Is Tehran willing to play brinksmanship with President Trump?\u00a0 We\u2019re about to find out.\u00a0 It\u2019s a relatively complicated calculation for me.\u00a0 The Iranian people are extremely disgruntled against their theocratic regime due to economic problems associated with the American embargo.\u00a0 Recently the government\u2019s suppression of protest was responsible for the death of hundreds of anti-regime partisans.\u00a0 Will that make the mullahs less likely to hazard a war or do they think it will distract the people who will instead concentrate on an outside aggressor.\u00a0 And what are the leaders guessing about the temperament and intentions of President Trump?\u00a0 Do they think he\u2019ll be cautious about engaging in a shooting war during an election year or do they think he will be forced to save face if they kill American soldiers?<\/p>\n
With regard to the second question, Tehran may be basing their estimation of the President\u2019s response on their experiences with George W. Bush and Barack Obama.\u00a0 Obama was entirely unwilling to deny Iran anything they asked for.\u00a0 His deal with the Iranians included $150 billion dollars in tribute including over a billion dollars in one hundred-dollar bills packed onto pallets for ease of shipment.\u00a0 There was the ideal American President from an Iranian perspective.\u00a0 With Bush they had a man who earlier on needed to be avoided due to his campaign of Middle Eastern military reduction.\u00a0 But once he allowed himself to become immobilized in the quagmire of the Iraq occupation, he was a fantastic victim for the Iraqi Shiite surrogates that Iran controlled.\u00a0 He was too weakened by the damage he had done to the American military and his own constituency to see that holding Iran responsible for the Shiite resistance should have been part of his larger campaign.\u00a0 Also, he never ended Iran\u2019s nuclear program when he easily could have.<\/p>\n
Getting back to the point, if the Iranians judge that President Trump will be either too pacifistic like Obama or too strategically na\u00efve like Bush, they may be in for a nasty shock.\u00a0 If they manage to kill a large number of American soldiers in this revenge campaign it\u2019s entirely possible that President Trump may elect to escalate the conflict with a very extensive series of missile and aerial strikes against the most important assets of the Iranian military forces.\u00a0 If a series of strikes to take out Iran\u2019s ballistic missile stockpiles, the nuclear production facilities and the jet fighter and naval vessels were to occur it might not be easy for the mullahs to continue their war.<\/p>\n
A further thought occurs that if human intelligence allowed targeting of \u201cSupreme Leader\u201d Ali Khamenei and his clerical kitchen cabinet that might put an end to the Iranian regime altogether.<\/p>\n
Now these are enormous escalations based on where we are right now but anyone who has followed the Middle East knows that just to engage in tit for tat low level violence is to play to their strengths.\u00a0 It is even possible that the missile strikes that the Iranians have fired may be a minor incident that won\u2019t require a strong response.\u00a0 We\u2019ll know soon.\u00a0 By morning the damage reports will begin to appear.<\/p>\n
It seems to me that Tehran will elect to use proxies to harass Americans anywhere they have a chance.\u00a0 That is more their style.\u00a0 But if they decide to get in a shooting war with President Trump, I predict they will get more than they bargained for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Is Tehran willing to play brinksmanship with President Trump?\u00a0 We\u2019re about to find out.\u00a0 It\u2019s a relatively complicated calculation for me.\u00a0 The Iranian people are<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2260,2259,16],"class_list":["post-9601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","tag-iran","tag-middle-east","tag-trump"],"yoast_head":"\n