Conrad Black: The Objectives of the Iran War Are Now Within Reach

Commentary

The dispatch of at least 5,000 U.S. Marines and airborne troops to the Middle East is a clear warning to the various fragments that still comprise the Iranian regime that the United States and Israel are about to strangle that country economically and make it practically unlivable—that is unless plausible spokespeople who can be held to account for the regime’s behavior pledge to end Iran’s nuclear military ambitions and its championship of international terrorism. It is an extraordinary manifestation of the uniqueness of the Trump era that the antagonism to the president in the United States and parts of Western Europe and Canada is such that those afflicted by psychotic Trump-hate have already succumbed to claiming that the Iran war is a failure.

This is by normal criteria not only a mistaken conclusion but an act of demonstrable insanity. Iran has no air defenses, and no navy other than some outboard motor-driven coastal craft that look like the militarization of the regatta of any inland North American yacht club. Iran has no effective air force, and the number of missiles and drones that it fires each day has been reduced by 85–90 percent since the war began four weeks ago. The first two levels of the high command have been killed and over 10,000 domestic military targets have been destroyed, and the United States has suffered eight combat deaths (though five others were killed in an accident that was not combat-related).

President Trump has made it clear that if Iran has not accepted the basic conditions of a verifiable abandonment of its nuclear military program and an absolute and permanent suspension of all aid to definable terrorist organizations by April 6, the United States and Israel will seize Kharg Island and confiscate the millions of barrels of oil stored there. Along with that, they will do the necessary on the southern littoral of Iran to ensure safe passage through the Hormuz Strait, demolish Iran’s entire electricity grid and oil production and refinement facilities, close the ports, and commence outright economic strangulation of the country. All of this will require a few boots briefly on the ground, and they have now arrived.

As this occurs, the United States and Israel will continue their strategic bombing, including bringing in drones to attack Revolutionary Guard roadblocks and eliminate other tactics being used to intimidate the benighted population of Iran. The intent is to increase pressure as long and as intensively as necessary to destroy the ghastly and theologically perverted tyranny that has been riveted upon the back of Iran and has been the greatest sponsor of terrorism in the world for 47 years. With a slight benefit of objectivity, it is obvious that far from being the quagmire and the stalemate that the anti-Trump media in the United States and elsewhere are now proclaiming, what has occurred has in fact been the most one-sided war in the modern history of authentic states.

This excludes simple takeovers where scarcely a shot was fired, such as Germany’s occupation of Denmark in 1940 or even the American seizure of Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega in 1989, where 23 U.S. servicemen actually died. In the history of states with substantial military forces exchanging fire over a period of more than a few weeks, there has never been so bone-crushing a strategic defeat of one side by another as in this conflict. Even the Six-Day War in 1967, in which Israel seized Sinai, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, did not remotely rout the forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan to the extent that the United States and Israel have defeated Iran in the last month.

Readers should, as in most matters regarding media reporting on the Trump administration, be on guard against absurdly counterfactual statements about the status of Trump initiatives. America’s NATO allies are for the most part waffling about whether this war is a NATO concern, even though the Iranians have demonstrated that they have missiles that could reach London and Paris, and only American intervention has prevented those missiles from having nuclear warheads.

It is a phenomenon of this war that a clear perception of its objectives—and of the necessity of its objectives being achieved—are perversely avoided by the psychiatric unfeasibility of the maniacal detractors of the current American president to accept his success. Western victory in the war on terror, the creation of conditions that will enable a durable peace in the Middle East and bring an end to the terroristic contention of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and the return of the ancient land of Persia to the ranks of the world’s civilized nations, are all immensely desirable objectives and all are now within reach.

The withdrawal of Iran as well as Venezuela, Cuba, and Syria as functioning Russo-Chinese allies, and the passage into American hands of control of more than half of China’s current oil supply, are altering the international correlation of forces in favor of the democratic West. Either by the survivors of the shattered Iranian regime coming belatedly to their senses and opting for peace, or by the Americans and Israelis pummelling the atrophied detritus of that regime into surrender as early as April 6, these benefits will become evident. This is the significance of the United States strengthening its expeditionary force in the Middle East with a mobile ground forces strike capability.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.