Bill Tallen

I was a teenager in the late ‘60s, watching Walter Cronkite report on the Vietnam War on CBS Evening News most nights around dinner time. Bad for digestion, but fodder for many debates with my dad, who (like so many parents) somehow seemed to get a lot smarter by the time I was 10 years older. Funny how that works.

Back then, the hard part for news junkies was the paucity of information — print newspapers, broadcast network TV, and weekly newsmagazines were about the only sources. Now it’s the opposite: We’re flooded with information, and much of it is suspect because everyone who can access a cell tower or a satellite is competing with his own version of the facts or their meaning. And most of them are either honest but wrong, with only a narrow view of events, a narrow range of sources, or no breadth or background to provide context; or they are intentionally deceitful, for reasons of profit, politics or ideology. Fact-checking every source would leave no time for life. My approach is to screen sources that report or analyze issues I am interested in, and have some background or education on. Sources I find truthful, rational and believable on topics I know, earn my trust on other issues. It’s not a flawless technique, but when confirmed by jumping down the research rabbit hole as time allows, it gives pretty good results. 

I’d enjoy debunking some of the poor or malicious reporting, by both bad actors and their useful idiots, regarding the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran, but there’s not enough room here. I’ll just share my own opinions on the ground truth.

The war with Iran continues. Those appalled by that lone fact lack a sense of perspective. America’s wars have mostly been measured in years, and the shortest recent one — the First Gulf War, 1990-1991 — lasted six months and resulted in 148 Americans killed. This one has lasted three weeks, with 13 American lives lost so far. Its progress in disarming and destabilizing the terrorist Islamic Republic regime is already out of all proportion with the First Gulf War, and it’s not going to last as long. Have a little patience.

The Iranian regime is in a state of near collapse. There’s a veneer of normalcy, but a close look reveals that there is no unified national military command, no effective civilian leadership, and instead the 10 Revolutionary Guard regional commands and 31 provinces are on their own, blindly striking out with whatever they have at hand in accordance with prior planning. Those regional and local commands are isolated, demoralized and starved for munitions with which to continue their fight. Missile and drone launches have diminished by 90% since Day One; of those launched, 93%-97% are intercepted, and their stockpiles and production facilities are being systematically destroyed. Soon they’ll be throwing rocks. Defections from IRGC forces — their equivalent of Hitler’s SS — and their Basij militia have begun. Before long, a real civilian uprising will begin, supported by American and Israeli air power and probably by a mass mutiny of the regular Iranian military, so far notably inactive in the war.

I wrote about the boogeyman of Iran’s ballistic missile force two weeks ago. There are so few left now, that their effectiveness has shrunk to terror attacks on Israel with cluster munitions that, even when they do land in the target area, are so small as to cause minimum damage, mostly injuries to people caught outside local shelters. Against the Arab gulf states, they score an occasional hit on a refinery or tank farm, which has managed only to cement a de facto alliance of every other Muslim state in the Middle East against them, and in cooperation with the U.S. and Israel.

Iranian drones are not, as the alarmists claim, forcing us to expend multi-million dollar missiles for each kill; they fly at 120 mph and are being shot down by antiaircraft guns and helicopter gunships; that is to say, bullets. Those that do get through have tiny, 80-90 pound warheads of minimal effectiveness.

Maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is still only a fraction of its prewar level, but that is more a matter of insurance claims for damage than sinkings, which have been few and far between. With the establishment of near-total air supremacy, U.S. air power is increasingly focused on securing safe transit through the Strait. More important is the emerging story of how it was the high-risk reinsurance firms like Lloyds of London that actually closed the Straits by denying coverage to shipping firms and captains. When you want answers, follow the money: The sour attitude of our once-great ally, the United Kingdom, has more to do with fear of its own immigrant Muslim population, and unhappiness at the loss of insurance revenues, than any issues of principle. Trump is now offering insurance coverage, and Lloyds and company are in retreat.

The last overplayed fear is American “boots on the ground,” considered to be a sure predictor of a “quagmire,” another “forever war.” The original science fiction novel by that title was great, and more plausible than this current fear. There are two locations that might, briefly, feel American bootsoles: the storage site for Iran’s highly enriched uranium, and Kharg Island, the conveniently offshore oil terminal through which almost all of Iran’s oil flows. Stay tuned.