Iran will yield or be beaten into submission

As this is written we are awaiting confirmation that the United States and Israel will escalate their attacks on Iran which has continued to respond frivolously to demands that it give up its ambition to become a nuclear military power and cease to finance terrorist activity all over the world.

Bulletin: There will be a two-week cease-fire as the Strait of Hormuz opens for full normal traffic and direct US-Iran negotiations take place in Pakistan. Authorised US spokespeople have stated that unless these negotiations produce assurances of the end of the Iranian nuclear military programme and of its international terrorist sponsorship, the cease-fire will end and the projected doomsday escalation of the war against Iran and its destruction as a modern state will resume.

There is not the slightest doubt that the United States and Israel possess the ability to eliminate all of Iran’s industrial war making potential and to close the ports of that country as completely as its airspace. All the talk about a quagmire, after four weeks in which Iran has been severely diminished as a military force and as a functioning state and the United States has sustained a grand total of eight combat fatalities, is nonsense.

The Iranians are naturally claiming that the United States has backed down, but since Iran had refused until the last minute to promise unfettered passage of the Straits of Hormuz without massive American concessions, none of which have been made, the reverse is true. Trump has completely disarmed the extreme galleries of his domestic political opponents including the 30 Democrats who signed a petition to remove the President for reasons of mental incompetence and derangement. No one who knows anything about Trump can possibly doubt that he will return to the full war option if, as is their custom, the Iranians do not negotiate seriously. His moral position opposite all the trans-Atlantic idiots accusing him of war crimes will be stronger having given the Islamic Republic an opportunity for a deathbed conversion to sanity.

The idea that this next phase of the Iran war, if it must be resumed, will be prolonged and inconclusive, is also nonsense. Assuming the United States and Israel do finally launch an escalated offensive, all Iran’s exports and imports will cease; there will be no incoming revenue, no resupply of any aspect of the sinews of war, and no domestic production whatever of any of the components of the ability to conduct modern warfare. Iran will continue to be hammered with up to 1,500 precisely targeted airstrikes per day with essentially no capacity of air defence whatever. No country can make a war on this basis for more than a few weeks.

It is inconceivable that Trump will not take up the cudgels if Iran does not make the concessions he demands. Eventually, somebody from the Iranian military, and not the grotesque thuggee of the Revolutionary Guard Corps or the loopy theocrats at the so-called holy city of Qum, is going to put his head above the parapet and speak for 90 per cent of the country and renounce its nuclear military ambitions and promotion of terrorism in exchange for an end of the war and an assurance of American and Israeli assistance in reconstructing Iran.

At that point, Israel will commence the final extermination of the terrorist apparatus of Hamas and Hezbollah; the war on terror which unofficially began with the suicide attacks on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 will be victoriously concluded. Iran will be readmitted to the ranks of the civilised states of the world where it has generally resided for most of the last 2,500 years.

When that day comes, the United States, between Venezuela and Iran, will control half of China’s oil supply although much of that will be taken up by Russia with oil that it has been shipping to Europe and India. The axis of anti-democratic states in alliance with the Russians and Chinese, will have lost Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, and the correlation of forces in the world will have shifted substantially to the US-led West. In any circumstances, Europe will have the time it needs to contemplate how to revive and salvage the European project and rebuild its alliance with the United States on a reciprocal basis.

The recent petulant and outrageous denial by a number of European countries of the right of the United States to use their airspace and American bases in those countries in the war against Iran must be seen as the ultimate futile expression of frustration by the  Europeans that the US rejects their conception of the Western alliance as the Americans doing the work and taking the risk while Europeans attempt to give the instructions.

The hopeful European predictions of American decline have mercifully ceased as that country not only demonstrates its military superiority but pulls steadily away from China in the contest between the world’s two largest economies. At the same time, Europe is notoriously stagnant economically, incapable of controlling its own borders, too dyspeptic to maintain a sustainable birthrate, and largely intimidated by their own Muslim minorities.

America surges ahead while Europe faces an agonising reappraisal. Iran will yield or be beaten into submission.