Martin Sieff received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for international reporting for The Washington Times. He served as Chief Political Correspondent at United Press International (UPI) from 1999 to 2009.
The unintended consequences of President Donald Trump’s latest war of choice are becoming clear. On Friday, CNBC reported that, “U.S. crude oil posted its biggest weekly gain in futures trading history.” Barrels of West Texas Intermediate and Brent Crude are now north of $90 dollars and climbing. Qatar’s energy minister, Saad al-Kaabi, speculated that oil prices could climb as high as $150 per barrel.
The reason for this is obvious, said the Wall Street Journal.
“The widening Iran conflict is threatening to set off convulsions in the world economy,” the financial broadsheet reported at mid-week. “The de facto closure of the Straits of Hormuz has trapped thousands of ships in the Persian Gulf , forcing Gulf producers to slash output and Asian refiners to hunt for alternative supplies.”
One did not have to be Michel de Nostradamus to anticipate that this was going to happen. Nostradamus repeatedly warned about the immeasurable catastrophes that would flow from provoking the Iranian people into a wild, once-in-two-millennia jihad against the West.
Not that such an eventuality was ever going to happen unless some Western leaders were stupid enough to martyr an Iranian Shiite leader during the holy month of Ramadan. Great thinking, guys.
Clearly Trump, his blustering and ignorant Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and his personal envoys, the New York real estate magnates Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, did not see it coming. Nor, of course, did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Nor did the legions of neoconservative armchair warriors at Hudson, Heritage, and the hilariously misnamed America First Policy Institute. Nor, for that matter, did the the editorial desk jockeys at the New York Post and the Daily Telegraph.
Even now, Trump, his strategic brains trust, Netanyahu, and the unimpressive masterminds of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) imagine that a brisk bombing campaign will do the job.
The excellent Times of Israel reported on March 5th that the IDF was warning of a two week campaign. In reality, this is code language for saying: “In two weeks, we will run out of bombs to drop and missiles to fire. Please prepare, Mr. US President, to send us endless more supplies then!” For the geniuses of the IDF, the magical Washington cornucopia will never run out of lethal goodies to send them.
Americans never learn and never will; the current generation of Israeli leaders is just as bad--if not worse.
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Real wars are never clean or surgical at all. And bombing is neither “precise” nor the panacea it is so often claimed to be.
The US Army Air Force really believed that the Norden bombsight would allow their fleets of uncontested slow, bulky but heavily armored B-17 Boeing Flying Fortresses--which were armed to the teeth with 13.50m caliber heavy machine guns--would fly with impunity over Nazi Germany and blast their synthetic oil plants and ball bearing factories into rubble.
Israeli generals, too, are trapped in these delusions. They still believe all the dusty cliches and obsolete old truths of the long-gone Industrial America that saved them during the fabled C-5 Galaxy Airlift in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
But that America is long gone. Free trade policies enacted by Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. hollowed out its heart, leaving a gaping, bleeding social and industrial hell-hole of destitution and despair. Trump thought he could wave a protectionist magic wand and remedy all the damage. He was wrong.
Furthermore, the Trump administration ignored (or, more likely, was ignorant of) the lessons of Gulf War I: President George Herbert Walker Bush, Secretary of State James A. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell, and Baker assembled a well prepared and enormous land army in Kuwait to pulverize the Iraqi army, which in 1991 was the fourth-largest ground force, consisting of an estimated 1 million troops and approximately 5,000 tanks.
The United States no longer has such an army. None of the ludicrous, corrupt, and inane spending directed by President “Dubya” Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney during and after the 2003 Second Gulf War restored it. They wasted and exhausted their army chasing goblins and djinn around the world. (Special Forces were even deployed to try and capture djinn in the nation of Oman during those fevered years).
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The scholar Arta Moeini of the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy wrote on the British platform UnHerd on March 4th:
…If Seyyed Ali Khamenei had choreographed his own death, he could scarcely have designed a more potent political end. After all, he was not merely Iran’s head of state: he was a religious symbol for Shi’ites worldwide. His assassination — by US-Israeli bombs during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, while fasting and overseeing wartime resistance planning — instantly transcended geopolitics and entered the realm of sacred myth. For supporters of the Islamic Republic, the symbolism is nothing short of miraculous, and among the Shiite population worldwide, it instantly resonates within their collective memory.
Also, we must never forget, as Trump, Netanyahu and their “tough,” “macho” “realistic” geniuses did, that Ali Khamenei was also a Seyyed, a direct descendent of the martyred Ali at Karbala himself.
Thus it is that the Islamic Republic has already been saved from imminent death: it has been resurrected, reincarnated, renewed, transformed into something far more fearful.
And it was Trump and Netanyahu between them who did it.
Well, it is now too late for them to wake up from their worthless fevered dreams: For they are now going to be on the receiving end of a genuinely fearful eschatology and jihad, holy war. And they aren’t going to like it. None of us are.
Trump, Hegseth, Rubio and the US military have no idea at all what any of this means: They are still caught up in the old Norden bombsight fantasies: Just a brief, “surgical”, “clean” bombing campaign will do it.
President Franklin Roosevelt felt the same way about the coming World War II. He really believed that fleets of B-17s all carrying those wonderful Norden bombsights was all the United States needed to win. It took the relentless determination and character of US Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall to force him to recognize that an enormous, well-trained and well equipped land army would be necessary too.
Trump, Hegseth and company are still blind to all this: They still imagine they will be able to bluff their way out of a full scale world war, or win one painlessly and cheaply. Almost every member of Congress thinks so too.
This insane idea of destroying the Iranian state or at least decapitating and reprogramming it by air power and assassination, is going to backfire catastrophically. Soaring oil prices are the warning red lights, heralding worse to come.
The bombing fantasy didn’t work against Nazi Germany in World War II even after more than half a million German civilians were killed by bombing alone. General Curtis LeMay’s US Army Air Force XXI Bomber Command killed half a million Japanese civilians in a single spring and summer in 1945. Today, Russia and China, as well as the United States, possess far more powerful thermonuclear arsenals.
We no longer stand on the brink of Armageddon: It is here.