Conrad Black: Triumph in Iran is coming

 The U.S. and Israel are crushing the Islamic regime, no matter what the media claims

Most of the world’s media including in the U.S is now stating or implying that the U.S. and Israel leapt impetuously into war with Iran, have blundered, and that the world may be on the verge of a terrible economic crisis, and a much wider and “forever” war. The biases of Al Jazeera and the Guardian, of the international leftist media generally, and the spigots of media Trump-hate in the United States are all well-known and drearily predictable. But many media outlets and commentators from whom we had a right to expect better have gleefully leapt into this trap like perspiring children jumping into a lake on a hot summer day.

The United States Navy will clear the Hormuz Strait within a few days. Iran is utterly resistless against its assailants and the pretense of any ability to conduct a defence of attrition, let alone aspire to underdog sentiment for their plucky stubbornness is just an illustration of the stupidity and moral bankruptcy of much of the western media. The spectacle of commentators who couldn’t tell a B-2 from a Piper Cub masquerading as von Clausewitz reciting strategic inevitabilities is, at least, amusing.

 Two weeks of war has led to claims that it is dragging on, is already a “forever war,” and even that the United States is losing and that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had no plan. Yet Iran has almost no military force left. The air force and navy, republican guard command structure and all air and missile defenses, have been almost completely destroyed. On Feb. 28, Iran launched 350 missiles and on March 14, 25. In the same, period drone launches fell from 800 to 75. All this is after two weeks in which the United States sustained eight combat fatalities and five others in an air crash that had nothing to do with enemy action.

The only foreign journalists in country are Al Jazeera and CNN, which as commentator Margot Cleveland remarked, would, if it were reporting on the Second World War, be broadcasting in German. Having effectively destroyed the Iranian armed forces, the Americans and Israelis are now hammering Iran’s defense industrial core: armaments production and research centres and underground stockpiles. 

Every time Iran fires a missile its enemies know immediately where the mobile launcher is and move to destroy it at once: as Iran continues the war it squanders its remaining ability to conduct a war. Iran is incompetently managing decline; not, after two weeks, showing astounding resilience. 

What the United States and Israel have done is the only practical alternative to allowing Iran to become a fully armed nuclear military power able to use its oil revenue to promote terrorist activities throughout the world and specifically to prevent any possible peace with Israel and intimidate the Gulf states. All of these avenues of aggression and destruction are on the verge of permanent elimination.

There is no surprise in Iran’s attempt to close the Hormuz Strait. It was always Iran’s most obvious point of retaliation, but it is a self-reducing asset as 90 per cent of Iran’s own oil exports go through Kharg island and the Strait. China is Tehran’s principal oil customer and the United States is still permitting Iranian oil to be shipped to China while asking China to assist it with tokenistic support as the U.S. reopens the Hormuz Strait.

 Presumably China will refuse, the Americans will open the Strait to those to whom they wish oil to be delivered, and there is no reason to believe that will include China. And it will not include any oil shipments from Iran, a crumbling regime riveted on the back of a nation that hates it, whose ports and airspace will be shut to the world other than the receipt of whatever ordnance the United States and Israel inflict upon it.

The U.S. Navy certainly possesses the ability to secure passage through the Strait. Asking collaboration from beneficiaries of oil shipments the U.S. can restore has enabled the Trump administration to determine which countries it can consider reliable. Europe failed the test, and China is casting its lot with an Iranian regime that is about to be expunged. The U.S. could place surcharges on oil shipments to Europe, and push China into reliance on Russian oil, of which there will be a surplus when its sales to Europe and India end.

And as Iran has gambled on provoking an oil crisis by attacking neighbouring oil exporters while imagining in their desperate foolishness that the U.S. will permit their continued oil exports, their exports will cease and the Gulf states will be driven into the arms of the Americans for protection. The amateurish attempt of Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabis and Qatar to put together a pantomime horse of an alliance balancing between the U.S. and Israel and Iran is still-born. In the light of Trump’s easily predictable response, the principal European powers and Japan, Australia, and Canada are all reconsidering their righteous abstentions and are waffling back toward alliance-mindedness and squeaks of solidarity.

Iran’s terrorist puppet organizations are being decimated. Hezbollah is weaker than at any time since 2006 and no longer possesses the ability to intimidate the unprepossessing government of Lebanon. Hamas has lost 80 per cent of its active terrorists and unless it disarms as has been promised, and no one anticipates that it will, Israel will finish the necessary and desirable task of exterminating it. The fact is that this is a stunningly swift and overwhelmingly one-sided victory. The American forecast was a five-week war and another two weeks at the present trajectory and there will be no identifiable Iranian government left.

No state can function indefinitely when the government is hated by the population and the country is being economically strangled and severely pummelled with precision weapons with no end in sight. During the 12-day war last June, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz credited the Americans and Israel with doing the world’s “dirty work” for it, but his government has unctuously said the current fighting is not NATO’s war as it is a defensive alliance, as if Iran had not produced a causus belli of 47 years duration and as if there was effective moral relativism between NATO’s irreplaceable American benefactor and the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism, Iran.

There will be a reckoning for the criminal barbarism of Iran, and also within the Western Alliance despite whatever unspontaneous supportive acts Trump can frighten and shame the allies into making.

Trump deliberately creates confusion by enunciating different goals and predictions and this has caused some slippages in support even in his own country. Confusing the enemy is a good idea and there seems no downside to confusing allies who are only reluctantly helpful anyway. The United States and Israel will produce a comparatively innocuous government in Tehran, and when cant and emotionalism subside, the civilized world will be grateful for that. In the meantime, few diplomatic activities seem more irrelevant than Prime Minister Carney negotiating with Norway (a petro-state with a population of five million), a “middle-power” agreement to counter the influence of the United States.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-triumph-in-iran-is-coming