Iran, Israel, Middle East, United States

The folly of boots on the ground in Iran

US-IRAN WAR

Intro: After the pain of Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s almost inconceivable the US would again send troops to the Middle East – but its president is desperate and narcissistic

Concern and anguish are justifiably growing that a cornered Donald Trump will send US ground troops into combat on Iranian soil to avoid being personally and politically humiliated in a war of attrition he started, mismanaged, and cannot end. Such a self-serving escalation, however – even if limited in scope and duration – could itself prove catastrophic for him and the American people. Think what happened in previous US-led military interventions. In sum total, he’s caught in a modern-day catch-22. Pick your own metaphor for dumb. Trump’s stumped, hoist by his own petard, stuck between a rock and a hard place, and up the creek without a paddle. The creek in question is, of course, the Strait of Hormuz.

Firmly ensconced in his strange parallel universe, Trump insists the war is all but won, Iran is suing for peace, and talks are making good progress. In the real world, Iran is still fighting on all fronts, Israel is still relentlessly bombing, the strait remains largely closed, and the Iran-allied Houthi militia in Yemen has joined the war, attacking Israel and potentially blocking Red Sea trade routes. The US and Iran have each issued maximalist demands, but there is no sign of actual negotiations. They are poles apart, further even than they were before Trump, egged on by Benjamin Netanyahu, abandoned diplomacy four weeks ago. Sometime soon, Trump will be forced to confront the huge gap between what he wants and what’s on offer. At that point he could turn to the troop buildup amassing in the Gulf and order ground attacks.

How did it come to this? It’s incredible to think that after all the mortal agony and pain of Iraq and Afghanistan, a US president is once again seriously contemplating boots on the ground in the Middle East. It’s even more amazing the president concerned is Trump, a noisy and outspoken critic of costly foreign adventures. Yet this is no unlucky break, no accidental misfortune. It’s the result of deliberate policy. If the US is facing impossible choices, the responsibility is entirely Trump’s, though he will surely blame and scapegoat others. For one, Pete Hesgeth, the Pentagon’s troubled comic-book warlord, is in his gun-sights.

Ignoring facts on the ground, the White House continues to spout lies and bombast. Trump is plainly in denial, claiming “regime change” has already been achieved with the assassination of Ayatollah Khamanei. Trump has this strange habit of behaving like a spectator, detached from the chaotic events he himself sets in motion. He acts and behaves as if the global energy shock, the US’s abject failure to defend the Hormuz strait and its Gulf allies, Iran’s unyielding defiance under fire, and the absence of the much-predicted popular uprising in Tehran, have nothing to do with him. He doesn’t understand Iran is fighting an asymmetric war, that even the biggest bombs cannot obliterate pride and ideology, faith and history.

Trump is increasingly isolated and out on a limb. His wealthy Arab business cronies no longer trust him. US bases on their territory now resemble a liability, not a defence. When he demanded NATO’s help, Europe said: we’ll let you know. Likewise, Iran’s ethnic Kurds are less than eager to die for a muppet. Support for the war among the US public and the MAGA right, always weak, is a fast-vanishing mirage. Having egged him on, Netanyahu refuses to bail him out – or to stop bombing everyone in sight. Trump believed Israel’s assurance of quick victory. As for Iran, its surviving leadership, dominated by ultras, reckons it’s winning. Its hard line gets harder by the day.

Imagine being one of the thousands of US marines and paratroopers now deploying to the Gulf. With a commander-in-chief like Trump, who needs enemies? Except plenty more lie in wait. Iran’s armed forces number 610,000 active-duty personnel, with reserves of 350,000. The regime may no longer be able to fight in the air or at sea. But on land, treading familiar terrain and ultimately willing, perhaps, to sacrifice “human waves” of troops, as in the 1980’s Iran-Iraq war, it remains a formidable foe. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) says it’s ready to carpet-bomb its own territory if invaded.

If ground attacks were to materialise – both Trump and Netanyahu have publicly discussed the possibility – the targets would most likely be the coastal batteries, missile defences, and concealed armed speedboat bases dotting the northern flank of the Hormuz strait. An attack on the Kharg oil export terminal further up the Gulf is also predicted. Ominously, Kharg is known as the Forbidden Island; it may be easier to overrun than hold. Such incursions would be intended to force the reopening of the strait, thereby easing the energy crisis, and strengthening Trump’s negotiating hand.

