Lots of big stuff is happening in the news. I’m going to take a little time and just explain a bit about Iran. If you’re already familiar, my apologies, but I thought it would be good to just give a basic overview of the situation.
So, where to begin? The Iranian Government has been behind much (not all) of the turmoil of the Middle East over the past few decades. The Government which was in place a week or two ago hates two countries: Israel and the United States. Iran is the classic state sponsor of terrorism; if it can’t directly engage in war with its enemies, it funds terrorist groups that do. It funds Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Israel knows this, and every time it gets attacked by Hamas or Hezbollah, it knows Iran’s really behind it all.
For a long time, Iran has had a nuclear program, claiming it’s for peaceful purposes (power generation, nuclear medicine, etc.). The problem, though, is that it’s spent a lot of time and effort enriching Uranium to a very high level, and there’s no purpose to going through so much trouble other than for the construction of a nuclear device. A nuclear reactor used for generating electricity does not require such highly enriched fuel, and there’s no point in stockpiling so much Uranium for medicinal purposes. It’s bomb material, pure and simple. You can see how this, along with advancements to Iran’s ballistic missile program, makes Israel very nervous. Leaders in the U.S. and/or Israel may have received some intelligence about pending developments on this, prompting the recent action against Iran.
Strategically, Iran is physically located at a very important spot. It has the ability to shut down a maritime bottleneck (the Strait of Hormuz) through which a very large percentage of the world’s oil gets shipped. Tanker vessels carrying oil from Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and others transit this bottleneck every day. Iran can try to shut down all traffic transiting the Strait and hold the oil hostage until it gets what it wants, or until somebody forces the Strait back open. Iran’s navy has taken a beating since hostilities commenced, but even without large vessels it can still launch missiles from shore at ships that try to transit the Strait. Incidentally, China needs a lot of oil, and it previously got a large percentage of its oil imports from Venezuela and from Iran at discounted rates. Now that both of those gravy trains have stopped flowing and nobody wants to send oil through the Strait of Hormuz, China’s going to start making a lot of noise about opening the Strait back up again.
The United States has a history of involvement in Iran’s internal affairs. In the 1950s the CIA helped pull off a coup that installed a leader friendly to the United States and its interests (mostly regarding oil and oil infrastructure). This led to an uprising among the younger generation a couple of decades later, when the U.S.-installed Shah was sidelined and Iran’s recent government model took power during the Islamic Revolution of 1979. It established a Theocracy, with an Ayatollah in charge of the nation. A president is also present, but the appointed-for-life Ayatollah makes the decisions.
Over time the demographics in Iran have worked against the Government. Although the religious enthusiasm of the revolutionaries in 1979 swept them into power, today’s under-45 population is much less interested in the morality police and would rather not deal with the crippling sanctions their government’s policies have incurred from the international community. Uprisings have sputtered to life, only to be put down by a sophisticated and brutal security apparatus. Networks of secret police, informants, morality police, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) put down uprisings through fear, violence, and intimidation.
President Trump is keenly aware of Americans’ distaste for another multi-decade conflict in the Middle East. He appears content to remove the nation’s current rulers to give the general population an opportunity to rise up and establish its own version of government. I don’t have insight into the President’s actual plan, but a major sticking point here is that everyday citizens in Iran do not have access to firearms, and that makes it very tricky for them to overthrow the armed security apparatus. In all likelihood, the theocratic element of Iran’s Government will come to an end (the role of Ayatollah and clerics will be greatly diminished), but the apparatus put in place to maintain the theocracy’s survival will likely take charge in some capacity. If that’s true, Iran will trade a religious authoritarian government for a secular authoritarian government. We’ll see just how willing President Trump is to continue remotely disrupting the power of the establishment in Iran. Eventually, the theory goes, they’ll have enough of the struggle, and they will surrender. An opposition must emerge somehow, either organically within Iran or the descendents of the Shah who was ousted in 1979.
This is a pretty fluid situation and I’m sure things will change by the time this entry gets posted, but President Trump said he expects this operation to last four or five weeks. War Secretary Pete Hegseth stated the objectives of the operation to be threefold: 1. destroy Iranian missiles/missile production, 2. destroy Iran’s navy and other security infrastructure, and 3. they will never have nuclear weapons. Destroy the missile threat, destroy the navy, no nukes. All three of those goals have been brought much closer to reality, but now we have an Iranian military and IRGC who are armed with missiles and are scared and/or motivated to take action. A lot of missiles seem like they’re getting launched, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a strategy behind the launches other than lashing out at anyone who doesn’t help them.
Like I said, it’s a highly fluid situation. There are a lot of articles and a lot of TV coverage about this story, but there’s not always a lot of information to report, so you’ll see and hear a lot of words that aren’t really telling you many concrete facts. Be on the lookout for how Russia and China play this one, what governments in neighboring nations do, and what kind of opposition groups start emerging as serious contenders to take part in a new government. Obviously, there’s much more to come on this topic, so keep an eye on big developments.
