Terrifying missile, drone and bomb salvoes brought the violence of modern war the length and breadth of Iran and Israel, and to bases in Abu Dhabi to Kuwait and even to Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
Seven of our soldiers are dead. The United States has destroyed most of Iran’s Navy and the battered 47-year regime of religious extremists seems on the brink.
Anyone who tells you what’s next in the Middle East, however pessimistic, the news will get worse.
No one can control the outcome, no matter how many bombs are dropped. Maybe history will say President Trump was reasonable, prudent and as careful as the fog of war permitted in targeting the ayatollahs’ regime; but locked in another destructive cycle, there is always the increasing chance something terrible could happen.
It did on Feb. 28. During a ferocious U.S/Israel attack on a complex of buildings in the southern Iranian town of Minab, among the structures hit near an Iranian naval base was a grade school for Iranian girls.
No side has been definitively blamed for the tragedy, but a probe by the New York Times and others said at least 175 people, many of them grade schoolgirls, were killed, probably by us. Their bodies and then their gravesites were clearly visible in reconnaissance and satellite imagery. When the war ends, this will be added to all the other bitter grudges and reasons for revenge.
Iran is getting mauled. Its oil infrastructure is being attacked.
Last week, President Trump demanded the regime’s unconditional surrender, which seems as unlikely as the Iranians overthrowing their oppressive government. The danger is that our rising casualties, spiking oil prices, or a collapsing stock market make us too impatient to wait out a happy ending.
It has happened before. The 2003 invasion of Iraq succeeded, but the aftermath was a disaster. We fired everybody from Iraq’s generals to its postal clerks. The result was a failed Iraq that was a mess for a generation.
How can this Iran war end well? How does America get out of this? Not easily.
The regime teetered following the massive bombardments that wiped out a generation of its leadership at the war’s onset, but after Iran’s version of designated survivor, what’s left of the regime seems to have steadied.
Israel and the U.S. continue to pound Iran, even as our leaders continue to exhort the Iranian people to rise and toss out what is left of their rotten leadership.
Yet Iran, leaderless and chaotic, is a terrible outcome, a recipe for years of continued conflict. Time for our CIA to step up.
Hopefully, they are in clandestine contact with Iran’s regular army leadership, as well as its experts, exiles, college students, monarchists, business leaders, and others who care more for Iran than the religious gangsters strangling Iran for 47 years.
