Bomb, bomb, bomb. Bomb, bomb Iran

Friend of the Blog mike wanted a response to the latest U.S. "fucking around in the Middle East", so here goes:

1) Meh.

2) Well...meh IF this is all it is. Dropping ordnance from the low stratosphere is the ultimate in Rich Man's War. Provided your target lacks similar capabilities? You can pretty much stroll away whistling. I don't see this as much, if any, different than bombing Serbs or Libyans, and all the earlier examples of Aerial Gunboat Diplomacy didn't result in any real military escalation. That sucked for the dead and maimed people within the impact areas, but otherwise? Meh.

3) Now...in terms of "the law of war"? This is obviously criminal, the crime of "making aggressive war" for which we hanged the leaders of Germany and Japan. It's technically "unconstitutional" as well, a violation of Congress' explicit war-making power. Which, as we all know, is as dead as the dodo assuming that the GOP majorities could even be bothered to stop fucking with idiocies long enough to bother.

4) Okay. Now...if this ISN'T all it is - that is, if Tubby wasn't just showing his whole idiot ass when he burbeled about "Make Iran Great Again" - and there's a faction in the Fraudulency Aministration that genuinely wants to put GIs in Tehran? Ohfuckno. THAT's beyond insane. This country couldn't do "regime change" in Iraq, a much smaller and less fractious nation, and after fucking around we found out when the Islamic State emerged from the ruins.

5) My opinion on the whole "Israel is the most utterly worthless "U.S. ally" in history" hasn't changed, either, other than this reinforces the whole notion. That kind of pisses me off, since the original Tzahal of the Six Day War was one of my childhood heroes, and the descent of the tough sabras of 1967 into the thugs of the West Bank checkpoints makes me grieve for everyone involved.

6) Jeffrey Lewis has a nice thread on the technical issues with these strikes, as well: https://bsky.app/profile/armscontrolwonk.bsky.social/post/3lsageddlpk2l - well worth a look.

So, to sum up, these things are actually one of the less-harmful (to his own nation) examples of Trumpfuckery. Fairly pointless? Yep. Driven by "addled FOX News grampa" energy? Sure. Possibly relating to the limp-dick performance of his Big Beautiful Birthday Perade? Maybe.

The wild card now is "what happens next?"

If the mullah government falls...then what?

Who or what replaces it? I wouldn't bet that Freedom Will Reign; Iran hasn't had decent governance since the Fifties, if that.

And this whole nonsense frankly just hammers home the lessons of Libya and Ukraine versus North Korea and Israel; if you're a smaller nation and you don't want to kiss the ass of (or get pushed around by) a Great Power?

You NEED fucking nukes. Now. Yesterday. 

So whoever replaces Khameni, unless they really, really want to kiss Trump and Netanyahu's asses, need to speed-run Khameni's nuke program, which is kind of "the opposite" of what this nonsense is supposed to be about. 

But we're going to have to just wait and see "what's next"

Update 6/24: Apparently what's next is "Tubby declares "ceasefire!", and both Israel and Iran reply "WTF, dude?"

There's no upside for Netanyahu to stop belting the mullahs. The IAF has got to be struggling - my understanding is that, for one thing, their aerial tanker fleet is aging and small - but anything that keeps the Israeli public angry and scared keeps his ass out of court/jail.

Iran? I'd sure they'd love to nope out of this. They're getting mauled. But, as I noted above, if they want ANY hope of not becoming the pawn of every nuclear power with a grudge (or a grift) they still HAVE to keep the hope of nuclear retaliation alive.

My guess is that both Iran and Israel will reach a sort of "peace of exhaustion" and Fatso can claim credit for that. But it won't be "peace" in any sense of the term. And what comes after that? I have no idea. 

Make stupid wars. Collect stupid prizes

That the Trump Klown Kabinet could fuck up a military wet dream?

Color me shocked by that. Shocked!

