Paul Edwards
Life, looked at in one light, is a never-ending series of decisions. Making them, for good or otherwise, is a reality everyone faces every day. Everything we do involves choosing between one mode of action and another, from just getting out of bed, to with whom and when to marry, and to go on living or end it.
Many decisions can be postponed, and some avoided entirely. Some should be taken only after serious reflection which requires time. Some are critical and demand urgent, immediate action. To decline altogether to make a decision simply means that it will be made for you by random chance, leaving you an observer.
Avoiding a decision that has to be made for an unconscionably long time is not only risky, perhaps perilous, for the one involved, it also sets in train a tension that ratchets up in intensity to a level painful to the principal and often to those who witness it.
The title of this piece is a down-home response to that tension. There are cruder ways of framing that directive, but this one gets the point across: Act! Do something! Take your shot!
Trump has put himself, and our country—insofar as it’s ours—in a bind of huge geopolitical import in which he seems unable to make a decision that must have immense consequences. He is on the horns of a dilemma with only two choices: fish or cut bait.
So the super carrier Abraham Lincoln is becoming inoperable through conditions that soldiers in the Global South would regard as ridiculously "soft". Armed to the teeth but lacking real motivation to fight on.
That ploy is not available with Iran now. He launched—with Nazi Israel doing his political murders—a powerful attack his military hacks devised and was humiliated, his proxies were hammered, his bases and sophisticated radar blown up, and his weaponry pounded and depleted. He then tried to float one of his sleazy deals, but Iran’s demands were non-negotiable, a concept he can’t fathom, being a born and bred shyster, shmata-merchant.
Facing a decisive moment, he has done nothing, pretending no action is required. It clearly is, though. If he does nothing, the entire Middle East will be geopolitically, militarily reconfigured to Iran’s specifications. Leaving aside the question of what that might mean, it is too late already to prevent it, since dynamic changes occur every day, though much remains to be codified.
He posted on his idiot blog the imaginary news that the Straits are open under American naval power that is controlling traffic and choking off Iran’s oil exports, a hallucination so grossly fantastic as to be hardly credible, even from a gibbering lunatic.
Hormuz is entirely under Iran’s control and no oil is allowed to pass to enemy countries, though it does to friendlies. Bab el Mandeb has been closed by Iran’s allies, the Yemeni Houthis, as well, so the world lacks over 20% of its normal oil supply, with the most crippling deprivation falling on Europe and The West.
Another vital factor: laymen assume all oil is the same. Not so. It exists in many varieties. The only type from which jet fuel is produced comes mainly from Gulf States, so The Empire faces radical decline in jet fuel stocks, which limits use of its air force.
Also never reported by our whore press is that nearly the entire world supply of sulfur and fertilizer base, and all helium, come through Hormuz. The West is already suffering critical shortages of those key materials and severe economic chaos impends.
If Trump swallows the humiliation of his egregious whipping, and decides to cut bait, to not risk a worse one, by dodging further military action—though all his demands, including forcing an end to Iran’s nuclear program, have been contemptuously spurned—the economic meltdown ongoing will bring disaster to the West.
If, however, he hazards a more potent assault of the same type— by missile, of which he now has a sharply diminished supply—he faces the reality learned from massive air raids on a defenseless Nazi Germany at the end of WWII, and in Vietnam: a country can’t be conquered from the air, regardless of attacking power. And Iran’s retaliation will be instant, massive, and devastating.
He is in the position of a chess player who, facing checkmate, has to sacrifice a last key piece just to prolong the contest. He has no winning play to make. He is a loser now, regardless of the choice he makes, even if, at last, he is too terrified to make one.
There is a special irony in this inescapable trap of his own devising that has nothing to do with Iran, Hormuz, or oil. That is the monumental shift it has brought to world geopolitical reality.
The Iran fiasco, like an old time Punch and Judy show, or a now video game, has been performed in a kind of box of its own, a procedure witnessed by a vast audience of non-participants who have had the dubious benefit of dispassionately watching it run, most in genuine surprise, and many with great satisfaction.
It takes little mental originality to imagine the altering perception of Putin and Xi as they have watched this blundering, ridiculous pratfall of the nation that has, by arrogance, force and deceit, so long dominated the world and presumed to make it all a colony for its cancerous imperial finance Capitalism.
They, and the world, have seen played out nakedly, the ludicrous failure of the Exceptional Nation, the punchout of the world bully, and its impotence and pusillanimity in action. They must think, ‘And this is the country that seriously wants to contend with us?’
