Precipice is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Thanks for upgrading to a paid subscription. Writing is my job. Your support of that means everything to me. I understand that there are many people, places and things clamoring for your dollar, but if you feel that Precipice is an important voice in our public discourse, please consider making the upgrade.
It’s day fifteen of the Very Stable Genius’s “excursion,” about which the American public was not informed, nor was Congress consulted.
Its aims are no clearer than they’ve been since Epic Fury was initiated, but if anyone is still touting regime change as an end product, he or she ought to bear in mind the assessment of the US intelligence community:
U.S. intelligence agencies have indicated that the Iranian government is not at risk of collapse amid the U.S. and Israeli offensive against the Middle Eastern country, Reuters reported Thursday.
One source told the outlet that a “multitude” of intelligence reports show “consistent analysis that the regime is not in danger” of collapse, retaining “control of the Iranian public.”
The Revolutionary Guard appears to be in control. The Iranian regime seems uninterested in following Shiite protocol in which supreme leaders are already Grand Ayatollahs and not chosen as a matter of familial selection (which, after all, was a main reason for staging its 1979 revolution against the Pahlavi dynasty). And so we have Mojtaba Khomeini, at least as hardline as his late father.
The Pentagon and National Security Council significantly underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to US military strikes while planning the ongoing operation, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
President Donald Trump’s national security team failed to fully account for the potential consequences of what some officials have described as a worst-case scenario now facing the administration, the sources said.
There are other ways that the globe’s other major conflict is bleeding into the one in the Mideast, such as Russia’s sharing of intel about US asset positions, something even the VSG acknowledges, but makes sure to couch in moral-equivalence terms:
TRUMP: I think he might be helping them a little bit, yeah. And he probably thinks we’re helping Ukraine, right?
KILMEADE: And you are, right?
TRUMP: Yeah, we’re helping them also, and so he says that, and China would say the same thing. It’s like, hey, they do it and we do it, in all fairness
Israel is planning a massive ground invasion of Lebanon. This will surely complicate Lebanese PM Joseph Aoun’s efforts to disentangle the actual Lebanese government from Hezbollah. Regarding Israel, it’s hard to blame it, given the 200 missiles Hezbollah fired into the country, piling on to the barrage from Iran.
NATO has now shot down three Iranian missiles headed for Turkey.
Does this conflict look like something that will be quickly contained and resolved? It now involves multiple fronts and players ( now including the post-American home front). Does this administration look like a team that thinks about strategy and endgames?
Here I have to say a word about Mike Pence, he who was nearly hanged by drool-besotted MAGA minions on January 6, 2021, but still, on the Columbus, Indiana Municipal Airport tarmac two weeks later, arriving home after Biden’s inauguration, thanked the VSG for his “service” to the nation. I just can’t sign onto the notion that he’s rehabilitated his image and become some distinguished elder statesman.
In a gesture that takes calling balls and strikes to a ridiculous degree, he now praises his former boss for the Iran attack, even given the expansions of the war enumerated above. Ever the sunny Boy Scout, he’s sure this is a moment for pride in post-America.
The Mideast war is going no better than the Ukrainian situation and it’s because post-America is led by a 79-year-old with, at best, the understanding of the world of a ten-year-old boy. And an administration and party of cowards, nuts and sycophants who wouldn’t dare cross him by speaking plainly about the reality.
The Iran War is a Rorschach test. Everybody sees what they want to see. I, for one, do not put much stock in wishcasting by the mainstream media on the basis of reports by anonymous “sources familiar with the matter.” In other words, I strongly disagree with the conclusion that the war is going badly.
We have taken out their nuclear capability, their navy, their Air Force, a good chunk of the highest echelons of both their military and political apparatus including Ayatollah Khamenei. We have severely degraded their ballistic missile capabilities and Iran is firing fewer and fewer by the day. ALSO there have been a shockingly low number of American and Israeli casualties. What most people don’t know is that 5-6 years ago those of us who were paying attention to the war gaming fully expected that a war with Iran would be very costly to the American military, that to destroy their navy we would lose a few ships of our own and that they would shoot down a number of our planes and make it difficult for us to secure air superiority. It has been nothing less than shocking to see both last June and now how much our technological superiority outpaces them. This was has already gone dramatically better than anyone had reason to expect two years ago. We have seen orders of magnitude fewer casualties than would have been predicted.
Also, because I begin with low expectations for this administration, my bar for them is quite low. I think, Barney, that you begin with the assumption that everything they do automatically will fail. I begin with the assumption that they are generally incompetent and so when they manage to achieve middling success I’m sort of impressed.
That said, where it is fair to raise concerns is the following: the US military is very good at achieving military objectives. We have successfully struck thousands of targets. But just as in past wars, it’s one thing to win the fighting and quite another to win the peace. The latter requires civilian leadership, and that’s where this administration is particularly incompetent. Our military is perfectly capable of delivering on whatever objective it is given. But air power alone won’t achieve lasting peace.
In other words, the claim that we’ve achieved nothing, or that Iran will come back ten times stronger, is so silly as to be impossible to take seriously. But the claim that Trump will probably find a way to screw things up is a good one. In my view, it’s hard to for what fills the vacuum to be worse than what Iran already had. In my view, Iraq is better off for us having gone in 20 years ago and Afghanistan was doing pretty well until we handed the country back to the Taliban.
The Iran War is a Rorschach test. Everybody sees what they want to see. I, for one, do not put much stock in wishcasting by the mainstream media on the basis of reports by anonymous “sources familiar with the matter.” In other words, I strongly disagree with the conclusion that the war is going badly.
We have taken out their nuclear capability, their navy, their Air Force, a good chunk of the highest echelons of both their military and political apparatus including Ayatollah Khamenei. We have severely degraded their ballistic missile capabilities and Iran is firing fewer and fewer by the day. ALSO there have been a shockingly low number of American and Israeli casualties. What most people don’t know is that 5-6 years ago those of us who were paying attention to the war gaming fully expected that a war with Iran would be very costly to the American military, that to destroy their navy we would lose a few ships of our own and that they would shoot down a number of our planes and make it difficult for us to secure air superiority. It has been nothing less than shocking to see both last June and now how much our technological superiority outpaces them. This was has already gone dramatically better than anyone had reason to expect two years ago. We have seen orders of magnitude fewer casualties than would have been predicted.
Also, because I begin with low expectations for this administration, my bar for them is quite low. I think, Barney, that you begin with the assumption that everything they do automatically will fail. I begin with the assumption that they are generally incompetent and so when they manage to achieve middling success I’m sort of impressed.
That said, where it is fair to raise concerns is the following: the US military is very good at achieving military objectives. We have successfully struck thousands of targets. But just as in past wars, it’s one thing to win the fighting and quite another to win the peace. The latter requires civilian leadership, and that’s where this administration is particularly incompetent. Our military is perfectly capable of delivering on whatever objective it is given. But air power alone won’t achieve lasting peace.
In other words, the claim that we’ve achieved nothing, or that Iran will come back ten times stronger, is so silly as to be impossible to take seriously. But the claim that Trump will probably find a way to screw things up is a good one. In my view, it’s hard to for what fills the vacuum to be worse than what Iran already had. In my view, Iraq is better off for us having gone in 20 years ago and Afghanistan was doing pretty well until we handed the country back to the Taliban.