We’re Winning
Pete Hegseth says “We’re winning, every day”. He also says things like “It takes money to kill bad guys”, as his Defense Department asks Congress for $200 Billion more to continue the War in Iran. $200 Billion: two years’ worth of Medicaid cuts reinstated; or building nine Ford Class Aircraft carriers. $200 Billion, the cost for six of the twenty years of the War in Afghanistan.
So the United States, led by “the man”, Pete Hegseth, and the “old man”, Donald Trump, is slipping into a regional war with no clear end in sight. He’s not wrong, we are killing “bad guys”. But we also proved what the Nuclear War theorists of the 1950’s and 60’s worried about. If you kill off the leaders of a government, who’s left to surrender?
Decapitation
We think of the Pentagon as a “military place”, building bombs, ordering troops around and such. But in reality, it has a lot in common with a college campus. They study, they collect data, and then they think about future actions. The most important things that the planners in the Pentagon do is to play out every possible scenario. If the United States bombed Iran, what would the military response be? If the United States dropped paratroopers into Greenland, what resistance should they expect, and what would the worldwide response be?
No one in the Pentagon, probably not even Pete Hegseth, should have thought that their quick “decapitation” strike on Venezuela was the model for an attack on Iran. In Venezuela, we kidnapped the leader of a criminal enterprise. Like any good “mob” organization, once the “Godfather” was gone, another took his place, and the criminality continues.
But it definitely “feels” like Hegseth and the White House thought exactly that. When faced with the overwhelmingly powerful United States and the planned destruction of Iranian political, social, and religious leadership: they thought Iran would fight for “a minute”, then sue for peace. The “minute” was up a long time ago.
Whose War?
In fact, the United States seems to be the “big dumb sidekick” of Israel in the War with Iran. Just last night, Israel launched a bombing mission against the Iranian natural gas fields in South Pars. It’s another escalation: up until then both the US and Israel were “hands off” Iranian oil and gas production. After all, when it’s over, oil is the “one thing” in Iran that has value to the United States. Now Israel is blowing it up.
Israeli goals in Iran are not exactly the same as the United States. It seems that Netanyahu is forcing Trump to further commit. Like the fictional Godfather, Michael Corleone, said: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”. Israel crossed a line the US thought was inviolable.
Iran naturally attacked in kind. (Didn’t Pete give us the impression that Iran didn’t have the munitions available anymore?). Now oil production and distribution facilities on both sides of the Persian Gulf are under threat. Trump said he “didn’t know” that Israel was going to launch their mission, but promises to “…massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas field,” if the Iranians continue their attacks.
Choking Out
What’s at stake? Already the twenty-four mile wide Strait of Hormuz, where twenty percent of the world’s oil passes, is closed. No oil company, and no country, is willing to risk a $100 million ship, with two million barrels of oil, in the firing zone. Why should they? There already are burned out skeletons of tankers littering the Strait.
What Iran can do with one anti-ship missile, or a few “suicide drones”, or even a couple of suicide soldiers in a high-speed rubber dinghy, is virtually indefensible. Even using US Naval vessels as escorts doesn’t “fix” the problem. But it does put American ships and sailors directly in the line of fire.
Meanwhile, the whole world waits, as Iran (not the United States) put’s it hand’s around the twenty-four mile “neck” of oil production, and starts to squeeze. Surely this scenario has been played out in the bowels of the Pentagon thousands of times. And, clearly, the US military doesn’t have an answer. Meanwhile Americans face a twenty percent rise in gas prices. That will spread out into not just travel cost, but all the costs of goods getting to stores. In other words, it not just the Billions spent by Hegseth’s Department that’s costing us. It’s means higher prices for the necessities.
Boots On, Feet Dry
Of course, the US is now sending in an “MEU”, a Marine Expeditionary Unit, consisting of 2500 Marines, and the USS Tripoli amphibious assault ship. She’s a cross between an aircraft carrier and a helicopter carrier. What is the mission for those Marines, when they finally arrive from Okinawa? Are they going to physically control the Iranian coast along the Strait, to keep drone and personnel launched attacks from the oil tankers? Isn’t that what we (and Israel, for sure) are waiting for: US boots on the ground in Iran?
And once the Marines go “feet dry”, what commitment do we make then?
There’s a legal concept called a “slippery slope”. It means that once you make a single, pivotal decision, you have stepped onto an “icy hill”. Decisions after that slides you farther down the slope into the abyss. It’s the old (bad) joke about the Korean War. It was a “police action”, but we ran out of police and had to send in the whole US Army.
This slippery slope isn’t covered in ice. It’s covered in crude oil, oil that literally runs the world. How important is that? The US lifted the sanctions on Russian oil, allowing it to be sold worldwide, with the profits going to prosecute Russia’s war against Ukraine. And now, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, is suggesting we take the sanctions off of IRANIAN oil. That would increase the world oil supply, slightly loosening the Iranian grip. But the money from those oil sales would go back to finance the Iranian war effort.
Isn’t that “giving aid and comfort” to an enemy, the Constitutional definition of treason?