The inherent, inescapable military risks are daunting. Causalities would be inevitable. Even if operations went well in the short term, questions would immediately arise about potential escalation when Iran counterattacked, expansion of the operational area, and duration of the occupation. If they went badly, the cry would go up for reinforcements – a scenario grimly familiar to anyone who recalls mission-creep in Iraq and Afghanistan. More risky still, to the point of suicidal, is another floated option: sending US and Israeli special forces deep into the interior to snatch Iran’s hidden, physically volatile stockpile of highly enriched uranium.

For all his childish threats of epic fury and maximum punishment, does Trump really want to unleash this nightmare? A rational person would strive to avoid it. At one level, his desperate-sounding, fiercely disputed claims that Iran is privately “begging” for peace reflect a realisation that a bloody, open-ended land war could destroy his presidency. His problem is that Iran’s regime knows this too. So, entirely logically, it will continue to rebuff his maximalist 15-point “peace plan” – which amounts to a call for complete surrender – while upping its own demands. They include a permanent end to US-Israeli aggression, undisputed sovereignty over the Hormuz strait, financial reparations, and lifting of sanctions.

Any deal that fails to satisfy bottom-line US and Israeli demands – namely, a definitive end to Iran’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile development programmes, a halt to Tehran’s support for allied regional militias, and guaranteed freedom of navigation in the Gulf – will be seen as a defeat for Trump. He now plainly wants to end the war but on his terms, with a deal superior to that secured by Barack Obama in 2015 (and subsequently trashed by Trump). Iran – angry, wounded, yet resilient – will not give it to him. Trump’s choice: cave or escalate.

At this dreaded juncture, what is there to say or think? This illegal war should never have been launched. Trump acted foolishly and opportunistically. Netanyahu, too, is greatly to blame. The threat was not “imminent”. And the war’s most persuasive justification – a promise to free Iranians from tyranny – has been abandoned. Negotiations, unconditional on both sides, are the only sane way out. Trump must swallow his pride, admit his error, eat humble pie. Yet, as all the world knows, the very idea that this most ignorant, reckless, and narcissistic of US leaders might actually do so is utterly ridiculous.

Not only was the second Trump presidency going to end in disaster, but the US-Iran war will be the greatest of all disasters of its foreign interventions.

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Arts, Australia, Books, Literature

Book Review: A Far-flung Life

LITERARY REVIEW

– The story is a sweeping epic that follows the MacBride family on a million-acre sheep station in Western Australia, exploring themes of secrets, tragedy, and resilience across several generations

In ML Stedman’s immensely popular 2012 debut, The Light Between Oceans, moral ambiguity was the eddying undercurrent, in a story about a couple who discover a baby on the shores of their remote island home off the coast of Western Australia. That novel spurred an international bidding war and sparked a lacklustre film adaptation. In her second publication, A Far-flung Life, Stedman remains just as preoccupied by what governs our understanding of right and wrong, as well as how we define our sense of family and identity.

Also set in Western Australia, A Far-flung Life begins in 1958 and follows several generations of the MacBride family on their million-acre sheep ranch, Meredith Downs. Here, small decisions have vast consequences: when the patriarch, Phil, swerves to avoid a kangaroo while driving home from the market, he and his eldest son, Warren, are killed. Matt, the youngest son, only just survives. Lorna, suddenly a widow, takes over the reins of the ranch, now the sole parent not only of Matt, whose amnesia from his head injury forces him to redefine who he is and the life he had once hoped for, but also of her “fiery, mercurial” daughter, Rosie.

As the years pass, other figures drift in and out of the MacBride orbit: there’s the taciturn Pete Peachey, a former prisoner of war in Japan who culls the kangaroos on the family homestead; and Miles Beaumont, a dapper Englishman of noble blood who’s learning the ropes on the station. Everyone has their secrets, the albatross they carry. Rosie’s causes her to flee to the outback, though she returns not long after, with a newborn in tow. She, too, will make a decision that reverberates for the MacBrides over the decades – particularly for Matt, who must learn what it means to live a life indelibly marked by unfathomable events.

A recurring theme through this attentive novel is a “forgetment”, a Stedman coinage and idea not for a memory but for a “thing you forget”. The struggle of writing our own narrative when it is violently altered and the way we are shaped as much by conscious knowing as by unknowing (what we hope time will dissolve) – these richly human notions are handled with skilled care. Just as the unflinching land can “rearrange itself without warning or permission”, so can our lives, our sense of self. As Pete Peachey reflects, “’Us’ is an ever-changing thing.” Throughout A Far-flung Life, the at-times herculean labour of weathering that change is shown as not an interruption of life but a part of it.

