trump iran war

Where have all the war correspondents gone?

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

The Trump-Iran War is a strange one, in that we’re not experiencing it directly; we only experience the effects.

Every war since Vietnam has been live and in person, in our living rooms on the evening news (or, with the rise of the 24-hour news channels, all day long). There have always been war correspondents embedded with the troops, and we’ve seen them on the ground in the fields of battle. We’ve heard from them how well or poorly the troops are holding up; they’ve offered us pronouncements and interviews from the commanders in battle; they’ve involved us in the wars. War has been emotional for Americans.

But this one is different. We aren’t experiencing the war directly, visually, viscerally. The only way we know the Trump-Iran War is still happening is because we’re paying more for gas, and high diesel prices have translated into higher costs for food and everything else. But beyond those basic effects on our lives, the only way we know the war is happening is due to the near-constant assertions from the White House that we’ve destroyed the Iranian military, that we control the Gulf of Hormuz, that Iran wants to negotiate.…

I can only surmise it’s a result of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s war on the free press. Hegseth threw the press out of the Pentagon, so there are no Pentagon briefings. And Donald Trump and his lackeys keep trying to throw the free press out of the White House. Well, I will say the press are also colluding in this silence, to a degree. It is far cheaper and easier for the press to report on the never-ending political/election “news” than to actually put reporters in the field. But sending those reporters into a war zone is not a unilateral decision; it has required the assistance of the government and the military, and that assistance is not there this time.

I don’t have an answer, just questions, and a feeling that something is amiss. There is no longer any such thing as a “long-distance phone call.” UFOs have disappeared because everyone now has a cell phone camera. We can communicate with nearly everyone on the planet with only the slightest of difficulties or pauses. And yet the Trump-Iran War is shrouded in mystery; we have only a single source of information about it, and that source—Donald Trump—has proven repeatedly over the last decade that he is not a reliable reporter about anything.

Putting the hornets back in the nest

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

Regardless of who, why, or how the Trump Iran War started, one thing is certain: we are going to be fighting it and paying for it for a long time to come.

In the first three weeks of the war, 13 US service members have lost their lives, at least four US airplanes have been destroyed, and the US has spent tens of billions of dollars on this fight. In other countries, hundreds or thousands of people have already been killed, the global energy trade has been disrupted, prices have skyrocketed, and the total cost will never be known.

Rational Americans are—quite correctly—demanding to know why President Trump felt the burning need to launch a hot war when he did, and without consultation with our allies (those same allies, by the way, of whom he is now demanding help to keep the Strait of Hormuz open). Equally important is when and how he sees this war ending: the best comment we have on that so far is that he’ll “feel it in his bones.”

And yet, his opinion of such things has proven—time and again—to be absolutely meaningless. His actions scream that he is operating according to his dreams and his view of “look at me, I’m strong and powerful,” with only barest nod at reality. But even if Donald Trump were to suddenly embrace altruistic, rational thought, and realize that we should no longer be fighting this war, that will not end it.

We’ve kicked over the hornets’ nest that was the religious dictatorship in Iran, but we have not destroyed all the hornets in it. Those with access to weapons in Iran have no reason to stop fighting, even if we do. They’ll keep threatening shipping through the Strait. They’ll keep dropping explosive-laden drones on their neighbors. They’ll keep urging their “proxies” to kill and disrupt as much as possible.

And we’re stuck with it.

Even if a new president took office next week, we’d still have to deal with the insanity launched by Donald Trump’s war of “don’t look at the Trump Epstein files.” Just as he came to office saying “no more forever wars,” such as what we did to Iraq and Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 2001 terror attacks, we’ll be dealing with the Trump Iran War for years to come. Even if Congress somehow manages to cut off funding for this “excursion” of Donald Trump’s, that will only prevent us from inflicting more damage on Iran; it won’t stop the Iranians from a rampaging campaign of revenge for what we’ve done to them in the last few weeks.

So now is the time to figure out—as Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington taught us—how to get over this heavy ground as lightly as we can. I fear the only answer is indeed a land war in Asia, in which we send in thousands of ground troops to root out every last adherent of the ruling clique in Iran, and then—as we did in Japan after World War II—set up a US-run government to enable the country to eventually transition into a freedom-loving democracy. It was long and hard in Japan, but we see the results when we don’t do everything necessary: Taliban-run Afghanistan, and the headache that is still Iraq.

And this is the point where I wish I was smarter. Actually I wish our political leaders were even smarter than that, that they could figure out an easy way out of this morass Donald Trump has dumped us into. I fear there isn’t one, and the only way out is through; a long, bloody, soul-rending struggle that Trump has thrown us into for no reason but to soothe his own ego.