Coyote Blog

I posted a draft of something I am tinkering with on viral ideas and intellectual immune systems by accident.  It is an idea I am playing with but still have not organized in a way I am happy with. It was unfinished because I hit publish instead of save draft like a moron.  A new version that is fully thought out is coming soon.

I am probably more knowledgeable about 20th century military conflicts than most, so perhaps it is useful to remind everyone of this -- I can think of no country in history that ever capitulated or initiated a favorable regime change in response to air attacks alone.  The closest I can think of is the Netherlands that surrendered to Hitler in 1940 after the brutal bombing of Rotterdam, but this capitulation occurred when Germany had an overwhelming force of infantry and armor slicing through that nation.  You can soften them up through the air, but you win on the ground.  Neither the UK, Germany, the USSR, Poland or later North Korea or North Vietnam ever gave up after an air campaign (the latter an example of where the US attempted to bomb a country into the stone age that started the war in the stone age).

All this of course is to reiterate my skepticism that bombing the sh*t out of Iran is going to lead to any sort of surrender or favorable regime change.  I see of late that Trump supporters have adopted the defense that their purpose in Iran is to degrade Iran's military ability and ability to support terrorism and conflicts in the region.  But that sure as hell was not the Administration's public line at the beginning of the war.  My recollection was that Trump's reasoning was we were going to decapitate the leadership and the people would rise up in revolution, an outcome I found unlikely from the first day.

Postscript:  I would have thought it a perfectly defensible position in a war like this to argue against the efficacy of our attacks while still believing the target regime is awful.  Apparently that seems to be a bridge too far for most war opponents, as I increasingly see those on the anti-war side attempting to portray the Iranian government as morally superior to the US.  For all our flaws and our failure to live up to our own standards, that is frankly absurd.  But I still see it every day, women in the US running around protesting conditions for women in the US wearing Handmaid's Tale outfits while simultaneously defending the ethics of the Iranian (or Gaza) governments.

So I will add my usual postscript:  I put all of the above in the "I wish I were wrong" category.  Opponents of wars frequently fall into the trap of supporting the other side.  The Iranian government is one of the worst in the world, both in how it treats its people (or at least the half without a Y chromosome) and its proclivity for inciting violence and mayhem in other countries.  It is a totalitarian regime responsible for much of the current instability in the Middle East and I would love to wave my magic wand and see it gone.

Back in the first heady days of the attacks on Iran I cautioned that it was relatively easy to kill a few leaders and bomb a bunch of stuff, but harder to understand how a liberal democracy was to magically eventuate in Iran.  The US has a history of removing one bad leader and getting only something worse afterwards (remember Diem?  Gaddafi?).  One problem is that after 40 years of rule, the totalitarian government there is strong and deeply entrenched, and the opposition (while it certainly exists) does not seem to have leadership, plans, or coherent organization.  Would killing Hitler in 1943 or Stalin in 1937 have incited a successful revolution?  Almost certainly not -- not because they were loved but because their party's instruments of control were strong and the opposition was smashed flat.

The only vague hope I might have harbored was that the CIA had some secret plan in place with the opposition organized by agents on the ground.  Really, this was an absurd hope, but I grew up in the 60's and the 70's when the CIA had a certain aura of competent deviousness.  Intellectually, I disabused myself of this mythology years ago, but its remnants must have still been lurking around my brain.

For others who might be harboring such vague hopes of secret master spy plans, there is this:

Even a massive military assault on Iran is unlikely to topple the Islamic Republic of Iran and its state system, according to a classified assessment produced by the US intelligence community shortly before the US and Israel launched their current 'shock and awe-style' military campaign on Tehran. The Washington Post first reported it, perhaps based on some kind of leak or briefing by an anonymous intelligence official, and calls it—

a sobering assessment as the Trump administration raises the specter of an extended military campaign that officials sayhas "only just begun."

The report, compiled by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) roughly a week before the war began, concluded that Iran's political system is structured to survive even major leadership losses, The Washington Post reports. However, this should really come as no surprise to anyone awake and observant throughout the past two plus decades of America's 'nation building' efforts in the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya. ...

