First up, there’s this excellent thought from Bill Lehman (and read all of it because it’s excellent):
Take down their military structure. All of it. Take out their Quds Force, the entire IRGC in as far as we can find it, and leave their government, their military and their military logistics a pile of burning rubble. I would be a fan of flying a few hundred supply runs over Iran, C-17s and C-5s, full of crates of rifles, and ammunition, and dropping them, for the People of Iran to use, to finish the job. Then we need to LEAVE.
And here’s a manifestation of the above:
Thousands of Kurdish fighters have launched a ground invasion in Iran, according to a US official. The Kurdish militias, based across the border in Iraq, began the offensive in northwestern Iran on Wednesday. The Kurdish groups are widely seen as the most well-organized faction of the fragmented Iranian opposition and are believed to have thousands of battle-hardened fighters.
President Donald Trump on Sunday night spoke with the heads of Kurdish militant groups in Iraq to discuss the situation in Iran. The CIA was exploring plans to arm the Kurdish forces with the aim of sparking a popular uprising, CNN reported Tuesday.
Yeah, I’m all over this idea, as long as we remember that sometime not so long ago we armed a group called the Taliban to rebel against the Russian invaders of Afghanistan, and that didn’t work out so well. And I’m also a little apprehensive that these guys are coming over the border from Iraq — FFS, that whole area is a snake pit, isn’t it?
And just to remind everyone: the PKK (main Kurdish political party) is soft-core Muslim but hardcore Marxist. If that combination isn’t a toxic brew, I can’t think of a better one. None of which bodes well for the future.
Me, I’d prefer to drop those rifles and machine guns into towns and villages all over Iran, after first notifying the local resistance leaders — we know who they are, right, CIA? — where and when the guns are going to arrive so that they aren’t just taken by the IRGC fanatics when the crates hit the ground. Using history as a pointer, this would be akin to randomly air-dropping guns into Nazi-occupied Europe, only to have the SS intercept the shipments and use them for their own purposes, i.e. killing resistance fighters (and a few Jews, just for fun).
It’s all a little complicated and so on, but in this case, anything is better than dropping American boots on the ground to handle the thing. Once again, a history lesson: Afghanistan and a little further back, Vietnam.
Guns and ammo are cheap; American lives are expensive, and worth more than the game. Especially in this Middle Eastern shit pit.
I absolutely agree with you. I thought one of the missions of the CIA was to build and even train to some degree resistance movements to thwart communism. Now we can add radical muhamadism and such. We toppled Iran in the 50s I believe. We also thwarted the communist take over of Italy in the 50s. We need far more of those operations to thwart communism, socialism and muhamedism. Let the locals sort it out.
I hope someone is thinking this through.
In Iraq, we toppled a Sunni government which ruled over a Shi’a majority. In the first elections, the Sunni minority launched a terror campaign to disrupt the voting, and we proudly watched as ordinary Iraqis not only lined up to vote anyway, but stained their fingers so it couldn’t be denied. Then we found out the Shi’a weren’t voting for a government, they were voting to massacre the Sunnis at first opportunity, and they liked to kill Americans too. Everybody knew they were getting leadership and materiel from Iran.
I was a big chicken-hawk cheerleader in the run-up to Iraq, and I feel bad about it now. Thing is, I felt weird about it then. There was always the sense that something was “off”. I don’t feel so weird now. This feels more like traditional American military and diplomatic leadership. It might work.
keep whacking them until they form a government that can operate in the civilized world or they keep their mischief to themselves.