Well, Trump says the Iranian war is over.\u00a0 Hmmm.\u00a0 How does that work?\u00a0 Does Iran stop attacking its neighbors and does that mean Israel and Hezbollah are ready to stop trading missiles too?\u00a0 I saw gasoline below $4\/gallon today.\u00a0 Is that because of these headlines today or is that just the latest price bouncing off of lower demand?<\/p>\n
Of course, I\u2019d love for this to be the end of this war.\u00a0 It would give the Republicans a big boost in November and would almost certainly deny Democrats the Senate.\u00a0 But it just doesn\u2019t seem likely to me that Tehran will just back off and play nice.\u00a0 It\u2019s just not in their DNA.\u00a0 But of course, I\u2019ll give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt and wait and see if he\u2019s pulled off a coup with this announcement.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always wondered just how dysfunctional the Iranian nation is.\u00a0 Back in the 1980s they fought a war with Iraq in which a million young Iranians died during \u201chuman wave\u201d attacks against a mechanized Iraqi army.\u00a0 The stupidity of something like this can\u2019t be overstated.\u00a0 But now the next generation of Iranians seem to be completely directionless.\u00a0 They despise the mullahs and hate their religious extremism and mismanagement of the economy but they have been brutalized by the Basij Resistance Force to such an extent that they\u2019ve withdrawn back into their homes and have failed to organize any resistance of their own.<\/p>\n
Think about this country, since 1979 their whole people have been led by lunatics whose whole plan is to restore a theocratic government that fell apart almost a thousand years ago because it has never had a reliable way of choosing new leaders and because its tenets are not conducive to a thriving society.\u00a0 But at the same time, the strongest faction in the country is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.\u00a0 The actual power in Iran is in their hands and they are in control of both the armed forces and the Basij Resistance Force that they use to control the general population and crush dissent.\u00a0 And they\u2019ve become so strongly ensconced that really the only way to pry power from them would be to send in an enormous army and defeat them on the ground.\u00a0 And everyone knows we\u2019re not going to do that.<\/p>\n
So, what we have is a perpetual stalemate.\u00a0 Iran spends its oil money on building bunkers in their mountains and filling them with missiles and drones.\u00a0 And they use these weapons to supply Hezbollah and Hamas with the means to kill Israelis.\u00a0 I guess the day could finally come where Iranians just get so fed up with their miserable lives that they rise up and murder the Basij agents with their bare hands.\u00a0 Or the Israelis just get so good at technological warfare that they manage to infiltrate all of Iran\u2019s bunkers and blow them all up at the same time and follow it up with exploding cell phones that kill the entire Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in one fell swoop.<\/p>\n
But until one or the other of these two fantasies come true Iran will exist to nauseate the world of normal people that just want a sanity to prevail.<\/p>\n