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While Trump and the media battle over whether Iran's nuclear sites were "ANNIHILATED," the focus on BDA (Battle Damage Assessment) is missing the forest for the trees. First off, every American should be thrilled that, while on the precipice, we were able to avoid falling into yet another power vacuum used to justify yet another regime-change forever war in the Middle East.
Did Iran's uranium enrichment centrifuges get obliterated into itty bitty smithereens? Probably. Is Iran's nuclear program delayed by months or even years? Yes. Did we avoid putting boots on the ground? Yes. Did Iran and Israel cease bombing each other? YES. These three affirmatives are what matter most at this time.
I am 35, old enough to remember when the Democrats were supposed to be the party of anti-war. But these days, if Trump says peace, they say war. If Trump says bomb, they say don't. On issues as monumental as nuclear bombs, our political conversation is fixated on stirring up the bathwater while the baby was thrown out during the spring invasion of Baghdad in 2003.
When it comes to a place with as much history as the Middle East, every struggle is in increments and every battle is in inches. Cyrus the Great unified Persia over 2,500 years ago when his armies defeated Nabonidus and the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The Assyrians conquered the Israelites; the Israelites conquered the Canaanites. The Ottomans fought the Persians for three hundred years. The Russians fought the Persians for centuries. MI-6 and the CIA backed a coup d'état that overthrew the populist socialist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossaddegh and reinstated the pro-Western monarchy of the Shah.
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A quarter of a century later, the pendulum swung the other way, and now the Russians are on the Iranian (modern Persian) side and the Brits and the Americans are backing the Israelis, who have possessed nukes since the eve of the '67 Six Day War. The Arabs refer to this devastating loss as Al-Naksa, which means the Setback. Three different Arab nations were decimated in less than a week, and yet it is referred to as a mere "setback". That's because over there, battles are waged across generations. Meanwhile, we Americans measure the arc of history in election cycles and markets that shift as quickly as the dunes roll all the way to the strait of Hormuz.
I could go on for a thousand more pages, but I think you get the point: the tribal and sectarian divisions of the blood-stained land run deeper than the oil below. Our American minds are too young to understand the depths of these conflicts and too ambitious to care.
What it comes down to is dollar signs. Big surprise, Iran's promise to shutter the straight of Hormuz were idle threats because they sell 90 percent of their oil exports to China; China didn't want them to shut it and so they did not. I'm just happy as long as those dollar signs don't equate to putting boots on the ground and nation building on the backs and through the blood of our youngest and strongest men.
I was 45 miles from Manhattan on 9/11/2001 and through my formative years I watched our bloodthirsty and greedy government initiate two disastrous wars. I spent six months living in the Middle East while studying Arabic for two hours per day, five days per week for three years. I had labored to learn the language with hopes of somehow undoing or fixing these horrible mistakes. But when I got back stateside from my study abroad, I said the same thing as Trump, "We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing."
Pardon the less-than Presidential language, but in this case the words are fitting and Trump is right.
If we examine what happened after the NATO-imposed "no fly zone" in Libya, for example, the unintended consequences of regime change are clear. At the time, Libya had one of the highest per-capita incomes in Africa. Then Ghaddafi was executed via a bayonet in his ass, and the country has been embroiled in civil war ever since.
When it comes to the question of American use of force in the Middle East, we cannot allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Almost none of the idiots you see squawking about BDA on cable news have any clue what's really going on over there, nor do they care. Half of them are blinded by Trump derangement syndrome, and the other half are still clinging to their provably catastrophic Neo Conservative desires.
Let's pack up and get back to addressing our own problems. Let's be thankful that, for the moment, we are no longer teetering on toppling another government in the near east, and we are (at least in the case of Iran) no longer on the brink of nuclear war. In the meantime, Iran has a lot of work to do if they want to get a nuclear weapon, and Israel has hangered its plane and sheathed its sword. Unlike our domestic politics, when it comes to the Middle East, I will take a kick of the can down the road over a thermonuclear war.
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