One of the most interesting takes on this is Garrett Graff's piece here:  

It sums up the multivariate fuckups, idiocies, and "scandals" (if such a thing can be applied to these shameless nitwits - you have to have the ability to feel shame to be "scandalized", and these garden tools have none) involved in the now-apparently-called "Signalgate" nonsense.

I don't really give a shit. These people have done and will do worse. This is just another Tuesday in Yemen and the worthless Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo Administration. Oh, wait, more dead people? Yawn.

No.

It's what it exposes about the pure, crystalline stupidity that has been the U.S. "policy" in the Middle East, Trumpian and otherwise.

Seriously...what the fuck did these nimrods think a dozen bombs, smart or otherwise, would do in Yemen?

The place has been a clusterfuck since, well...in the modern era? The Sixties, when the place split into two north-south halves and proceeded to indulge in various bloody debates over who should be the boss of whom.

Throw in the usual - corruption, poverty, famine - and you've got the classic Middle Eastern recipe for misery.

So how does hucking a dozen or so kinetic weapons into random apartment buildings "help" with that?

Hint: it doesn't.

This was, apart from the awesome level of bureaucratic incompetence - people on their iPhones in the Kremlin cafeteria, random journos in on the chat, schoolboy emojis - the ultimate in worthlessly performative "war". This was the equivalent of the story in Tony Herbert's Vietnam memoir where he runs down the list of target effects and comes across one labeled "emplacements destroyed" and wonders how you "destroy" a hole by blowing it into a bigger hole.

For a couple of cool million in ordnance, fuel, equipment wear, and personnel costs this nonsense only made the Yemeni rubble bounce. 

I'm sure Elon Musk will get on this "waste" just as soon as he gets done kicking all us "fraudsters" off Social Security.

WASF.

All the troubles in the world, January 2024 edition

 Couple of quick thoughts today.

1. Israel vs South Africa in the International Court of Justice

A quick reminder that the ICJ, along with a lot of the other "international law" and "law of war" institutions are effectively creations of the last truly horrific global episode of mass death, the Second World War.

That's why, for example, things like the bombings of London during the Blitz, Dresden, the fire-raids over Japan in 1944 and '45 are now officially the "war crimes" that Curtis LeMay admitted he'd have been hung for had Japan won the Pacifc War.

The supposed key is "proportionality". Even in war, if someone attacks you without provocation ('making aggressive war", also a war crime that George Bush could easily have been prosecuted for going into Iraq in 2003...) you're fully justified in hitting them hard.

But not TOO hard. You can't firebomb their cities and kill millions of their people to get the political and military leaders who war-crimed you when they attacked. You've gotta try and kill those people without butchering job-lots of their countrypeople who had nothing to do with the original crime.

What I think is "wrong" with the ICJ case that South Africa is bringing is that it accuses the Israelis of "genocide".

I don't think for a moment that if the Netanyahu government could genocide the Arabic former residents and descendants of those residents of the Ottoman province of Palestine they wouldn't because they're just nice guys.

They're vicious ethno-supremacists, who have utterly embraced the idea that only they are truly human and the Palestinians are some sort of two-legged humanoid vermin. Don't be surprised; had you asked a typical frontier American anytime between 1750 and 1900 of their opinion of the various native groups they were pushing out of their vicinity you'd have gotten a damn near identical answer.

The Gaza "campaign" is just the hot phase of the war that Israel has been fighting against the Pals since the mid-1940s. Including the long march to apartheid since 1967 - something that a South African would be expected to be brutally familiar with.

The equally vicious bastards who engineered the attack on 10/7 know that better than anyone, and that was their plan all along; to rip the smile off the pretty Israeli girl soldier and bare the teeth behind it. They intended to bait the Israelis into what they're doing. Netanyau's people responded like the junkyard dogs they are, and here we are.

The problem I see is this.

What Israel is doing in Gaza is clearly a war crime. It's not proportionate to kill tens of thousands of innocent women and kiddies who happen to be in the vicinity of war criminals. It's not within the bounds of whatever the fuck "international law" is to be doing ethnic cleansing. We - the U.S., that is - bombed the fuck out of the Serbs for that, remember?