The intelligence report also poured cold water on the idea that Iran's opposition could quickly fill any power vacuum. US intelligence analysts assessed that the country's fragmented opposition movements remain too divided to seize control, regardless of whether Washington pursued limited strikes against leadership targets or a broader assault on state institutions.

Equally unlikely, according to current and former US officials familiar with the analysis, is the prospect of a spontaneous nationwide uprising. We could speculate that this possibility may have had a chance of some degree of success within the opening one or two days of the mass US-Israel bombing campaign, but it clearly didn't materialize.

I will observe that no such promised revolution has occurred so far after the Maduro snatch.  You can almost visualize the Administration look of confusion when the revolutions they were convinced would magically appear did not occur.  Sort of like the look on the coyote's face when some trap he has created fails to work.

Postscript:  I put all of the above in the "I wish I were wrong" category.  Opponents of wars frequently fall into the trap of supporting the other side.  The Iranian government is one of the worst in the world, both in how it treats its people (or at least the half without a Y chromosome) and its proclivity for inciting violence and mayhem in other countries.  It is a totalitarian regime responsible for much of the current instability in the Middle East and I would love to wave my magic wand and see it gone.

I am not going to get into any ethical or legal arguments about the decapitation raids on Iran.  I don't have the time or the heart to do it right now.  I couldn't be more thrilled to see the leadership of Iran eliminated but the legal basis for all this is slim.  Of course every President this century has done something similar, sometimes with far less provocation, so the precedent train already left the station long ago.  I will, however, offer one practical issue.

The US is really good at getting rid of leaders like this, and if anything is getting better.  I won't go further back than my lifetime, but the Diem coup (and execution) in South Vietnam, the lukewarm (at best) support for the Shah of Iran that contributed to his ouster, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Afghanistan invasion, Gaddafi in Libya, Maduro in Venezuela, Noriega in Panama -- the list goes on.  But in many or most of these cases, what followed the US-led decapitation was as bad or worse than what came before.  Vietnam - equally bad or worse.  Iran - worse.  Iraq - better but took a really long commitment.  Afghanistan - at least as bad or worse.  Venezuela - unknown but no immediate revolution as hoped.  Libya - much worse.  Panama - probably better.

We have no historically successful roadmap to go by, and in a sense this may be a situation like Hayek's critique of government planning -- that a perfect roadmap cannot exist because we don't understand the mass of individuals we are "liberating", or even how they define "liberated', or even if they really want to be "liberated."  As all of us humans do, we project our own preferences and outlooks and assumptions on people where they may well not fit at all.

Even beyond the job of seeing Iran no longer acting as a leading agent of chaos, I would greatly love to see their people liberated.  Women in Iran who were just emerging into the 20th Century under the Shah's leadership have a chance to emerge from gender apartheid again, and I am 100% hoping to see this.  (I wrote a while back about the utter lunacy of US women on the Left consistently siding with hardcore Islam and ignoring the plight of women in these countries).

Unfortunately for my optimism, I said the exact same thing, almost word for word, when we invaded Iraq.  Iraq has since struggled to fulfill this promise, though to be fair a lot of the blame for that rests not on US failures or the Iraqis but on the ongoing efforts by Iran to subvert the country and keep it roiled in chaos.  But getting there took a HUGE US commitment of money and lives, way more than a pushbutton decapitation of the leadership.

A parting thought -- there is clearly an Iranian opposition.  We have seen them bravely marching in the streets (far braver than our anti-fascists here as they faced actual imprisonment and death for such protests against real fascists).  This is an honest question -- around whom does the Iranian opposition rally and organize?  As in many such authoritarian societies, only the authorities have organization.  So even decapitated, the military and former government theoretically have a huge head start in pulling things together under their control in the aftermath than an unorganized populace.  This is the same problem faced by many post-colonial governments.  It's not that their populace wanted a military dictatorship when the colonizer left or was thrown out, but in many cases the only organized and educated group in the country was the military which stepped into the vacuum.  I am not an expert on this but I have always assumed India escaped this fate because it had a relatively large, educated group of indigenous people trained in government and not in the military.

Postscript:  I continue to find it sort of hilarious that media that go out of their way not to deadname a transexual teen insist on describing Iran as part of the Arab world and their citizens as Arabs.  I can tell you with great confidence and many experiences that there is no way to piss off an Iranian faster than to call them an Arab.