying because of his defeat, and as he lashes out at Fox News and even the Republicans in Georgia, one wonders if less principled people (plenty of them in this administation) have been whispering in his ears to encorage him to support Israel's batty aims?

Simon Tisdall makes some interesting points here-
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ed-war-on-iran