COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

It's started already.

The Senate releases a report revealing evidence that the government of Iran, while not complicit in the 9/11 plot per se, has been facilitating travel of Al Qaeda operatives.
And the left--having no shame--is already calling for a military assault on Iran.

Such calls illustrate the left's fundamental unseriousness on matters military.

As I've written before: loads of doodoo-flinging monkey wannabes study tactics. And even more of them study strategy.

The professional, in contrast, studies logistics.

How would Brad DeLong have us support the assault? From where? The Afghanistan model is too light, and there are no existing conventional formations to leverage, as we did with the Northern Alliance. All the heavy lifting would have to be done by us. Which means we would have to send mechanized formations lumbering into Iran.

From where?

Such an operation would have been logistically impossible--even absurd, without first having invaded Iraq. There is no way the governments of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait would have allowed us to support an attack on Iran from their bases. We had a hard enough time getting the Saudis to acquiesce to Iraq!

Second, Even basing a mechanized operation in Iran would be a dice roll. Why? Because as soon as you picked a fight with Iran, Iran would immediately cut your logistics base off from shipping by shutting down the Straits of Hormuz with Exocet missiles.

Do you have enough prestock in Iraq to make it to the Straits of Hormuz to protect your own supply line?

Are you sure?

Well, then everything you devote to securing the Straits of Hormuz sure isn't going to be knocking the regime out of power in Tehran is it?

So we'd be forced to split our effort between the two, just as Hitler did by trying to attack Moscow and the Caucasus simultaneously.

And even if we didn't do a conventional invasion--if we limited ourselves to airstrikes, what's the risk/reward analysis.

Well, here are the potential downsides:

Well, we broaden the conflict and make support for our efforts in Iran AND Iraq alike very difficult for moderate Arab leaders to provide, thanks to political pressures at home.

We make things more difficult for ourselves in the UN than they already are.

Iran will shut down the Straits of Hormuz anyway, cutting off Kuwait from all shipping, undermining our logistical support in Iraq, making it impossible for us to deploy or redeploy heavy equipment without Iran's ok, and cutting off middle eastern oil supplies to the entire world, sending oil prices to the stratosphere and the world into a recession.

Jihadist insurgents will be emboldened in Iraq and elsewhere, as they score rhetorical points about how the attack on Iran proves that the US is really at war against Islam.

The air assault on Tehran will likely have little effect, and may even serve to consolidate the Mullah's hold on power. But it will play very poorly on CNN International Edition, and possibly go on for weeks without effect, just as our attacks on Yugoslavia did in 1999.

And the upside:

Well, none that I can think of.

Even if you did knock the mullahs from power, how would you secure the country? With what troops?

I think Brad DeLong's been working in an ivory tower in Berkeley too long. The rest of us have to deal with what is actually, you know, possible.

Of course, that doesn't stop DeLong from calling for an impeachment of Bush and Cheney--not for violating the law, mind you, for failing to have implemented DeLong's foolish suggestion already.

And yet, Brad's defenders will no doubt say that when he advocates an immediate assault on Iran, he's not really advocating an assault on Iran. Only pointing out the absurdity of attacking Iraq and not attacking Iran. But this point is only tenable if you completely ignore logistical realities, troop availability, and the existence of umpteen security council resolutions and the resulting availability of entire brigades of international troops for assistance.

The speciousness of the leftist arguments knows no bounds.

Splash, out

Jason