FOX News on the Iranian threat
The FOX News Channel will be featuring an analysis of the Iranian threat. In advance of the program, the FOX News website has a couple of articles that give a pretty good indication of what it will be about. The first is titled Iranian Nuke Dreams Challenge Bush Doctrine, which lays out the geopolitical dimensions of the threat. Walter Russell Mead is quoted as saying that an Iran with nukes would make the Bush Doctrine “look hollow”. Well, yes it would since it would mean that no action was taken to stop the Iranians. The article indicates that there would be bipartisan support for preventing the Iranians from getting nukes but what, precisely, that support would actually translate to is unclear. I expect that there will be broad support for air strikes but only limited support for the use of ground forces. However, once Congress backs the use of force, it would be very easy for air strikes to give way to a full-scale invasion.
The second piece is titled What Are U.S. Military Options in Iran?. As I indicated above, the experience with air strikes against Serbia indicates that there will probably be a lot of support for this option. It would appear that no one interviewed doubts that the U.S. would be able to invade but some people fall into the Nervous Nellie category and think that U.S. losses would be substantial. These folks (which include retired military) have been consistently wrong for the past 15 years. They don’t appreciate U.S. military capability and what “air dominance” really means. If the Iranians field their army it will die in the field. If they don’t field their army then we just walk in. Iran might be able to sustain an Iraqi-style insurgency for at most a year or so but, unlike those insurgents, there would be no one to supply the them. We would have any insurgents totally cut off with the “Stans” to the North and East, Iraq to the West, and the U.S. controlling the Persian Gulf and the Indiana Ocean. To quote Bill Paxton in Aliens, “Game over, man!”
The program will be on FOX News at 01:00 GMT 25 April.