Havoc!

The weather is still pretty nice; it made for a quiet and peaceful walk around the neighborhood this morning. In a few more weeks this cool weather will segue into Houston's normal, so I guess we enjoy it while we can.

For weeks now, though, the dogs of war have been restless, and now, quiet as it may seem on the home ground, we hear the cry of, “Havoc!”

With this week’s overwhelming attacks by U.S. and Israeli forces on Iran’s ruling oligarchy, rendering most of them dead along with the decimation of their navy and air defenses, war is upon us.

As of yet, it’s a high-tech blitzkrieg, but the fanatical Muslim theocracy is not yet giving up. It’s hard to see how the mullahs can prevail – they’ve lost both the populace with their recent massacre of thousands of unarmed demonstrators, and credibility as a government.

Meanwhile, the potential definitely exists for terrorist sleeper cells that immigrated during our borderless epoch to strike at the U.S. citizenry. War entails risk.

To no surprise, already there is domestic resistance to the initiative. So, is the effort meritorious?

If you consider Iran’s position in the world as a financier of proxy evil embodied in Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, it is hard to lend the mullahs any sympathy. But the greater perspective should take into account 1) their mindset of Islamist supremacy over all other cosmologies, 2) their drive to implement that supremacist view, 3) their nuclear ambitions, and notably 4) Iran’s missile attacks this week on Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and Jordan.

That last note above (#4) gives you a bit of a sense of their level of truculence vis-á-vis the rest of the world. All of the named countries they’ve targeted have not participated militarily (yet), and, significantly, they’re primarily Sunni as opposed to Iran being run by Shia Islamists. One might perceive that as them taking a wild, desperate swipe at their religious foes, or – more importantly – them striking out at the ‘’other” world.

And when you take that last view and consider it along with their nuclear program and Islamist jihadis' known penchant for suicidal offensive attacks, it is not difficult to see taking the Islamic Republic down as a necessary move to avoid a global nuclear apocalypse.

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Addendum

As pointed out by Marc Theissen in We’re witnessing the birth of the Trump Doctrine:

“Trump is not starting a forever war in Iran; he’s ending one.

For 47 years, the Iranian regime has been waging war against the United States. That war began in 1979, when Iran seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking more than 50 Americans hostage for 444 days. The war continued as Iran orchestrated the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 258 Americans, followed by the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 Americans. It continued in 1998, when Iran provided “direct assistance” to al-Qaeda for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, training its “operatives about how to blow up buildings,” according to a ruling by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.”

He goes on to include more Iranian aggression. The point is simply that we didn’t just see a war begin, we’ve been at war with the Islamic Republic for a long time.