The remarks differ from what Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is said to have told the president in high-level White House meetings.
President Trump said on Monday that Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believed that any eventual military action ordered against Iran would be “something easily won.”
But that is not what General Caine has told Mr. Trump and other senior advisers in recent high-level White House meetings on Iran, people briefed on internal administration deliberations said.
Instead, General Caine has said that the United States has amassed forces in the Middle East to carry out a small or medium strike, but that there would be a potentially high risk of American casualties and that such an operation would have a negative effect on U.S. weapon stockpiles. General Caine has also underscored that the operations under consideration in Iran would be much more difficult than the successful capture last month of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
Iran is not so small, what 80 million people, a large country with mountain ranges, which lend themselves to guerrilla action, and hiding forces that it’s hard to bomb them dead, as afghanistan could tell you. Flat countries like Iraq they can just get bigger bunker busters, they have communications corrupted so can see where these guys are more than they think the US can see them too.
But Iran will not be seeing regime change, and it would take millions of troops to occupy it properly, even if our leaders weren’t too corrupt and mean to do it properly. We were too corrupt and mean to do Iraq and afghanistan well, this new administration would take it to a new level. They never set up an economy under an honest system. Never set up and fostered smallholding farmers and helped give them the tools and machinery to feed the country and make a base of support for a new government. In iraq they could’ve set up families with new farms they could split off for instance. They could’ve set up some industry, and made good solid jobs that pay for a dignified life.
Instead they paid off warlords that spent the entire time in a game of thrones type power struggle. Supremely corrupt, no one wanted or liked that government, and it predictably immediately collapsed when we pulled out. The taliban may be religious extremists, but they are honest. They don’t tolerate that level of corruption and graft. If they said they didn’t do an attack, you could believe it, if they did an attack, they would claim credit. Meanwhile the puppet government lied systematically, even about provably false stuff.
So anyway, they won’t go in boots on the ground as such, but if they did it would be a massive boondoggle given an already bad leadership made worse by this administration and their blackmailers the Israelis. But they might seize pieces of land around the Straits of Hormuz, that is the likely scenario unfortunately. And of course bombing, including civilian infrastructure, assassinating their leaders, including their ayatollah. Power grids, hospitals, you name it. Ongoing, peace won’t stop the attacks Israel doesn’t care about dishonoring agreements they’ve absolute military advantage and blackmail controlling the superpower.
Nothing better will result, their islamic republic will endure, and many will die needlessly as economic harms will become worse in Iran and spread worldwide.
Yeah, there won’t be an occupation. It’ll be an aerial and artillery bombardment causing hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties and destroying the Iranian people’s efforts at regime change.
The goal is to destroy Iran’s economy, take Iranian oil offline (which will drive up fossil-fuel prices, helping Putin) and steer a few billion in oil-industry reconstruction projects to the fossil-fuel gangsters.