As this piece is written on Tuesday afternoon, the Iran war continues to be unprecedented in a number of respects. It is the most overwhelmingly one-sided war between substantial countries in modern history. One side has completely destroyed 90 per cent of the military capacity and defence production industry of the other at the cost of eight US combat fatalities and 35 Israeli civilians dead from cluster rockets. The winning side has followed an astoundingly successful blitzkrieg with a total economic shutdown of the opposing combatant.
The winning Americans and Israelis have received practically no support in the western world, but the other Gulf states have been comparatively supportive and although officially neutral, and in several cases traditionally friendly to the Islamic Republic of Iran, have received more incoming missiles from Iran than has Israel.
The Iranian government is now clearly not only shattered from the many prominent leaders who have been killed by precisely targeted enemy attacks, but is divided between those who wish to negotiate while there is still some ability to do that and the Revolutionary Guard and Basij thugs who effectively tyrannise Iran in the name of the almost anonymous and the invisible theocratic clerisy that is supposedly governing the various amputated limbs of this decisively beaten and almost universally detested regime.
The Iranian leaders, whoever they are, suffused in their psychotic sectarian fervour, have attempted to sell the notion that as long as they survive as an ostensible government, they have won the war. They are sitting in underground bomb shelters under rubble heaps with very few forces to command other than those that intimidate the population from demonstrating and trying physically to overthrow them. And they are bitterly divided between the designated negotiators and the official spokespeople, professing to believe that they have defeated their enemies who have closed their airspace, shut their ports, and destroyed their military, all at minimal cost to themselves.
Because the United States has stopped paying lip service to the phony NATO Alliance for whose deterrent power America is almost entirely responsible financially and militarily, it has almost no vocal supporters in its just and provoked war against the world’s principal terrorism-sponsoring state. This condition is aggravated by the general international and substantial domestic antagonism to US president Trump. He is to foreigners the apogee of the Ugly American, boastful, self-centred and abrasive, although when put to the test the majority of Americans approve of his policy of not allowing their country’s pockets to be picked by allies, who generally fail to reciprocate US comradeship and support.
This was particularly evident two weeks ago when the principal European “allies” declined to allow the United States to use their own airbases in Europe or their “allies’” airspace to attack Iran. There was apparently moral equivalence between the country that rescued civilised Europe in both World Wars and the Cold War and heads the alliance that has secured Europe these 77 years; and the corrupt and bigoted Iranian font of most international terrorism.
Of course, Trump is also disliked with sociopathic derangement and impotence by his domestic opponents, mainly Democrats who have been kidnapped and dragged off the popular political field in wokeness, Socialist dogmatism, virulent anti-Semitism, and the remains of the white American guilt complex that suddenly reared its furry head after the collapse of the Soviet Union, America’s last remaining rival prior to the rise of China. When it was completely triumphant, the Puritanical conscience of America was suddenly and briefly transmogrified into an unfeasible coalition of flagellant minorities: wherever two agnostic, historically uneducated Americans of any pigmentation were gathered together, they were apt to be burning a US flag, tearing down a statue of a US president, or simply shouting moronic slogans about “white privilege.”
Trump knocked all that into a cocked hat, shut the borders, to illegal immigrants, set about rooting out the 500,000 violent criminals who had entered illegally and then expelling them, and also deporting two million others who entered the country illegally. He ended the green terror that was strangling US industry, reduced taxes, assaulted the teachers unions that have largely destroyed the state school system, and the morally bankrupt university faculties, kicked NATO into pledges to make a serious contribution to their own defence, destroyed the Iranian nuclear military programme, moved the president of Venezuela from his palace in Caracas to the house of detention in Brooklyn, New York and has now, with Israel, reduced Iran to a half deflated punching bag. It is a record of remarkable achievement and even though a majority of Americans do not particularly like Trump, they approve most of his policies.
His achievement in seizing control of a political party and being twice elected president, having never previously sought public office or held a military command is unprecedented and astonishing. And it has been compounded by his formation of a political movement that has defined unheard-of partisan skullduggery, and the shameful politicisation of the federal police, the intelligence agencies, and the prosecutors. The election that he lost was a questionable orgy of unverifiable harvested ballots cast and counted without supervision after election day. His accomplishments are little appreciated abroad.
It now appears that the peace talks will not be resumed, the ceasefire will end and what the US military call “bridge and powerplant day” (when those of Iran are destroyed, as well as the Kharg Island oil shipping facilities and Iran’s floating oil reserve), is at hand. But Iran will almost certainly purport to cave and then try to renege, but this tactic doesn’t work with Trump. He is about to terminate the viability of the Islamic Republic with a minimum of casualties on either side. This will satisfactorily win the war on terrorism and establish beyond sane dispute the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. It also somewhat revives the bedraggled notion of nuclear non-proliferation. And in putting half of China’s oil supply in US hands and demonstrating the vast superiority of US over Chinese and Russian weaponry in the Iran War, he is altering the correlation of forces favourably between the United States and China and makes any notion of the Chinese invasion of Taiwan practically unthinkable.
All of this is now very likely to happen though the death-throes of the Islamic Republic may go on for another few weeks, depending on the factional struggles among the surviving ruling cabal. Cooler heads will have to return, caps in hand, to Washington to suggest some serious reciprocal basis to a reconstituted Western Alliance.
US and Catholic Church must maintain a united front against ‘the Antichrist of our time’