No. of Recommendations: 20
I for the life of me will never understand how the left got to where it is today, that their hatred for 1 guy blinds them to nearly 50 years of murder and mayhem directed against us by the Iranians.
If you want to understand the left, you have to stop attributing our skepticism of the current operation with being blind to past Iranian practice.
All of us are aware of the Iranian's malefactions. We're just also aware that you're not likely to improve the situation all that much by lobbing missiles at them from a few hundred miles away. Sure, we can temporarily degrade some of their capabilities - but to temporary effect, and at such considerable cost to ourselves that it's not much of a net benefit even if all goes well.
And of course, once you go up the escalatory ladder you lose the deterrent effect of even those attacks: once you start bombing them, you can no longer threaten to start bombing them. Which is what led them to seize the strait, which they hadn't actually done in the last 50 years. It became a smart move for them once we went to war against them. So yes - things can actually get worse in some ways when you go to war, even if the regime is already terrible and fomenting problems to begin with.
That's why NATO isn't rushing to bail Trump out. He made a bad choice. Not bad because of any love for Iran or blindness to their murder and mayhem - bad because it's likely to lead to poor outcomes for everyone. Had he consulted NATO before doing any of this, they would have had an opportunity to explain to him why this was a bad move. Such explanation would have included the obvious likelihood that Iran would try to expand the war and interfere with energy flows. And the fact that even though the bombs and missiles could be done from hundreds of miles away, restoring the energy flows will require getting your actual troops (well, naval forces) within a dozen or two miles of Iranian territory.
Which is why Trump isn't just opening the straits ourselves. Because he knows that way lies troops coming home in flag-draped coffins. Which is why NATO isn't accepting his argument that we've done hard part (attacking from hundreds of miles away or 30,000 feet), and all that's left is the easy part (running interference within a few dozen miles of the Iranian coast or sending in ground troops to seize the area along the strait). He's trying to saddle other countries with the part of the mission that's most likely to involve serious casualties, even though he gave those countries no opportunities to make objections to the planning or initiation of the operation and no opportunity to make the case to their own citizenry that such losses were necessary. Which is a hard case to make, given that Trump appears to have concluded that the U.S. citizenry would not accept significant casualties to re-open the strait.
