“There’s nothing surprising about anything Iran is doing” in response to the U.S.-Israeli attacks, Ray Takeyh told us today. Takeyh is a Middle East scholar and participant in a Council on Foreign Relations panel on Iran this afternoon. “They’re doing exactly what they said they’d do,” he added.
Not surprisingly, of course, the U.S. Administration has been completely caught off guard by Iran’s response. In yet another chapter in the “bozos will be bozos” saga, the Administration is often befuddled, without any strategic framework, unable to state and sustain war objectives, constantly lying, insulting our service men and women with pseudo-macho bravado and by equating war with video games and sporting events, creating enmity with allies, destabilizing the global economy, and currently launching a new regime in Tehran worse than the previous one and with revenge on its mind.
There has been little by way of interagency process critical to coordinate political, economic, and military strategy, no advance preparation to evacuate U.S. citizens from the region, no timely notification of embassy staffs, a refusal to take Ukraine’s advice on how to eliminate the same Iranian drones they are facing, and a colossal intelligence failure that resulted in the U.S. killing 175 school children and teachers. And as oil prices increase, the illegal choice to attack the rotten Iranian regime is now filling oil-rich Russia’s war chest as it continues its own illegal war against Ukraine. All this for $1 billion per day!
In keeping with its stellar operational and tactical record, however, the U.S. military has been performing well. The U.S. military is very good at initial offensive attacks. We’re quite adept at blowing things up, but that immense power needs to be preserved for imminent, verifiable threats, which was certainly not the case here. Our problem here is not military in nature. We can always count on the professionalism of our warfighters. Our problem is one of extreme strategic incompetence.
At some point, and no matter the actual facts, the U.S. Administration will declare complete and total success in Iran. Takeyh says Iran may be able to declare victory, too, however, in surviving the attacks and exerting real costs on the international community.
