Middle East

The current Iranian revolt.

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Iran was once an ally of the US and Israel. That ended in 1979 with the revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Since then, the Iranians have declared that we are at war. In 1979, during the revolution, they took members of the US embassy staff and the Marine Guards hostage.

The immediate cause of this action was President Jimmy Carter’s decision to allow Iran’s deposed Shah, a pro-Western autocrat who had been expelled from his country some months before, to come to the United States for cancer treatment. However, the hostage-taking was about more than the Shah’s medical care: it was a dramatic way for the student revolutionaries to declare a break with Iran’s past and an end to American interference in its affairs.

That article is typical leftist revisionism. The hostage takers were “students” only as an expression of their age. They were typical “student radicals” seen in most countries undergoing such violent upheavals.

Carter attempted a hostage rescue which was botched although the military people did their best. The US had no joint forces history and the mission was spread between Army, Air Force and Navy, none of which had worked together before.

The hostage crisis ended the day Reagan was inaugurated as president and was probably a sign that the Mullahs saw that he would not be played as they had played Carter.

Now, we have another uprising but this is directed at the regime.

A wave of spontaneous protests over Iran’s weak economy swept into Tehran on Saturday, with college students and others chanting against the government just hours after hard-liners held their own rally in support of the Islamic Republic’s clerical establishment.

The demonstrations appear to be the largest to strike the Islamic Republic since the protests that followed the country’s disputed 2009 presidential election.

Thousands already have taken to the streets of cities across Iran, beginning at first on Thursday in Mashhad, the country’s second-largest city and a holy site for Shiite pilgrims.

The protests in the Iranian capital, as well as U.S. President Donald Trump tweeting about them, raised the stakes. It also apparently forced state television to break its silence, acknowledging it hadn’t reported on them on orders from security officials.

The 2009 protests became violent but Obama offered no support.

CNN tries to spin it but Obama was silent as Iranians were brutalized and killed.

What is different now ? One, Trump is president. Recently he has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and decided to move the embassy there.

There have been many complaints and protests, mostly in the US but he has persisted. This is in stark contrast to prior presidents who were all talk, or no talk, and no action.

In addition, Obama’s shameful deal with the Iranian mullahs may have destabilized the regime as the rulers greedily gathered in the billions sent by Obama and did nothing for the people. Obama might have, totally inadvertently, destabilized the regime he was trying to support.

Maybe this is the opening round in regime change.

David Goldman has discussed Iran’s Syrian quagmire.

The Iranian regime is ready to sacrifice the most urgent needs of its internal economy in favor of its ambitions in Syria. Iran cut development spending to just one-third of the intended level as state income lagged forecasts during the three quarters ending last December, according to the country’s central bank. Iran sold US$29 billion of crude during the period, up from $25 billion the comparable period last year. The government revenues from oil of US$11 billion (655 trillion rials) were just 70% of official forecasts, and tax revenues of US$17.2 billion came in 15% below expectations.

Chaos in Iran’s financial system prevents the Iranian government from carrying a larger budget deficit.

It appears that the Obama payoff with billions of cash has been quickly absorbed by the corrupt regime and its mullahs, which may explain the revolt currently underway. We await developments.

“If we want an intact Iraq, the price of having one without fostering long-term strife across the Middle East is pushing Iran back out of Iraq.”

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J.E. Dyer: Turning point: Iran’s influence in Iraq tipping to dominance:

In 6 years, Iran has dramatically transformed the operational landscape of Mesopotamia and the Levant. For multiple purposes, she now dominates and/or can use territory more than 200 mi. closer to key locations on the Med. coast. She has also built a formidable outpost in Syria and Lebanon.

A troubling and I suspect accurate analysis. Worth reading in full.

Summer Rerun: The Calendar is Not Omnipotent

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Here’s a video of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser reacting to a Muslim Brotherhood demand that women be required to wear head coverings.  Nasser and his listeners are quite amused that anyone would propose such an idea in the modern year of 1958.  The video reminded me of this post from March 2014…

Barack Obama and John Kerry have been ceaselessly lecturing Vlad Putin to the effect that:  grabbing territory from other countries just isn’t the sort of thing one  does  in this twenty-first century, old boy.

For example, here’s  Obama: “…because you’re bigger and stronger taking a piece of the country that is not how international law and international norms are observed in the 21st century.”

And  John Kerry:  “It’s really 19th century behavior in the twenty-first century.  You just don’t invade another country on phony pretexts in order to assert your interests.”

The idea that  the mere passage of time  has some automatic magical effect on national behavior…on  human  behavior…is simplistic, and more than a little odd.  I don’t know how much history Obama and Kerry actually studied during their college years, but 100 years ago..in early 1914…there were many, many people convinced that a major war could not happen…because we were now in the  twentieth century, with international trade and with railroads and steamships and telegraph networks and electric lights and all. And just 25 years after  that, quite a few people refused to believe that  concentration camps devoted to systematic murder  could exist in the advanced mid-20th century, in the heart of Europe.

Especially simplistic is the idea that, because there had been no military territory-grabs by first-rank powers for a long time, that the era of such territory-grabs was over. George Eliot neatly disposed of this idea many years ago, in a passage in her novel Silas Marner:

The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.

