National Security Adviser John Bolton is lying again.
He says the US has no intention of invading Iran, taking it back to the Stone Age like he and his fellow neocons did to Iraq in 2003.
On Tuesday, the Washington Examiner reported:
A reporter told Bolton there was speculation that the decision [exiting the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] was a “precursor to the U.S. putting boots on the ground in Iran.”
“They would be badly mistaken,” Bolton said at the off-camera briefing.
Bolton might be right.
No boots on the ground—just a sustained air campaign to destroy anything of value on the ground (and underneath).
This is the ultimate objective. Make sure Israel is not challenged as the grand hegemon in the neighborhood. Greater Israel requires absorbing southern Lebanon all the way to the Latini, removing the Ba’athist government of Bashar al-Assad, and destroying Hezbollah in Lebanon.
This last one will now require destroying most of Lebanon as well. Hezbollah and its allies just won a majority in the Lebanese parliament. They now control more than half of the 128 seats in parliament. What this means is nobody’s going to disband Hezbollah’s militias and take away their arms, thus making them helpless against the Israelis, who are determined to wipe them out and make those left pay for defeating the once-all-powerful IDF in 2006.
Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, said in a televised speech the win is “a great political, parliamentary and moral victory for the resistance” against Israel.
Israel is capable of taking out Lebanon, but not Iran, so the assistance of the United States will be required.
Which, once again, makes John Bolton a liar.
But then we’ve come to accept that sort of behavior from neocons.
And Donald Trump.
The coming war, unlike the invasion of Iraq, will not include token public discussion or the secretary of state holding up a symbol of evil and excoriating Iran and Hezbollah.
It will simply happen.
That’s how Trump works the executive. He extracts “commander-in-chief” from the Constitution and believes that gives him the right to bomb whomever he wants—or rather targets selected by Israel and the neocons.
Of course, air wars are rarely decisive, and Bolton may be obliged to change his mind on those boots on the ground.
But that won’t work, either.
Iranians will fight to the last man and woman, just like Americans would if the country was invaded and occupied.
The only solution, from a demented neocon perspective, is to nuke Iran using those fancy “low-yield” mini-nukes Trump is fond of talking about.
Even so, those left will fight on from the rubble.
This whole thing is a no-win.
But then the neocons—and the no-mind-of-his-own president—follow Einstein’s maxim: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
