April's Fools

The Iranian predicament.

“You will hear of wars and rumours of wars,” the Bible assures us in the book of Matthew. “See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places.

All these are the beginning of sorrows.”

Depressing stuff. The “see that you are not troubled” bit is rather weak salve, it seems to me.

The Good Book isn’t wrong: Since time immemorial we’ve been beset by wars and rumours of wars; we humans are absolute masters at waging mortal combat with each other. The present time is no exception: Russia has been at Ukraine’s throat for four years, Pakistan is in open conflict with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and civil wars are roiling Myanmar, Sudan, Congo, and Yemen, and the battle dominating headlines at the moment has Israel and the U.S. warring with Iran.

A month into the Iranian conflict, President Donald Trump finally addressed his nation this week (on April Fool’s Day—fittingly, some would say). He managed to keep his remarks to under 20 minutes, a small miracle for him.

What he had to say didn’t inspire confidence that there’s a satisfactory exit ramp from the mayhem initiated when the Americans and Israelis went in with guns a-blazing on February 28. Sure, they decapitated much of the leadership regime right off the hop. But it’s had all the effect, practically speaking, of lopping a head off a hydra. The fanatics remain in charge, embedded as widely and deeply as ever, and more than 400 pounds of enriched uranium remain unaccounted for. And Iran has the world’s energy economy over a barrel—pun intended— with its stranglehold on the shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz.

All in all, it’s an inglorious mess, and the pundits—thicker than ticks on a coonhound in an Alabama summer—are excoriating Trump for blundering blindly into a lethal box canyon with no hope of finding a way out. He’s not the first American President to discover the unhappy reality of conflict in the Middle East, mind you; again, Scripture is instructive:

“As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly.”

The pundits may be right. But none of them really know—nor do any of us—how close Iran was to achieving nuclear weapon capability, and by extension how much of a threat was hanging over the entire world.

As murky as the situation is, one thing seems clear: if the Americans and Israelis pull out now, with the Islamofascists still in charge, not much will have been gained despite all the fearsome firepower brought to bear. With the Strait of Hormuz under Iranian control, the world will actually be substantially worse off.

And so they have little choice but to fight on. And the troubling reality is that they may have to send troops into the country to achieve their ends, despite the bloodbath that could potentially prove to be.

All of this is translating into political grief for Trump at home. The war is broadly and increasingly unpopular; and with gas prices soaring north of four bucks a gallon, Republican prospects in the upcoming mid-term election look increasingly dim. If Trump loses control of both the House and the Senate he can kiss much of his agenda goodbye. He may come to rue the day he decided to attack Iran as the “beginning of his sorrows”.

A final observation: the non-Iranian oil-producing Gulf states—Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar—have never had greater inducement to reduce their reliance on the Strait of Hormuz. One presumes—hopes?—that they’re drawing up urgent plans to punch additional pipelines to the Gulf of Oman, to the Red Sea, to the Mediterranean. They’d be fools not to—because never again should they and the world economy be held hostage by the Iranians.

And if the Gulf states want instruction as to how to make those pipelines happen quickly, they should look to Canada—and do the exact opposite.