War with Iran?

[Dill]

(09-19-2019, 01:55 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: I think that my issue lies with SA. Iran sucks, and so does SA. Both of them are theocratic garbage piles. One pretends to have some democratic principles and one pretends to be an ally. Both are breeding grounds for anti-Western sentiments and extremism. I'm happy to see the two of them beat the crap out of each other.

That could be analogous to saying, 105 years ago, let Serbia and Austro-Hungary beat the crap out of each other.  Back then, military alliances set a world war in motion. In this case economic dependencies would work with similar effect.

A war between SA and Iran would shut down the Gulf. What's the US Navy in Bahrain and the AF in Qatar supposed to do with missiles flying overhead, unsure whom is targeted? Our oil-needy allies Japan, India, Germany and South Korea would feel the pain immediately as would ME partners Jordan, Iraq, and Turkey. Russia and Venezuela would profit immediately. The fissures opening in international relations would exploited by Russia, China, NK and enable some weakened bad actors like Al Qaeda and ISIS to regroup and reload. Also Iran has proxies, some of them bordering Israel north and south. Would they remain idle?

You are a policy guy. You understand that the point of diplomacy is to prevent war, to prevent countries from veering this close to it.  Now our media present us with lots of chatter from the administration and news commentators about "what to do now?!?" and whether WE should attack Iran because a country SA attacked with our technology (resulting in the world's current greatest humanitarian crisis) has struck back, likely with Iranian technology. 

The gamble that trashing the Iran Deal and re-instituting sanctions would "bring them to the table for a better deal" appears to have failed. And now we have a heavily armed Iran, its back to the wall, moving steadily up the escalatory ladder, and an impulsive president worried that a war will hurt his election chances (and Iran knows this) but who doesn't want to appear weak to his friends, MbS, Kim and Putin. 

Occasionally someone reminds us that we would not likely be in this quandary if 1) Trump had not trashed the Iran deal and re-instituted sanctions on that country, and 2) the US had put conditions on its alliance with SA. Use US weapons for defense, not Saddam-style invasions of neighboring countries; don't kill and dismember journalists working for US newspapers, etc. But that's all history now as various ad hoc responses are considered, not in terms of how they align with some already articulated ME policy for long term security, but in terms of how the world will perceive us ("Big stick" or "all talk"). And for the president, personally, in terms of how his base, and the world, will perceive him.

More to come, as oil prices rise . . . .