But I don't think it rises to the level of "genocide".

So I think the ICJ will rule in favor of Israel.

Which, as Juan Cole points out here, is troublesome just because "(i)f the justices fail in their duty to uphold International Humanitarian Law in this instance, the failure could be fatal to what is left of the legitimacy of international institutions, throwing us back into the jungle."

I note that, per the BBC today, Israel's "response" to the charge is that they are acting in "self-defense".

I'll keep that in mind the next time my neighbor takes a swing at me. Because when the cops show up at the smoking ashes of his house I can point to the ruins, the corpses of his family, and explain how I was acting in self-defense. 

I'll be curious to see how that'll fly.

2) The airstrikes in Yemen

Bret Devereaux has an excellent breakdown of why a) this is entirely expected and - as opposed to the Israeli clusterfuck we've just discussed - is entirely within the bound of international law, and b) likely to lead to a difficult and troubling escalation.

The real problem is the methods.

Airstrikes are a big, blunt hammer. As John Paul Vann said about how they were useless in Vietnam, the best weapon in counterinsurgency is a knife. You try and "pacify" an insurgency from fifteen hundred feet AGL all you're likely to do is piss off the surviving civilians whose homes, businesses, churches and schools you flattened.

But the alternative is doing a Shores of Tripoli sort of punitive expedition, which in the IED-and-cheap-automatic-weapon-casualty-averse world of Western powers is a nonstarter. There's no way for an Anglo-American landing party to do an O'Bannion in Yemen without a hellishly high risk of losses. 

And if so the Anglo-American public, who in general has no fucking idea where Yemen even is, much less the issues of freedom of navigation, the Saudi-Yemeni War, what's going on in Israel and Gaza, and the geopolitical balance between the Saudi-Gulf States and Iran, would rouse from the latest episode of "90 Day Fiance" in wroth and pillory their various governments for...well, something.

Decereaux sums things up neatly, if ominously:

"So on the one hand, the Houthis are unlikely to back down over just a few airstrikes – they’ve shown tremendous resiliency in the past against air campaigns. On the other hand, Houthis have endangered the vital national interests of many countries which are substantially stronger than they are. Historically speaking, piracy and indiscriminate trade disruption were not long-term successful strategies and states have been willing, when necessary, to employ extreme levels of violence to make those activities stop. I don’t think that has changed. Unfortunately, many of the people of Yemen – who have little say in what the Houthis do – are likely to suffer as the Houthis find out why is has been, historically speaking, a terrible idea to indiscriminately try to close down the seas."

Talk about eating soup with a knife.

Into the Ghetto

 

As an addendum to my post below, a reminder: this, I think, is Hamas' goal.

My Bride is right; the latest military action is hopeless militarily. It cannot possibly "win" in the conventional sense. Any more than the airliners of September 2001 could "win" anything.

It can do what those airliners did, and what this photo does; firmly affix the image of a brute with a rifle destroying a helpless innocent family. Making that brute a hissing and a byword for horror.

Over at Nancy Nall's joint I said that, and was called out for cheap-shotting Israeli soldiers.

I replied:

"When you swing a butcher’s cleaver, you should not be surprised when people call you a butcher.

When Israel made the political choice to treat their Arab subjects like the apartheid regime treated its black citizens, it chose the mantle of apartheid.

When Israel goes into Gaza it will have to use the exact same methods the Germans used in Warsaw in 1943 and the Soviets in Berlin in 1945. It makes them neither Nazis nor Communists, but it will make them monsters in the way the SS in Warsaw and the Red Army in Berlin were monsters.

That’s not a cheap shot. That’s war, which, as Bill Sherman reminded us, is all Hell. And urban war, as I remind you, is a specially awful Hell that earns the maker the kind of bloodyhanded mantle that stains for generations.

That, I think, is Hamas’ entire intention. They want to generate a photo as iconic as the infamous one of the German soldiers herding the little kid with his hands up down the Warsaw street. They want the Arab world to associate that with Israel.

