No. of Recommendations: 13
So why aren't they responding to attacks on neutral shipping in international waters, something that Hitler did?
For the same reason we're not. It's not even clear they can protect the ships from the type of drone and missile attacks that Iran can launch from shore, they would be exposing their own troops to casualty risks that their population is no more prepared to absorb than we are, and because the U.S. was the proximate cause of the strait being closed. Just because a customer decides that they're not going to follow the "you break it, you bought it" rule doesn't mean that the store owner will go along with it.
They correctly intuit that the U.S. and Israel caused this situation by choosing to make war on Iran without having a plan in place to prevent them from disrupting global energy supplies. If you don't assemble your coalition of allies on the front end - getting their agreement and giving them a seat at the table from the very beginning - they're not going to be in a position to rush to your aid when things go pear-shaped.
So which is it? Did we degrade or eliminate their nuclear and other capabilities or have we not?
And if we did last time, why are we not (in your view) going to accomplish anything this time around?
It's both. Last time, we blew up nearly everything that could be blown up by bombers and missiles. And blowing things up with bombers and missiles isn't enough to prevent them from developing a nuke in the future, because Iran still can (eventually) dig up the fissile material and has the ability to redevelop the centrifuges.
There's nothing left to bomb, because they didn't rebuild any of the stuff we bombed last time. But since they still have all the knowledge and fissile material (which you can't eliminate by bombing), you're not preventing them from ever having a nuclear weapon.
I'm sure this very conversation was held at 10 Downing St. in March of 1936. How did it work out for the world? Or the version of this conversation that happened either in Foggy Bottom or the White House Situation Room in the late 1990s?
Sometimes declaring war is the right thing to do. Sometimes it's not. The fact that you can identify moments in history when an attack should have been made but wasn't does not mean that the war that we chose to launch in February can achieve its goals or was the smart thing to do. Whatever conversations were held at 10 Downing St. in March of 1936 don't suddenly make the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 a smart choice, or the Russians' invasion of Afghanistan either. Sometimes launching a war is the right move, and sometimes it's a phenomenally stupid move - and sometimes it's something that will end up being a jumbled muddle that causes losses to both sides without significantly advancing your strategic goals.
