Iran: the REAL solution
STRONG HINT: Don’t let’s anybody get sidetracked or distracted by blockades, negotiations, or other pointless pettifoggery. There remains one, and only one, correct answer to the nagging Iran question, and it’s been the same for nigh on fifty (50) years. To wit:
To Blockade or Not Blockade, That Is the Question. But There’s Only One Answer: REGIME CHANGE.
We’ve gone from 4D chess to 4D blockades.Will it work?
The New York Post says yes: “Trump Brilliantly Calls Iran’s Bluff — With His Own Strait of Hormuz Blockade”
Bloomberg says no: “The Hormuz Blockade Is a Throwdown the U.S. Can’t Win”
Question for the readers: Which outlet is right and which one is wrong?
Answer from the writer: Yes.
The New York Post is correct: Trump’s blockade of a blockade deprives Iran of profiting from ransom payments and/or selling any oil, thus increasing its economic suffering. It weakens one of the mullah’s biggest bargaining chips.
If you assume that Iran is negotiating in good faith, weakening the mullahs’ bargaining position makes tactical sense.
But Bloomberg is also correct: It’s extraordinarily unlikely that Trump can blockade his way to victory, especially in the short term. More likely than not, the blockade would have to last months — if not years — to bear fruit, and for a candidate who ran on the platform of “no more forever wars,” that’s not an attractive option.
Besides, the economic pain will be shouldered unevenly, with the nations that actually care about the welfare of their people screaming far louder than the mullahs. Iran doesn’t mind suffering — as long as everyone else suffers, too.
If you assume that Iran is negotiating in bad faith, a blockade of a blockade is an incremental tit-for-tat escalation that increases everyone’s pain points without bringing us any closer to a real solution.
In other words, it’s a waste of time.
Perhaps a smarter strategy is to hit the mullahs with a threat they dread far more than a blockade. I’m talking about the two words that have horrified Americans since the Iraq War of the early 2000s: regime change.
But not Iraqi-style regime change, where we plant U.S. soldiers overseas and try to build a new government from the ground up in a foreign land. That’s regime building, not regime change.
I simply mean smashing the current regime.
Under President George W. Bush, American foreign policy operated under the “Pottery Barn rule,” which meant, as Secretary of State Colin Powell explained, “If you break it, you own it.”
But why? What prevents us from breaking it and simply walking away?
What’s wrong with regime change WITHOUT regime building?
Egg-zackly, precisely so, and just what I (perhaps mistakenly) assumed the plan had been right from the start. Alas, with his useless “negotiations,” his unconvincing bluster about “destroying civilizations,” and now his “blockade of a blockade” strategery, Trump seems to be wandering farther and farther afield from the lone bone-simple solution that addresses all the concerns any sensible sort might have about the still-intact Mad Mullah regime: nuclear weapons; support for terrorism; menacing anti-American and -Israel with both rhetoric and physical action; the bloody suppression and/or mass murder of anti-regime protesters; et al ad nauseum.
It still shocks me that, after a fine start which saw a cpl/three waves of Ayatollahs righteously taken out by a shitstorm of High Explosive Death From Above, Trump inexplicably halted the bombing and floundered about in search of avenues more acceptable to the namby-pamby Jurassic Media consumers of the world, resulting in the continued survival of the selfsame Mullah goobermint which had started all the trouble way back in Jimmeh Peanuthead’s day.
I say again: if Trump pulls out, declares “victory,” and leaves any kind of entity called “the Islamic Republic of Iran” still intact behind him, then the whole misbegotten enterprise was a complete waste of time, money, materiel, and American lives. The Mullahs must go. There is no acceptable alternative—NONE.
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