Feel free to call it what you like. But if Israel goes ahead with what I’m sure they will, that’s what they risk; becoming not just apartheid Afrikaaners but joining history’s great butchers."

And, thinking on this further, I see no reason to alter so much as a syllable of that reply.

Mr. Thucydides on Line 1...

I want to add a note on just how geopolitically moronic this is.

Leaving aside the purely moral questions of murder-by-drone (and I suspect that a drone is more likely to have been the Angel of Death here rather than an Army aircraft...) any politico-military act by a Great Power can and should be judged by the cost versus the benefit of the action. So, let's look at those here; first, what are the benefits?

1. Taking a powerful Iranian piece off the board.

Fred Kaplan has a pretty good summary of the larger view of this action here (he also calls it an "act of war" eliding, I think, the reality that the U.S. and Iran have been in a cold war since Trump's abrogation of the JCPOA). Bottom line is that the Dead Guy was effectively the combined Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the CINC of Special Operations for Iran. This was a decapitation strike and, as such, a successful one.

2. Reminding everyone, especially everyone in the Middle East, and especially everyone in Iran, that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Not that anyone really needed that reminder. But this is an in-your-face example of the Ledeen Doctrine. As such it raises as many questions as it answers, and we'll discuss that below. But there's no question that this is a sort of "you're not safe anywhere" gesture to anyone thinking about giving Uncle Sammy the side-eye.

3. Aaaaand...that kinda runs me out of "benefits".

Seriously. I'm not sure what else this does, other than ratchets up the US-Iran cold war.

OK, so...what are the (direct) costs?

1. Rachets up the US-Iran cold war.

Which in itself isn't a good thing, but my real concern is that it could lead to a US-Iran hot war, and there's simply no "good" result of that.

Look, the United States at this phase of it's existence is a "status quo" Power. Stability and regularity are its friends, chaos and uncertainty its foes. Like any status-quo Great Power, it benefits when it can work with smaller regional powers to exert its influence. When it's forced to respond to troubles thrown out by regional instability it risks - as it has found - getting mired in endless sapping brushfire wars and profitless imperial adventures. Status-quo Powers are not usually good at "responding", they're not designed to be nimble or flexible. They do best when they can surround themselves with buffers of client and proxy states that can be bribed, wheedled, intimidated, or some combination of all three, into doing the Power's dirty work for them.

What We the People should have learned from the last 19 years is that "regime change" in politically un- or under-developed polities is unlikely to produce more stability. The Clintonistas tried to "save" Somalia and just knocked it further into the tules. The Bushies knocked the Saddam cork off the Iraq bottle and produced the unholy clusterfuck that this move is part of. The Obamites went along with defenestrating Ghaddafi in Libya and produced an even-more-failed-state.

Removing the mullahs from Iran won't produce a "better" Iran (from a US policy standpoint). Whoever follows is going to be 1) Persian, and, as such, convinced of Iran's place as the regional middleweight power, and 2) reminded that the US has not been a good thing for Iran since back in the 1950s - he, she, or they will remember Mossadegh and the Shah and the Gulf War and, now, this.

2. Replaces the Dead Bad Guys with...some other bad guys we don't know.

The Trumpkins make much of how the Dead Guy was a Bad Guy, but...c'mon. Seriously? This was fucking Napoleon? How "irreplaceable" a military-political genius was this joker? It's not like the IRGC is some sort of modern-day Alexander's Companions. They've made trouble in the Middle East and...what? Like it's that difficult to make trouble in the Middle East? Like it takes some sort of 12-dimension-chess-master? The cemeteries are full of irreplaceable men.

And - as we found with Ghaddafi and Saddam - sometimes the people who replace the guys you kill are madder, badder, and more dangerous to know.

I said this succeeded as a decapitation strike. But who knows? It may turn out to be a "Yamamoto shootdown"; a little revenge drama that has no impact on the military organization it's targeting. Only this one wasn't in the middle of buttrump nowhere Southwest Pacific but at the freaking Baghdad Airport, which brings us to...

