War with Iran?

War with Iran?

During the 1930s Japan was busy invading China, committing racial atrocities in a rampage broadening their economic and political empire.  The rape of Nanking in 1937 by the Imperial Japanese army (the then Chinese capital) was a huge horror preceding the unspeakable horrors following Pearl Harbor both in Europe and in the Pacific theatres of war.   Estimates of dead in that Nanking massacre range from 50,000 to 300,000.

The United States imposed crushing sanctions on Japan, including an oil embargo and rubber from Dutch and British possessions in the South Pacific.  The United States had also demanded that Japan withdraw from China, under which the Japanese were busy renaming Manchuria to Manchukuo, a province of Japan.  This embargo was an existential threat to the Japanese, choked their economy, poaching their territorial and imperial ambitions.

The Japanese then initiated war against the United States by surprise attack on December 7, 1941.  President Roosevelt’s administration knew what they were doing preceding Pearl Harbor, wanting to snip the Japanese wings, joined by the British ostensibly, to protect their empire, upon which the “sun never set.”

Now why this history?  

Well, because Iran is fomenting terror throughout the Middle East.  It is supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. It wishes to achieve hegemony through military and political action.  This enrages the Saudis, Egyptians, and Israel.  Although the US has withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal, the Europeans are under pressure from the US to shut down the Iranian economy. Inflation is 50% and unemployment 25%. They are succeeding.  Iran is suffering, and pressured.  Unable to produce sufficient revenues to keep the country going,  the theocrats in charge are becoming desperate, escalating tensions in the straits of Hormuz through which much of the world’s oil traffic must traverses.  So the militants have decided to shoot down a US asset and bomb two ships.  Trump says the drone was in international waters, but who believes him?  Today he called off a retaliatory strike, and that may be a clue to where the drone was actually located—over Iran or International waters.

John Bolton is a known bellicose national security advisor, and Mike Pompeo a known hawk.  Next to the word “cunning’” in the dictionary is Bolton’s photo.   And Pompeo? He loves war.  Bolton and Pompeo want regime change in Iran. Bolton and Pompeo want regime change in Iran.  Bolton aggressively supported the Iraq war, and we know how that turned out when George W. Bush decided to avenge his dad’s attempted assassination. 

Trump does not even know what he said the day after he said it and may, arguably, have beginning dementia.  He is a feckless ignoramus, hardly able to stand up to a foreign policy crisis.  He is busy conducting reality show rallies in, of all places, Orlando where most of his Floridian supporters live.  His base does not care about anything except their religion—Trump.  And all Trump cares about is getting reelected, to continue his pursuit of illicit riches for himself and his family.  People, he said he was opposed to all wars, “America First,” but that was only when Democrats were in power.  And when President Obama was not born in the United States.  Does anyone believe that this narcissist will tell us the truth or manage a gathering storm?

Of this, wars are born, old men sending young men and women to die.