Very cool pics. Last time I was up there they were just finishing the ground prep and putting in a bridge.
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Serious question.
Without comparing it to President Obama; in other words, letting it stand on it’s own…
Is Trump’s foreign policy (if there is one) “strong”?
He is a lawyer, not a general or historian.
No. There is not coherent policy and thus it cannot be considered strong.
I would call it completely non-existent and nonsensical.
Iranians are a completely different ballgame from the Arabs and their (justifiably) much ridiculed martial prowess. They’re very smart (just look at the number of Iranian PhD on US universities) and completely insane when it comes to defending the territory of Iran.
Oh, and they’ve got 10x the population of Iraq. What could go wrong in case of an invasion? Iraq-Iran war was their low point in terms of military capability, as the always informed John Dolan wrote 10 years ago:
Now that we’ve got a little experience of our own in Iraq, it’s easier to understand how the Iran-Iraq War started. Start with a map and you can see Iraq looks like a funnel narrowing down to the Persian Gulf. That’s the most valuable real estate in the country because it’s Iraq’s only sea access and it’s also down there that a lot of the best oilfields are. And it’s Shia territory. Iran is Shiite, and Khomeini was like a living God to all the Shiites. He already hated Saddam for booting him out of Iraq after the Shah exiled him.
Saddam saw his chance. As we found out in 1991, Saddam’s a gambler. And the odds looked good for him to take Western Iran away from Khomeini back in 1980. The Islamists running Iran were amateurs, a bunch of noisy students and ignorant mullahs. They’d executed most of the Shah’s officer corps, and put the rest in prison. So Saddam figured the Iranian Army would be headless and easy to destroy. Same calculation Hitler made about Stalin’s army.
The Iranian Air Force used to be feared all over the Middle East. It was the only AF outside the US to have the F-14, the most advanced interceptor in the world. Iran had some of the best pilots east of Israel and a big fleet of F-4s. But after Khomeini’s mullahs started butting in, the elite pilots fled or got executed, the US put an embargo on spare parts (the one effective thing we did against Iran) and soon most of the Iranian AF was expensive scrap rusting in the hangars.
Saddam had another hole card: the Iranian Arab minority. He figured two could play the destabilization game. If Iran started stirring up the Shia majority in Iraq, he’d just return the favor by getting the Arabs in Khuzestan (Western Iran) excited about seceding.
So on September 22, 1980, Saddam launched the biggest surprise attack since the Egyptian thrust into Sinai in 1973.
Saddam had the Arab-Israeli wars in mind, too. He was especially thinking about the Israelis’ brilliant preemptive attack on the Arab air forces in the first hours of the 1967 war. He sent his MIG 21s and 23s to destroy Iran’s F-4s and F-14s on the ground. But he didn’t have Israeli pilots, SA munitions, or intelligence. The F-4s were in reinforced bunkers, the MIGs couldn’t carry enough of a bombload to finish off Iran’s big airfields, and a few hours after the attack, Iran had F-4s in the air, attacking the Iraqi armor columns. Just like Stalin after the Nazis attacked, Khomeini had to release dozens of pilots from death-row cells, shove instant rehabilitation and pardon certificates into their hands, and beg them to get into the cockpits and win one for the Imam.
The Iraqi ground attacks went pretty well in some sectors, not so great in others. It was a long front, from Kurdistan to the Persian Gulf. Saddam’s army was built on the Soviet model, and they were good at the stuff the Soviets did well, like massed artillery fire and coordinated armor attack. But there was one bit of really bad news for the Iraqis: the Arabs in western Iran didn’t revolt on cue. In fact most of them were loyal, fighting with the Persians against the invaders. (Like I’ve said before, never trust any plan that says “and then the natives will welcome our troops with open arms,” no matter whether it’s Saddam or that asshole Perle saying it.) Iraq took the Shatt-al-Arab, the key waterway in the delta, and grabbed half of Abadan, the most important oil town along the border. Then the attack bogged down.
The Iranians had some basic advantages. For one thing, a much bigger population than Iraq. And their morale was good from the start. There’s nothing a Shiite likes better than sacrifice, and here was a case where you could give your life and save the homeland. The boys came running. Lots of them even brought their own burial shrouds with them – couldn’t wait to get into that once-and-for-all nightie, I guess.
The Iraqis started to flinch. They liked it when they were roaring over Iranian villages in their T-55s, but house-to-house fighting against crazy Shias in death shrouds isn’t most people’s idea of a good time. The Iranians noticed something that really got their blood up: the Iraqis were decent soldiers, but they didn’t like dying.
By November 1980, the Iraqis were stalled all along the border and the Iranians were getting excited. All those “students” who ditched their homework to hassle American diplomats had a new enemy to fight. The saps all joined up and headed for the front.
The Iranians had three separate armies: the regular army, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Militia. They competed with each other, and there was the usual interservice crap, but all three wanted to fight. The regulars wanted to clear their names, the Revolutionary Guards wanted to get their 64 virgin concubines by dying ASAP, and the militia wanted to defend their homes.