3. Punks the Baghdad government and every Iraqi regardless of political affiliation.

Imagine how you would feel if your neighbor kicked your door down, walked into your kitchen, and shot dead the guest your cousin had invited in.

You might not like the guest, or your cousin all that much...but that? That's a punch in your face. That's utterly contemptuous of you and your home. The neighbor has, to put it bluntly, just shown that you are his bitch. If you don't respond with force, well...you are.

It's one thing to know that the strong do what they can. It's another thing to have your nose rubbed in it.

Seriously, I have no idea how the current government in Baghdad survives this if they don't make every American persona non grata and order the whole nutroll out of their country within 30 days. Hell, you'd think that they'd demand the extradition of the drone operator and everyone in their chain of command on murder charges. They won't...but why not? I mean, it kinda WAS premeditated murder.

3. Bogs the US even further in the Middle Eastern/Sunni-Shia War of Religion mire.

The one thing that everyone here has tried to make a Trump Positive is his supposed longing to #endendleswars. How the hell does this do anything to do that? I mean...you want to whack this dude? Fine. You can't find a way to get him to turn up in the Baghdad Marriot with a fatal heart attack, two labradoodles and a boy toy wearing a full wetsuit and stripper heels? Instead you choose the most ridiculously in-your-face fuck-you to every Masud and Amina between Gibraltar and the Celebes?

-----------

We've had discussions here that always seem to come back to the "Well, sure, Trump talks bugnuts shit, but that's just Trump..." thing. But I think this is a perfect example of WHY it's a problem. This doesn't strike me as something that was the result of some sort of deep foreign policy analysis. This feels like Trump gets pissed off at these pesky little Persians fucking with HIS embassy and making the news like he was a girly-man Jimmy Carter sorta wuss and calls down to his CIA Iran desk and says "Goddamn it, find me some Iranian sonofabitch to kill!" so he can look Strong and Commanding. This really is Foreign Policy by Tweet.

I'm not trying to say that he's somehow breaking U.S. Middle Eastern policy. That's been a shitshow since we stepped into the French and British colonial shoes after 1945.

But the feckless bastard has found ways to make it an even bigger shitshow, and after Bush I wasn't sure that was even possible.

What a fecking mess.

Update 1/4/20: Oh, for fuck's sake...

OK, so...the part where this whole idiocy is "Foreign Policy by Tweet"?

1) Fifty-two hostages? The 1979-1980 "Hostage Crisis"? Seriously?

2) "Iranian culture"? You're advertising that you're gonna war crime Iran by targeting cultural heritage sites? Why not bomb Coventry Cathedral, too, bubba, so you can bag the sweep. Jesus wept.

3) No more threats, hunh? I guess you're King of the Playground now, Spunky.

IF one of my troops had actied this stupid I'd have had the sonofabitch pulling extra duty until he ETSed. Since the POTUS is in the chain of command,...

Update 1/5/20: No, duh.

Like I said; this was fucking inevitable.

Anyone but a complete goddamn moron or goddamn Donnie Trump - but I repeat myself - could have seen this coming. KNEW this was coming the minute the warhead of the Reaper missile detonated. Does it mean that the GIs will have to do a Saigon-embassy-un-ass the joint? Maybe. The Baghdad government knows damn well that the GIs are the only militarily effective force in their country, and that if the GIs go it'll be a matter of time before the Sunni rebels re-rebel (the ridiculous Islamic State panic masked the reality that, in Iraq, anyway, the IS was more-or-less just the continuation of the Sunni resistance to the US occupation that began in 2003.

But the hell with tomorrow; today the Iraqi pols have only one choice, and that's between giving Uncle Sammy the finger, or being his tool. No Iraqi pol is stupid enough to think that being a Quisling is going to get him anywhere after this past week. Trump has made it cleat that his entire geopolitical approach to the Middle East is summed up in the sort of thing one of his goobers would wear on a T-shirt at one of his Nuremburg rallies; "Kick the ass. Take their gas."

