What is it Good For?       

Absolutely nothing, some have written regarding war, but it strikes me that it is at least sometimes necessary. WWII was in that category, I would say, once Germany and Japan got it started. But it’s hard to tell when that point is reached. Britain and France clearly waited too long back in the 30s, but hindsight is easy.

History is full of wars that seem unnecessary in hindsight – or at least unwise – started by various nations for various claimed reasons. What is shared by all wars is death and destruction. A relatively new aspect of this, on full display in the current war in the Middle East, is that so many of the deaths that accompany the destruction are of civilians. Modern military strategy and hardware makes it easy for the military to stand back and destroy things without losing many of their own personnel. Richer nations are better at this, as the requisite technology is expensive, and the US is one of the best at it. However, what the Ukraine/Russia and current Middle East war have also demonstrated is that drone technology makes ‘stand back and blow shit up’ a more viable strategy for less rich combatants, too. I don’t know if that is a good thing or not.

I suspect this all makes it easier to start a war. The potential to do a lot of damage without having to witness flag-draped coffins coming home makes war an easier choice for national leaders, particularly in a democracy. I think that was a key factor in the willingness of the Bush II Administration to start the ‘shock and awe’ Gulf War II.

That conflict went on for a very long time, and of course the flag-draped coffins did start coming home eventually, although not in anything like the numbers generated by the Vietnam or Korean wars.

Memories of all that came back to me when the US and Israel began their attacks on Iran some weeks ago. I felt no sadness at the news of the death of a Supreme Leader who had so recently overseen the killing of some tens of thousands of his own people for the sin of massing to protest his government. But I still felt a big dose of – WTF?

We’ve heard many things from members of the US administration at different points. The calls to the Iranian people to ‘rise up’ against their leaders seemed to me a fantasy. First, what reason was there to believe they could now effectively do that when they were cut down in the streets for trying simply to protest only weeks ago? Second, what reason is there to think they want to in the face of attacks from outsiders that are – inevitably – killing their friends and relatives?

History Lesson 1: Poor white dirt farmers did the overwhelming majority of the dying for the Confederacy during the US Civil War. They hated slavery more than most Northerners, not out of moral compunctions, but because that institution robbed them of a means of feeding their families. None the less, they fought and died for the Confederacy with considerable bravery because the goddam Yankees had invaded their homes. People do that.

Niall Ferguson, a born-again Trumpist, wrote an article in The Free Press on Feb 28, asserting confidently that this would not be a long war. To quote him directly – ‘One thing I can confidently promise about the US-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic: it will not last long’.

History Lesson 2: That was precisely the belief on all sides at the start of WWI. It is something like Military Principle No. 1 that ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy’. (Helmuth von Moltke, 1871, I believe). Ferguson is supposed to be a historian, and here we are now with the Straits of Hormuz all but closed and the world price of oil dancing around $US100/barrel.

The next two articles by Ferguson in The Free Press were titled ‘Could This be the Start of WWIII?’ and then ‘This is How the Iran War goes Global’.

So much for ‘it will not last long’, I guess.

DJT at one point a bit after this war started said it could only end with the ‘Unconditional Surrender’ of Iran. It is doubtful the US President could recite any of the occasions in the USA’s past where it demanded ‘unconditional surrender’ of an enemy.

One was U S Grant in the aforementioned Civil War. Indeed, it was eventually said that was what his initials stood for. He insisted on those terms because he (and Lincoln) had determined that the Southern combatants were traitors, and because he and W T Sherman had by 1864 built a military machine that the South had no hope of matching. The North had simply out-produced and out-manned the South, Grant had Lee in a corner, and Sherman was burning and pillaging his way across the heartland of the South. The war was clearly headed to a Union victory.

Another case was in WWII, when Roosevelt, Churchill and (sadly) Stalin agreed that those would be the only terms on which they would end WWII. Again, once the US had entered the war, those three powers commanded wartime economies that Germany and Japan could never match. WWII was also clearly going to end with an Allied victory, so they could declare how it must end. The same Allies had also put some 8million military boots on the ground in Europe, North Africa and the Pacific.

Now, I read in the WSJ that Trump is ‘seeking a dealmaker’ in Iran while the Iranian government says that no talks with the US are occurring or planned.

Here is a quote from the WSJ story:

The U.S. sent Iran a 15-point plan to end the war, which centers largely around previous Trump administration demands of Tehran. Iran’s military spokesman suggested the U.S. was negotiating with itself to get out of a “strategic defeat.”

Um, you don’t send a ’15-point plan’ to an adversary of which you are demanding ‘unconditional surrender’. And from what I can tell from reading the news about what is happening in the Middle East at this writing, ‘Iran’s military spokesman’ is saying things much closer to the facts than anything DJT has said recently.

I also read that Israel has killed the Iranian naval commander responsible for blocking the Straits of Hormuz. Does anyone think that will re-open the Straits to oil tankers? The Supreme Leader was killed on Day One, and that did not stop the war. Iran is a nation with a gang government, like modern Russia and China and the old Soviet Union. It is run by a clan in which there is always another clan member available to step up. (Being a gang nation, the one who steps up may have had to kill – or ‘purge’ – some of the others, that’s how gangs work.) The Supreme Leader was quickly replaced by one of his sons (a family business kind of thing) and the naval commander will be replaced by another naval officer – perhaps not his son. I don’t think you can kill the entire clan. Perhaps they are going to try.

Just today, after I had already written two drafts of this post, another article appeared in the Free Expression section of the WSJ, by one Matthew Continetti.

It ends with the following:

Even as the White House pursues negotiations to end war with Iran, U.S. ground forces are moving into position near the Persian Gulf. Marines, special forces and paratroopers will give the president options. They can be used to secure Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium, open the Strait, guarantee freedom of navigation and fulfill his objective of ending the threat from the Islamic Republic.

The White House says Mr. Trump will “unleash hell” if Iran doesn’t accept a deal. Sometimes hell isn’t enough. The president must see Operation Epic Fury through to a successful conclusion—and finish what he started.

Mr. Continetti’s article leans heavily on the US’s failure to remove Saddam Hussein in Gulf War I in urging the US to ‘finish the job’ in Iran. He mentions the failed campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan in Gulf War II, but does not seem to see the lessons of those conflicts as relevant to the current situation. Why Mr. Continetti believes that this time it will be possible to finish what Trump started is not at all clear.

It is a terrible thing to start a war. It is a sin of the highest order to start a war, to begin sowing death and destruction, without a clear-eyed assessment of what you want to accomplish, and a carefully constructed plan to achieve it. If the USA went into this with such a plan, it has indeed not survived contact with the enemy. I see no reason to believe Iran will ‘surrender’ in any common meaning of that word, and the Middle East will be a bigger ongoing mess than it was before the bombing started.

I hate to write it, but this looks to me like another ignorance-based major military fuck-up by the USA. The list of those is already much too long.  I do hope that I am wrong, but that is at this point only a hope.