The key word is “defend.” Defending and attacking are whole different ballgames. If you’re going to attack, you need highly trained troops, but if you’re only asking your troops to defend you can sometimes get a good performance out of amateurs. The Iranians couldn’t match the Iraqi armor, but they had more guts and initiative in small-unit engagements. By the end of 1981 Iran had pushed the Iraqis away from Abadan. From then on, the Iraqis were on the defensive. They dug in their tanks, a dumb, coward’s move that took away their mobility and showed how plain scared they were.
And the Iranians kept coming. Like the Russians in WW II, they just didn’t mind dying, and it started to spook the Iraqis. Saddam tried pretending nothing had happened: in the spring of 1982 he pulled all Iraqi forces back to the 1980 border. All that did was get the Iranians excited. They kept coming, with a huge human-wave attack on Basra. The poor militia bastards, with no training or coordination, just ran at the enemy yelling about Allah. They died like flies, up against Iraqi tanks and minefields. It was one of the most bloody, stupid assaults since 1945.
Saddam knew he had to do something. Well, you know the saying: “when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.” Saddam went shopping through every Warsaw-Pact weapons factory that would let him and his oil money in. He bought everything from MLRS systems to T-62s, but the big-ticket item was a whole fleet of the new Soviet Mi-24 attack helicopter.
If you’ve read about what the Mi-24 did to the Afghans (before we gave them an edge with the Stinger), you can imagine what a fleet of factory-fresh Mi-24s did to the Iranians’ human-wave attacks in 1983. It was a slaughter, and the Iraqis proved that even if they weren’t much good at dying, they were good at killing. In one Iranian human-wave attack the Iraqis flew 200 Mi-24 sorties, hosing down the poor Shiite bastards like crop dusters going over a cabbage field.
Saddam’s military engineers turned the marshes on the border into artificial lakes, like giant moats in front of the Iraqi lines. And he told his commanders they had one more weapon: gas. The Iraqis started using Mustard Gas, the sickest weapon of WW I. Even the Nazis never dared to use it, but Saddam’s troops used it to break up mass infantry attacks. And nobody much cared. That’s the story of this whole war: nobody outside of the two countries gave a damn what happened. From 1984 on, the war was like a stuck LP. The Iranians spent lives like Foch and Kitchener on the Western Front, and the Iraqis tried to kill Persians without risking their own cowardly hides.
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7113&PAGE=1
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Everyone should read about the Battle of Khorramshar (Wikipedia doesn’t give it justice…)…
The Iranians literally had children throwing themselves in wave upon wave on Barbed Wire for the troops to pass over…
After the battle…there was literally nothing left of a thriving Port City.
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Yeah, IRGC scoured the country for mentally challenged and physically disabled kids and teenagers for the first wave attacks. Each was given a white burial shroud and a cheap plastic key to unlock the gates of Heaven…
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That is haunting. Heart-wrenching. Gosh…
It’s funny how the chickenhawks will mention how Saddam “gassed his own people” to justify his removal and the invasion of Iraq but avoid bringing up how he gassed Iranians.
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Or that the vast majority of ISIS footsoldiers were killed by the Kurds and Iranians.
Meanwhile, US is now officially on AQ’s side
In one conflict, the U.S. is working with its Arab allies — particularly the United Arab Emirates — with the aim of eliminating the branch of extremists known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP. But the larger mission is to win the civil war against the Houthis, Iranian-backed Shiite rebels. And in that fight, al-Qaida militants are effectively on the same side as the Saudi-led coalition — and, by extension, the United States.
“Elements of the U.S. military are clearly aware that much of what the U.S. is doing in Yemen is aiding AQAP and there is much angst about that,” said Michael Horton, a fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a U.S. analysis group that tracks terrorism.
“However, supporting the UAE and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia against what the U.S. views as Iranian expansionism takes priority over battling AQAP and even stabilizing Yemen,” Horton said.
Keep your friends close… and your enemies allied?
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It’s at this point that you begin to absorb quite how indifferent the Trump administration is to any concept of human rights. Trump’s initial response to the Saudi attacks on Qatar was to endorse them enthusiastically (even as what was left of the State Department tried to keep the peace). And his administration’s response to the Saudi assault on Canada is to take no side in the dispute. Between a barbaric absolute monarchy that jails and tortures dissidents, obliterates women’s opportunity, and crucifies criminals in the streets … and Canada, for Pete’s sake, Trump cannot pick a side. In 2012, the State Department gave Samar Badawi the International Women of Courage Award, but now the State Department will not criticize her arrest. (The U.K. has been miserable in this regard as well.)
Because they want to be sure Iran has an enemy. I believe the fear of Iran is not based on believing they don’t want a country of crazies getting too powerful as much as it is the fear of Iran as a country that isn’t full of crazies. Iranians are educated, cultured and westernized. We don’t want to deal with equals over there.