01-03-2020, 02:03 AM
(01-02-2020, 11:48 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: Any thoughts on where this will go? If Iran is in an awakening period, the country won't support prolonged fighting against the US. Will the IRGC and the various militias formerly managed by Soleimani try to extract revenge with attacks on US forces, or will they not even attempt that?
I can see it accelerating the generational turnover in Iran, so it's looking like your prediction of Iran becoming a US ally has some hope.
I hate to be cynical... but if you thought that the Vietnam War was a disaster, then wait until you see a war with Iran. America will have no allies in such a war; if you thought that America was becoming isolated in its diplomacy in recent months, then wait until you see how things go.
This will be the most productive war that America has had in a long time -- in sending American soldiers back in body bags. Iran is a dangerous power with a ruthless regime armed to the teeth. This is a country with a larger population than either Germany, Italy, France, or the UK... and with leadership ready to commit its youth as cannon fodder. Iran has the means of doing to the American Armed Forces in a few months what the slow-moving disaster in Vietnam took ten years to achieve.
I have my view of Donald Trump as a leader of a nation at war, and I will save the language for the late General Norman Schwarzkopf in his assessment of Saddam Hussein:
"As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist, he is neither a great military strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that he is a great military man, I want you to know."
As a political leader:
To be sure, Trump is not going to lead troops in the field, but as a top leader of a nation in a Crisis War, he is neither a good politician, nor a great unifier of a people in need of a shared purpose, nor is he able to offer any semblance of a coherent argument for any costly and unsettling cause. He is not a Churchill, a Lincoln, an FDR, a Mannerheim, a Juarez, or a Bismarck even if he is part of the sort of generation whence such leaders come for any country in about every eighty years, someone capable of transforming unwelcome carnage into a noble cause. Such leaders may not have wanted war, but they got it, and they handled it well. Personal glory? Only after the fact.
All that he has been able to do is to appeal to bigotry and greed, which are good motivators early... (Look at all the profits that can go to war profiteers, including to those who supply the body bags!)...
America is deeply divided, and many Americans would see a war into which Trump bungles as evidence of a callous incompetence. Many might think it a diversion from the consequences of his gross misconduct as President.
...Most liberals, and I am no exception, see John Bolton as a nasty warmonger... but even he seems to recognize the situation as too dangerous for his taste. He can see Democrats winning in November and recognizing the necessity a year from now of turning over war criminals, including Trump, to the Hague Tribunal. As shown in cases involving Rwanda and Yugoslavia, the Hague Tribunal has a freakishly-high conviction rate. Bolton sees that, I believe, as a risk unworthy of taking.
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I cannot now afford a newspaper subscription, so I have not lifted anything from editorial pages. What the late General Schwarzkopf said is public domain because he said it while in service to the US government.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
