Don't Bomb Iran!

At least not yet anyway.

It's pretty clear the Iranian totalitarian regime is looking to goad the U.S. into a first bloody strike.

Shooting down the drone was a brilliant move since there won't be any grieving families on the television. Nobody got hurt. Then, by muddying the waters over the location of the drone when it was shot down, there will be uncertainty over which party is telling the truth. Is this a case of the "Bully of the World", the United States, looking for an excuse to attack Iranian or is it a war-like Iran attempting to start an international military conflict by shooting down a U.S. drone in international airspace?

The world will ponder since both sides are keeping a straight face.

On the U.S. side, there are calls for reprisal but extreme caution should be observed if past experience will be given attention. If the U.S. should actually fire missiles into Iran or Iranian targets, you know the pictures coming back will be those of civilian casualties and the hurt looks of Iranian diplomats.

Even if we should hit nothing but sand.

It's a miracle of nature that the U.S. can't seem to hit anything but civilians in these Middle Eastern countries. We bomb a military installation and the pictures come back as women and children. In a past experience we bombed a toxic gas manufacturing facility in Iraq and, surprise, it was a children's formula processing plant! Amazing how, with the most advanced tracking systems in the world to date, we can barely hit a terrorist.

But subsequently, the pictures aren't going to look good if we don't wait for further escalation from the ancient brain-trust of the Mullahs.

And wait we should.

We could send them the bill for $ 130 million, the cost of the drone. Then we could threaten to seize Iranian assets if they don't remit the balance within 90 days. That would be the businessman's answer.

Besides, what's one lost drone to the Pentagon? It's a drop in the bucket in their massive secret budget which is most likely larger than 90% of the world's economies.

They'll just order another dozen.

War Mongers to the Front

I'm starting to see the roll a person like John Bolton plays in the Trump administration. With a guy like him always calling for the destruction of "Name-Your-Adversary", if I was sitting in Iran, I could never be sure if the President would be seriously listening to him or not. It would be hard to think he would but there he is chanting "kill, kill, kill" all the time. And President Trump is saying "I don't know how long I can hold this guy back." It makes one wonder if it's a tactic.

Would that it were but it's a deadly game both the U.S. and Iran are playing and it reminds me very much like what happened at Fort Sumter back in 1860 to bring the North and South to begin the American Civil War.

It was important to Abraham Lincoln for the South to fire the first shot in the war. You know, that's important in politics so he decides to just send an unarmed supply ship since North Carolina, having already seceded from the Union, had stopped suppling the fort which was on an island in the harbor. So the southern garrison on the shore, seeing the ship, launched an attack on Fort Sumter and the result was the "War of Southern Aggression" with just about every adult male alive at the time ending up dead.

Iran Becomes North Korea

We know the sanctions are killing the Iranian economy, for what it is, and if we want to pursue any kind of retaliation, the U.S. would do well to keep it economic. The Iran government is trying to find a way to break out of this blockade and save face while doing it. A tall task. So they are rattling away and causing, in reality, minor destruction.

Planting mines above the waterline of a ship tells me they didn't want to actually sink it. They wanted a good fire but again, nobody got killed. I don't think anybody even got hurt unless they fell off of a ladder or something. The ships are insured for this sort of thing. Even the Japanese are downplaying the whole affair since the ship was bound for Japan. So this sort of non-aggressive aggression is mostly designed to bring attention to Iran's 'plight". Not enough there to start a fight.

Plus, it was not an American ship so just leave it to the insurance company accountants.

What to Do

It's pretty obvious. With the pundits all describing Iran as playing a "Long Game", that should also be our strategy as well. The North Korean playbook as been to do just enough to make people nervous and Iran is making people nervous alright but that in itself does not constitute grounds for war. Also, just like North Korea, Iran has threatened destruction of the economic means of their neighbors should the United States intervene militarily. In the case of the Middle East, that's the oil fields.

So standing back and waiting to see just how far Iran is willing to go in this game of chicken will serve the United States interests. Meanwhile it's Iran's economic issues that will continue to work against them. They've squandered their meager GDP over the years on guns for the military and not butter for the people. And now it's come to bite them in the ass. Mullahs and Economics don't mix.

I don't see any other nations stepping up and offering any support for an armed solution to Iranian skullduggery so instead of putting on our "Defenders of the World" hats yet again, we should just wait until Iran does something to piss SOMEONE ELSE off.

Until a major country like France, Japan or Spain steps up and says "Something should be done" about Iran, we should just keep working on closing our southern boarder. It isn't like we've got nothing better to do.

So until Iran decides to definitively fire the first bloody shot at the United States, we should wait it out. But if they do decide to pull the trigger first...

That will spell the end for them.