Karl Denninger: Oh Look, Fact On Iran!

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Every American war of the last seventy years arrives wrapped in the same promise:

A short, clean operation that will leave the target weaker, the region safer, and the home front untouched.

The strikes on Iran have already broken all three terms of that promise. Iran still holds its enrichment program, now charges tolls for passage through Hormuz, and has handed the United States a recession that the piece below argues will be papered over with the one tool Washington reflexively reaches for, which is more borrowed money. Karl Denninger walks through the wreckage below, and the conclusion he arrives at is one the war party will hate:

there are only two real options left, both of them humiliating, and the men who counseled this adventure should never again touch a lever of American power.

 

Originally posted by Karl Denninger at Market Ticker:

You don’t have to like it but that doesn’t change the facts.

The United States faces a fundamental fork in the road. One path leads toward kinetic escalation, risking broader regional and global catastrophe. The other leads toward a calibrated off-ramp. The hard question is whether that off-ramp actually exists.

There’s an off-ramp but it is capitulation in that it requires recognition of what was already lost meaning a likely-permanent toll structure through Hormuz and acceptance of the status quo — meaning Iran will maintain and continue to develop nuclear infrastructure, including power and ultimately more.

Tehran’s foreign ministry declared that nuclear enrichment is “a right that already exists” and cannot be negotiated. That position has held through the JCPOA years, through two military campaigns, and through the death of its supreme leader. Trump demands zero enrichment. Iran will not accept it. The gap is not bridgeable through diplomacy. A deal Iran rejects is no deal. A deal Iran signs, by definition, preserves enrichment. That is not the outcome the administration says it wants.

Exactly.  And further, any nation-state has every right, if it is sovereign, to pursue nuclear energy.  If you argue otherwise get back to me when you’ve forced Israel to divest theirs, which was acquired under clandestine circumstances (they stole it) and nobody has done a thing about it.

Why?  Because they can shoot, that’s why.  The same reason that North Korea pursued it and has not been forced to divest it, nor will they be.  In fact North Korea has reportedly amended their Constitution such that any attempt to decapitate their political leadership results in an immediate nuclear retaliation.  Would they actually do it?  That’s unknown, of course, but you really don’t want to find out, do you?

Nonetheless the cold facts are that for the last 70 years or thereabouts a nation with nuclear capability is one that has sufficient deterrence to prevent anyone from tampering with its decisions on leadership.  You might not like this if you’re one who believes they have the right to dictate terms to other nations, but national sovereignty is just that and you cannot defend your right to claim it while denying it to others.

As Robert points out (as have I) Clausewitz stated that war is the continuation of policy by other means when diplomacy fails.  Indeed, and this is a question of policy.  The problem is that neither diplomacy or air strikes and other stand-off weapons will achieve it.  Iran will not actually concede the point voluntarily no matter whether they claim they will or not, and bombing them will not secure the material nor prevent them from rebuilding their infrastructure.

Iran is not a tiny little nation with no resources.  Their land mass is roughly half that of the United States east of the Mississippi and their population is close to 100 million.  Attempts to incite their population to rise up and overthrow their existing government have been run all the way back to the 1950s by America and in each and every case what we got was worse than what was there before.  This entire mess started with our decision in the 1950s to “protect” British Petroleum’s assets that the elected government of Iran seized — not our nation’s assets or those of one of our companies, Britain’s.  We did that and we’ve not stopped tampering since yet we’ve never achieved what we claimed we would by any of it at any point in time.

Are we willing to commit between 100,000 and 500,000 American troops to go quite-literally seize the nation and spend the several years required to dismantle all of this and take the material, then occupy it on an effective permanent basis or execute every single crazy Islamic person there?  Under what pretense would we justify that?  Do we have any hint that the rest of the International community would tolerate us doing it?  Will Americans sign up for it, be drafted (yes, that would require a draft and this time girls go too!) and be ok with tens of thousands coming back in boxes and bags?  No.

And everyone both there and here knows it.

Yet that’s the only military answer.

The other is to withdraw, accept the Iranian posture on the Strait for now, try to negotiate away their newly-put-in-place toll system, try to negotiate something that halts their newfound desire to apply that to the undersea fiber cables that run in the same area through their waters (which was stupid for all other nations to do, incidentally) and accept that they will charge said tolls and use the revenue gained by it (and possibly on the fiber cables too) to cover the costs of the infrastructure damage we inflicted during this action.

Some of that on the money side we might be able to negotiate away.  Maybe, since the other nations that have been hit (including our bases and infrastructure) took damage too, and perhaps we can all shake hands on that.

Maybe.

And while we’re at it, we must identify each and every person who advocated and counseled our President to do this, and formally separate each and every one of them from any of the levers of power in the United States on a permanent forward basis.  To the extent that implicates relationships with other nations, so be it, and to the extent it implicates people right here at home we must both expel them from office and prevent them, as a body politic, from ever holding any office of benefit or profit in the United States government in the future.

Incidentally there is no evading the recession (or worse) that this adventure is going to cause.  It is already roughly half as long as the 1974 oil embargo that led to eight years of economic Hell in America.  I came of age during it and I remember every bit of it.  Attempting to attenuate it with “rate cuts” and more government spending, given our fiscal position, debt, and the exponential increase in financing and costs that will generate, if it is tried, will guarantee a 1930s-style outcome and lead to the very real possibility of our government collapsing.

That must not be done and we must not, as Americans, permit any attempt at it.  In fact the opposite; we must gut the medical monster like a fish right here, right now, put a permanent stop to the now-exponential and parabolic increase in CMS spending and the extraction that sector imposes on everyone else.  That is the only way to get the federal budget, state budgets and personal balance sheets of the American people under control and at the same time all cross-subsidies on energy and similar, including any and all that are attempted to be put in place for “AI” and similar must be barred.

There is no other alternative to what is an obvious and impending economic disaster if we do not do so.