IF I thought that Trump was serious about #endingendlesswars, that he'd simply tell the guys to grab a hat and not let the door hit them in the ass?

Fine.

But whacking Solemani and sending paratroops to Kuwait and not even feinting towards repealing the AUMFs?

Nope. He's not even trying. He's pulling your leg just like he pulled the poor bastards' legs who "invested" in his fake university. That's who he is. That's what he does.

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSF.

The Grifters and The Mark

Buried under the flaming dumpster that is the Trump Shutdown was a pretty remarkable bit of policymaking that took place in Cairo the other day. SecState Pompeo delivered a little oration that was remarkable either for its' 1) mendacity, or 2) delusion. What fascinates me is that I'm honestly not sure which it represents.

You can read the full text of the remarks at the link, but the gist of Pompeo's remarks was that:

1. The U.S. is, and always has been, a "force for good" in the Middle East,
2. That Iran, OTOH, is massively evil and stinky and bad.
3. That Obama was almost as bad and stinky as Iran because he tippy-toed around in the Middle East while "apologizing" for bad U.S. behavior,
4. Unlike Trump, who is a real Man and loves him some muscular Christian war against eeeeevil Islamist terrorism and Iran,
5. That Real Muslims like y'all love, too!

Fred Kaplan sums up the problems with this nonsense better than I can, so I can't do better than quote him:

“America is a force for good in the Middle East,” Pompeo said at the start of his speech. But to the extent he defined good, it was solely in terms of helping certain allies (mainly Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) while hurting certain enemies (ISIS, terrorists, and especially Iran). There was no recognition of complexity: Nothing was said about the Saudi bombing of Yemen (only Iran was painted as a force for bad, contrary to human-rights organizations); nothing was said about Trump’s divisions with Europe over Iran; nothing was said (one way or the other) about the role of Russia or Turkey in the Syrian conflict, or the Saudi murder of a U.S.-based journalist.

Obama may have been naïve in hoping that the pursuit of common ground and mutual interests might soothe the ancient tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims or upend the chessboard of Great Game geopolitics that have played on those tensions for centuries. But Pompeo’s speech makes clearer than ever that Trump has no interest in trying to soothe anything: He wants to take sides in the conflict, join the war—but even here, he has no idea how to do so with authority or effectiveness. He is indulging in partisan mythologies that bear little relation to the actual past and shed little insight on a fruitful way forward."

My question, though, is this - is this really "indulging in partisan mythologies"?

Or does this joker - and, by inference, his Orange Master - truly believe this nonsense?

I think the difference makes a difference, and that, in turn, goes back to the issue k about the difference between Trump and the Trumpkins words, and deeds.

If this Pompeo word salad is simply an attempt to blow more smoke up the Arab world's backside, that's one thing. Propaganda and blather can be simply the bodyguard of lies that can be re-arranged, or abandoned, as needed. A realistic Middle Eastern policy can be crafted with one hand whilst the other performs silly magic tricks to distract the rubes Arab "street".

But the precedent here is the Bushies. I truly believe that the bulk of the Bush cabal really, truly believed their neo-conservative nonsense about smoking guns and mushroom clouds and letting freedom reign. The cynics, the Cheneys, were the minority. I think the bulk of the Bush coterie were captured by their own rhetorical disinformation and air-castle fantasies.

The trouble with sussing out the difference is the long history of piss-poor U.S. geopolitical strategic thinking. It's damn deadly difficult to determine whether the mistakes are deliberate and caused by a boneheaded idee fixee' driven into the policymakers heads by some political philosophy (whether Ayn Randian free market fantasies or "liberal interventionist" fantasies really makes no nevermind...), or whether they were simply mistakes driven by poor intelligence analyses and craptacular institutional structures of the U.S. geopolitical decisionmaking apparatus.

I think it makes a big difference whether these people are the fools, or the fooled.

But I'm damned if I can figure out which.