Conrad Black: Middle East is on the brink of peace, thanks to Trump
The Russo-China-Iran alliance is being destroyed
Even after
President Trump’s televised address on Wednesday night, the obtuseness and
antagonism of the Napoleonic military geniuses in much of the world’s media
think that the Iran War could be a quagmire and stalemate without a formal
Iranian surrender.
Trump
repeated that his objectives are the permanent end of Iran’s nuclear military
ambitions and of its support of terrorism in much of the world. In furtherance
of that he will strike them “very hard” for another month or so. This can only
mean that he will, if necessary use amphibious or airborne forces to take over
the distribution of Iran’s oil, while destroying its power grid and closing its
ports as tightly as its airspace. This is a logical conclusion of the war, in
which the United States has incurred eight fatalities in combat and five others
accidentally. Neither this small number nor the material cost of about $50
billion is onerous to the United States.
The
president implied that without the necessary formal concessions of Iran, the
U.S. and Israel will continue to isolate Iran, as it no longer has any power of
resistance. The U.S. and Israel will be perfectly capable of maintaining Iran
in a condition of complete stagnation, vulnerability and bankruptcy at minimal
human and material cost to themselves indefinitely.
This is not
a quagmire; it is a complete victory in the most one-sided war between serious
states in modern history. A reduced number of tankers is still moving through
the Strait of Hormuz, and there are clearly back-channel communications between
the Americans, and at least a faction of the shattered Iranian government,
despite the Baghdad Bob propaganda being spewed by Iran from the bomb shelters
of Tehran.
What is
occurring is a simultaneous series of decisive changes to the international
correlation of forces. The West is about to win the war on terror that it has
been waging. The Middle Eastern forces that refuse to recognize the right of
Israel to exist as a Jewish state are about to be crushed completely and the
durable reconstruction of the most contested areas is about to begin.
Syria,
Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, are all being detached from their Russo-Chinese
sponsors. The United States is about to take over as much as half of Chinese
sources for oil and will be substantially replaced by Russia while Western
Europe becomes predominantly dependent upon America and its clients for oil and
gas and ceases to finance the Russian aggression in Ukraine with oil and gas
purchases from Russia while beseeching America to do the heavy lifting in
preventing the Russian takeover of Ukraine.
This will
complete a benign cycle in the Middle East. For 20 years it had been in a tense
balance between three separate geopolitical formations, following the Iraq War,
which was a strategic disaster and delivered that artificial country largely
over to Iranian influence.
Then there
was the hopeful but unsuccessful Arab spring, and the rise of ISIS. Iran set up
what became known in the region as the Axis of Resistance with terrorist
vassals in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen controlling distinct territory and
resources Iran expanded its influence without provoking a full-scale war with a
serious opponent, until the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023. Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates used their vast petroleum wealth to
subsidize resistance to the Iranian backed forces without getting into a direct
confrontation with Iran. The rivalry between these two groups was essentially
promoted by the third pole of influence which consisted mainly of Turkey and
Qatar supporting Islam as political movements that were not puppets of Iran.
Turkey was reduced to this after the European Union slammed the door in its
face when it sought a closer association with it.
Israel stood
aside from all of this, though it was regularly harassed by the Iranian-backed
terrorist apparatus of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza and the
bedraggled Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
Israel
steadily became a more formidable military foe that was capable of deterring
the sort of wars unleashed upon it by the Arab powers in 1948, 1967, and 1973.
It was officially at peace with Egypt and Jordan. Guerrilla wars are only
resorted to by entities that don’t have the resources for a real war.
The United
States, in between the terrible blunders of helping force out the Shah of Iran,
(President Carter), and promoting (President George W. Bush) elections that
elevated Hezbollah and Hamas, attempted to manage, but not resolve this
permanent state of acute abrasion.
Donald
Trump, who has demonstrated great intuitive, but not scholarly talents as a
geopolitician, recognized that this permanently uneasy and violent condition
possessed no potential for evolving positively, and that Iran and its proxies
had to be neutralized He withdrew from Obama’s catastrophic nuclear deal with
Iran which authorized Iran to become a nuclear power in ten years, and imposed
heavy sanctions on that country.
By the last
year of Trump‘s first term, Iran could not afford to finance the terrorist
activities of its vassals. Trump designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps as a terrorist organization, and then killed its commander Quassem
Soleimani.
The Abraham
accords in 2020 moved the Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan away from the
previous Arab position that normalized relations with Israel would depend on a
resolution of Palestinian problem. It was an important step in integrating
Israel into its region rather than it being quarantined as a leper state by
most of its neighbours.
The barbaric
escalation of October 7, 2023 that unleashed the Hamas invasion of Israel,
which was expected to send a flying column to the walls of Jerusalem and to
provoke an uprising in the West Bank, filled Israel with a determination to
fight the terrorist war in Gaza to a victorious conclusion.
The Biden administration waffled with a weak
statement that Israel had a right to defend itself but disputed its right to
counterattack seriously into Gaza. With the return of President Trump, the U.S.
led discussions that produced a delicate ceasefire and the release of Israeli
hostages, and Israel eliminated approximately 80 per cent of the Hamas trigger
pullers. It remains to disarm Hamas and to reconstruct Gaza.
Events were
overtaken by the approach of an Iranian development and deployment of a nuclear
warhead for missiles that could reach as far as London and Paris and Israel and
the United States destroyed that capability from the air. Iran was swiftly
resupplied, though not with nuclear warheads and the U.S and Israel refused to
accept Iran’s stall of negotiations, leading to the present conflict.
Europe’s
performance has been contemptible as most of their governments are leftist and
are overly influenced by extreme Muslim voting minorities. There will be a
reckoning in NATO for all the slackers, including Canada. It will be a great
and a delicious irony that Donald Trump is producing the greatest advance of
world peace since the end of the Cold War.
In one long
lifetime, the remarkable American presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Nixon, Reagan,
and Trump will have transformed the war-ravaged world of Hitler and Stalin into
comparative peace and prosperity.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-middle-east-is-on-the-brink-of-peace-thanks-to-trump?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=other
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