I am against bombing Iran, for a simple and I think much-overlooked reason: our government will just make a mess of it no matter how well-deserved or thoughtfully strategized it may be.
The comforting and necessary twin assumptions of competence and fidelity are simply not sustainable assumptions in the current day. Our government has lost the moral right to send men into combat, and that’s the nicest thing that I can say on that front. Both the competence and fidelity of our military chain of command are at un-heard-of lows in recent years. The military is becoming just one more aspect of Big Government which, if allowed to develop, will be used against the US citizenry.
Thoughtful justification in favor of smacking the Mullahs around for waging war against the US for between 20 and 40 years are overlooking a key fact — the option to execute strikes as part of a reasonable strategy is simply not on the table, no matter how much you in your own mind may see a path to making things work out for the better. There is no reason to assume that should this hapless administration executes strikes against Iran, things would somehow improve. in fact, they will just get worse. This administration is of course clueless and dangerously so, but the problem is only partly the fault of this administration. It is a government-wide collapse of moral and pragmatic reasoning. The nonsensical views once limited to places like the State Department are now widespread, and even the military is consumed with patently ridiculous assumptions about how the world works. I don’t care that 99% of officers O-6 and below may be competent and dutiful servicemen — the real problem exists in the O-7 and up area which calls the shots.
Between the flat-out malice of Benghazi and the (at best) astonishing incompetence of the Afghanistan collapse, the picture is clear, and all the ruthless competence of the E-1 through O-6 warriors will not prevail against the dishonest, fanciful, self-serving careerism of the flags. CAVEAT: I know some flags and these are good men and women. They are a minority, and they cannot carry the day. That’s just an unpleasant fact, and it is time to acknowledge facts which we do not like.
The upper chain of command of the United States Department of Defense and those of the military branches are simply not to be trusted. They do not have America’s best interests at heart. What Bill Clinton began, Barack Obama completed, and now Joe Biden has at his disposal. And don’t get me started on Bush. I do think that if Trump had served his second term, he might have made progress recovering this perilous situation, but he certainly did not do so in his first term – I lay much o this at the door of his disastrous firing of Mike Flynn, at the behest of Pence.
And so this is only a barely-partisan position of mine, and if redueced to simply assessing what we have to work with right now, it’s not partisan at all. Facts don’t care about political feelings. We have a military chain of command which is a mission-non-capable political creature. Neither party has a good record.
Three coffins will arrive at Dover today. President Biden will be physically present. That’s enough of that.
