Category Archives: defense policy

Be Nice if they Can Get It

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The headline and subheadline demonstrate a dangerous misunderstanding.

Iran’s War-Shattered Economy Means It Has an Urgent Reason to Negotiate
Damage done by US and Israeli attacks will take years to repair, putting pressure on Tehran to seek financial relief in talks.

No, it doesn’t. The claim here egregiously wrongly assumes that those in control of Iran, those reigning over the Iranian people, think like we do. Assuredly, they do not. Their view of this war is that they’re not dead yet, so they haven’t lost. They consider themselves winning, and they will consider themselves to have won (and here, they’d be correct by Western standards, too) if the fighting stops with them still in charge (their primary war aim) and in a position to continue pursuing nuclear weapons (their close second war aim).

Full stop.

Yes, it will take years to rebuild the economic and infrastructure damage done them, but the only economic and infrastructure functions that interest them are those necessary to their nuclear weapons development and building program. The rest, that which would ease the lot of the Iranian people, are of no interest to these rulers. That narrow view greatly shortens the timeline for repairing and rebuilding.

There is one parallel with Western values that does obtain here, more or less. The news writer had this in the piece at the first link:

The US blockade of Iranian ports will further strain the country’s budget.

So, too, was our own Revolutionary War a strain on the allied 13 colonies’ budgets. They ran out of money and just freely and willy-nilly printed up paper dollars, with consequent runaway inflation and refusal of so many suppliers, colonial and foreign, to accept that paper. This is the meaning of “not worth a Continental.” The colonies stayed in the fight, though, for eight (more or less, depending on when you mark the beginning and the end of the war itself) long years, ultimately outlasting more than defeating the British. There is one critical difference, though. The colonies and the colonials suffered that as a free people who were in charge of their destinies. Iran’s despotic rulers are the ones in charge of Iran’s their destinies, and they don’t care about their subjects.

Sure, getting financial relief would be welcome to Iran’s despots, but that’s nothing more than a happy side effect for them.

I’ve quoted Rafsanjani before; here he is again:

If one day, he [Rafsanjani] said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.

A European Plan to Hold Open the Strait of Hormuz

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They’re finally getting around to talking about setting something up—after declining to help force it open in the first place. That would be too dangerous for fragile European militaries, they say. Might get poked in the nose. Or as French President Emmanuel Macron so carefully euphemistically put it,

…reopening the strait by force would be “unrealistic[.]”

What’s really interesting, though (as an aside, I do wonder why those nations have military establishments if they’re not intended to fight), is who has been invited to this diplomatic coffee klatch and who has not (of course the US has not, but that’s not the interesting part). They’ve invited the People’s Republic of China and India. But they’ve apparently chosen not to invite the Republic of Korea, Japan, or Australia, each of whom also has a serious interest in the free flow of cargo, oil, and natural gas through the Strait. Of course, they chose not to invite the Republic of China; that would offend the PRC, and Europe is much too fearful of the PRC to do anything that would even remotely hint at that.

Saudis Want Negotiations

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Saudia Arabia is worried that the Houthis, a terrorist client of Iran, will close the Bab al-Mandeb and thereby block Saudi oil shipments from leaving the southern end of the Red Sea enroute to India, Asia, and points east. They fear an Iranian push on the Houthis in response to President Donald Trump’s (R) move to block the Strait of Hormuz against Iranian oil leaving, ships entering with a view to loading up on Iranian oil, and ships exiting that have paid the Iranian protection money.

Never mind that ships leaving with non-Iranian oil or other cargo—including the Saudis’ oil—and that have not paid the protection vig are free of the Trumpian blockade.

Against all that, the Saudis want Trump to go back to negotiating with the Iranian terrorists. Negotiate, the Saudis want, anything, anything to keep the Bab al-Mandeb open. Please.

No. Trump’s blockade must stay in place, and the destruction of the IRGC’s small boat fleet must resume forthwith, along with the resumed destruction of Iranian missiles and rockets and their launchers, along with the destruction of Iran’s drone inventory, launchers, and ability to manufacture any weapons of any type. It’s not possible to have meaningful negotiations with terrorists.

If the Saudis really are that married to negotiations and attendant terrorist accommodations, let them reach their own accommodation with the Houthi terrorists. Alternatively, the Saudis could get serious about fighting and destroying the Houthis themselves in place of their years of desultory, perfunctory potshots at the occasional Houthi enclave.

The Strait and Victory

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There is a two week cease fire more or less in progress in the US-Iran portion of the US/Israeli war against Iran, one that is subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has not done so.

On Wednesday [after the cease fire nominally went into effect], Iran told mediators that it would limit the number of ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz to around a dozen a day and charge tolls. The Iranian navy also told ships anchored nearby that they still needed Iran’s permission to cross the strait. “If any vessel tries to transit without permission, [it] will be destroyed,” according to a recording reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The White House is insisting that what the Iranian personnel say in public is radically different from what they’re saying in private. Either way, though, those are just words. Actions matter, and so far those actions include a lack of tanker and cargo ship movement through the strait beyond a few that have paid as much as $2 million in protection money to the Iranians. That’s not a COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING.

Meanwhile, Iran is attempting after the fact to alter the terms of the cease fire to include Lebanon and Israel’s campaign against the Iranian terrorist surrogate Hezbollah. That that’s a separate matter is unimportant to Iran as its personnel, once again, welch on an agreement, tap things along, and stall, stall, stall.

That Iran’s military capacity has been devastated is true enough.

…strikes destroyed roughly 80% of Iran’s air defenses, more than 1,500 targets, as well as more than 450 ballistic missile storage facilities and 800 one-way attack drone storage facilities. The operation has also decimated Iran’s defense industrial base, Caine said, including shattering more than 80% of its missile factories.

But those numbers are just the modern body count, and they’re just as meaningless without context. How do those losses compare with what Iran started with? How many of those missiles, rockets, drones, and launch systems does it have left? How many of those small boats? How much of its industrial base is left?

The current situation seems similar to that of the Rome-Carthage wars, particularly the second one. From Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Fall of Carthage:

Despite their appalling losses, the string of humiliating defeats, the defections of some Italian allies, and the continuing malevolent presence of Hannibal’s army in Italy, the Romans simply refused to come to terms with the Carthaginians…. They were then able to beat the enemy on every other front and force the undefeated Hannibal to evacuate Italy…. The Carthaginians expected a war to end in a negotiated peace. The Romans expected a war to end in total victory or their own annihilation, something which no contemporary state had the resources to achieve.

We’re not dead yet, say the Iranian negotiators, so we haven’t lost.

It’s time for them to die.

Bah—Who Needs National Defense?

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A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday Letters section was unhappy with the spending proposal for and attendant priority given to defense spending. He didn’t seem to see any need for spending there.

I read with some alarm the enthusiastic commentary in your editorial regarding the proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget….
… Diverting expenditures to military weapons and away from social needs—housing, food and medical care—isn’t sensible nor is it possible, given current domestic needs.

What isn’t sensible is not funding our ability to defend ourselves in a world of many powerful enemy nations, at least one of which has sworn to surpass and dominate us.

Any free nation needs to be able to defend itself, or it won’t be free for long, and all the social needs—housing, food, and medical care—it gets, such as they might be, will be dictated by that nation’s conqueror. National defense must be that nation’s government’s first priority.

I decline to live under a People’s Republic of China tyranny. Or to see my nation simply destroyed by a nuclear armed Iran that has no other goal aside from visiting the same extermination on Israel.