Or, as Mark Steyn put it much more recently:

‘Stability’ is a surface illusion, like a frozen river: underneath, the currents are moving, and to the casual observer the ice looks equally ‘stable’ whether there’s a foot of it or just two inches. There is no status quo in world affairs: ‘stability’ is a fancy term to dignify laziness and complacency as sophistication.

Obama also frequently refers to the Cold War, and argues that it is in the past. But the pursuit of force-based territorial gain by nations long predates the Cold War, and it has not always had much to do with economic rationality. The medieval baron with designs on his neighbor’s land didn’t necessarily care about improving his own standard of living, let alone that of his peasantswhat he was after, in many cases, was mainly the ego charge of being top dog.

Human nature was not repealed by the existence of steam engines and electricity in 1914…nor even by the broad Western acceptance of Christianity in that year…nor is it repealed in 2014 by computers and the Internet or by sermons about “multiculturalism” and bumper stickers calling for “coexistence.”

American Digest just linked a very interesting analysis of the famous “long telegram” sent by George Kennan in 1947:  George Kennan, Vladimir Putin, and the Appetites of Men. In this document, Kennan argued that Soviet behavior must be understood not only through the prism of Communist ideology, but also in terms of the desire of leaders to establish and maintain personal power.

Regarding the current Russian/Crimean situation, the author of the linked article (Tod Worner) says:

In the current crisis, many will quibble about the historical, geopolitical complexities surrounding the relationship between Russia, Ukraine and Crimea. They will debate whether Crimea’s former inclusion in the Russian Empire or Crimea’s restive Russian population justifies secession especially with a strong Russian hand involved. Papers will be written. Conferences will be convened. Experts will be consulted. Perhaps these are all prudent and thoughtful notions to consider and actions to undertake. Perhaps.

But perhaps we should, like George Kennan, return to the same questions we have been asking about human nature since the beginning of time. Maybe we are, at times, overthinking things. Perhaps we would do well to step back and consider something more fundamental, something more base, something more reliable than the calculus of geopolitics and ideology…Perhaps we ignore the simple math that is often before our very eyes. May we open our eyes to the appetites of men.

Pres. Trump’s Policy Choice on Syria

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In the aftermath of Pres. Trump’s cruise missile strike on a Syrian air field used to deliver chemical weapons of mass destruction on Islamist Syrian rebels, it is both a useful and needful thing to revisit my Sept 9, 2013 post on the policy choices Pres. Obama faced then.

Choices that Pres. Trump must now address in convincing a cynical and war weary American people that Syria is indeed a massive threat to American security — and especially individual freedom — at home.

See link:

Obama, US Military Victory, and the Real “Red Line” in Syria

This blog post made the argument that America had the military means to overthrow the Assad regime with an air-sea military campaign using air-laid sea and land mines, but that “Bush Derangement syndrome” on weapons of mass destruction made it impossible for American political elites in 2013 to take action.

The following is the close from that blog post that outlined the choices Pres. Obama flinched from in 2013 and Pres. Trump now faces with the American public:

The choice that the Obama Administration faces is that nothing America does or doesn’t do will change Syria from being a terrorist supporting, failed, 3rd World state. The choice at hand is what kind of terrorist supporting state our inaction or intervention will create, and the wider consequences of that choice, especially for American freedom at home.
 
Doing nothing means we will have a Iranian/Russian/Chinese supported WMD using Syrian terror state that harbors Iranian Nuclear, Chemical and Bioweapons production facilities.
 
Acting to depose Assad means we will have an ethnic cleansing, al-Qaeda supporting, economically & politically irrational terrorist state that hates Iran and the Syrian Alawites who staffed Iran’s WMD facilities.
 
The first is an existential threat to American freedom, the second is a manageable local problem for Israel and the Turks.
 
A wide ranging break-out of WMD across the world means they will be much more readily available to terrorist organizations. The tighter surveillance and security steps the American state will need to implement in order to address that threat at home will reduce the economic vitality of the American people as the national security state crowds out more and more freedom as the cost of “security.” Leaving us all very much where Benjamin Franklin predicted…neither having or deserving either.
 
It will take principled and competent American political leadership to persuade the American people to face these facts.
 
I don’t expect it to happen.
 
Our current American political elites won’t cross the “BDS Red Line” that American public elected Pres. Obama for anytime soon. Obama’s election and actions since were in accordance with the expressed will of the American people. Only horrible events, like British Prime Minister Nevile Chamberlain’s “Peace in our time” conference selling out Czechoslovakia swiftly followed by Hitler’s repudiation of it, will let the American people hear and see reality on the other side of the “Red Line.”
 
However, the first step down the road of invoking competent & principled American leadership is laying down a rhetorical marker against the day that WMD proliferation forces the American public to listen
 
This is the marker:
 
“It’s American Freedom at Home, STUPID!”
 
‘Nuff said.

The best place to fight WMD using terrorists is overseas with the military, not at home with emergency first responders in chemical warfare slime suits cleaning up the bodies after a WMD strike.

The Bush administration refused for numerous reasons to defend its policy choices or provide known intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, allowing Senate Democratic leaders Reid, Pelosi and eventually Pres. Obama to destroy all federal government credibility on the subject.

Pres. Obama when faced with the same issue flinched from crossing his self-made WMD “RED LINE.

We will now see if President Trump is better at communicating with the American people past the “Bush Derangement Syndrome” based WMD RED LINE than Pres. Obama was.