Time and its fickle passing are insightfully examined. The nature of loss and its temporal warping – where “one minute didn’t have the same length as another” – stands in counterpoint to the indifferent, relentless passage of time on the land. Hours, days, weeks: these human-made creations, the contours of which seem to blur, are only one way we mark our passage. There’s also “the gradual curl of a ram’s horns”, “the stretching and the shrinking of the light”. Stedman elicits, too, how when dazed by grief, one can experience time as stasis: for Matt, forever tied to a cataclysmic single moment, “maybe the roo was always going to bound in front of the truck; was still bounding in some eternal present”.

As the MacBrides learn how to endure the challenges besetting them, it’s a testament to Stedman’s deftness and skill that A Far-flung Life, racked with calamity, only occasionally approaches the mawkish. Every loss feels earned, and what may have otherwise been a syrupy saga is instead a palpable examination of loss, memory, and identity. Her breadth of research is also fully alive in the novel’s expansive detail: the landscape is rendered with intimate familiarity, as is the quotidian minutiae of life on the station. Stedman’s masterful control of perspective, shifting between multiple characters as well as expanses of time and place, culminates in a remarkable, poignant tale.

The moral ambiguity animating the novel lies in things which are best left buried; which parts of a life are allowed to become “forgetments”. This isn’t a question of feigned ignorance but rather of what role forgetting plays in forgiveness – not only of others but of oneself. The author holds the inquiry up like a glimmering piece of quartz, illuminating its shadowed recesses and fractures. The answers, she suggests, aren’t important as the life lived in pursuit of them.

– A Far-flung Life by ML Stedman is published by Penguin, 448pp

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Iran, Middle East, United States

Trump’s dilemma of his own making

IRAN WAR

Intro: Iran’s leaders will not be threatened into relaxing their hold on the Strait of Hormuz. The US president will have to break it for them

It cannot have been part of America’s plan that nearly four weeks into this war with Iran, Donald Trump should still be issuing furious threats and ultimatums.

By now, he must have believed that the Islamic Republic would either have been overthrown or so incapacitated by American and Israeli firepower that its surviving leaders would be imploring him for terms. The reality is closer to being the other way round. Incredibly, it is the US president who finds himself making ever more fevered demands for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

The reason why he has landed himself in this invidious position is that his administration failed to foresee the blindingly obvious: that Iran’s regime, once backed into a corner, would retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz and start firing missiles at America’s allies in the Gulf. Why else would Iran have spent decades amassing the biggest arsenal of ballistic missiles in the Middle East? The commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps always knew that their greatest strategic asset was the power given to them by Iran’s geography to, in extremis, wreck the global economy.

Supertankers laden with 20 per cent of the world’s seaborne oil pass every day – at least in normal times – through the Strait of Hormuz.

By attacking only a handful of these tankers, the IRGC calculated that it could sabotage global oil supplies as no one has ever sabotaged them before. That is exactly what has happened.

If Trump had possessed any foresight, he would have ordered the US navy to secure the Strait of Hormuz before the war began. That was supposed to be why the US Fifth Fleet was based in Bahrain.

Instead, before starting the war on Feb 28, Trump neglected to send any more warships than would be needed to bombard Iran and protect the two American aircraft carriers.

Now that the IRGC has closed the strait to any shipping that Iran considers hostile, the president has resorted to threatening escalation. Will Iran give way and allow free passage? That is almost inconceivable.

Will Trump have to make good on his threat to attack power stations in Iran? Given his unpredictable habit of zig-zagging from one position to another, no one can be sure. But even if he did, the IRGC would almost certainly refuse to yield. Iran would then likely act on its threat to strike power stations in “countries in the region that host American bases”. Given that the IRGC has already fired missiles at the world’s biggest gas export facility – Ras Laffan in Qatar – this cannot be excluded.

At some point, it should dawn on President Trump that the Iranian regime will not be threatened into relaxing its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz. Given that they will never choose to loosen their grip, Trump will have to break it for them. He will soon have to decide whether to reopen the Strait by force – a highly risky operation that would probably require troops on the ground – or endure huge economic damage. He surely never planned in having to face this dilemma.

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