A Long Time Coming
Forty seven years is a long time to wait for payback
I was deployed to Beirut following the 1983 bombing of the Marine Barracks, so watching Iran’s leadership pulverized by American bombs is a gift I never thought I would see in my lifetime. To be clear, I was a Navy Hospital Corpsman at the time, and I spent most of that deployment aboard the USS Guam, off the coast of Beirut. I wasn’t ashore slugging it out with Iranian proxies like my buddy Mike Ettore, but I was there, and I always hoped to get payback when I joined the Marine Corps and became an infantry officer.
I have always been firmly behind President Trump because he’s not a politician and drives the political class, the foreign policy establishment, DC think tanks, and the legacy media crazy. I despise all those institutions because I hate chronic losers, compulsive liars, and people whose gross incompetence got friends of mine killed for no damn reason.
Having said that, President Regan, whom I admire greatly, was also guilty of paying too much attention to national security intellectuals. Regan’s famous “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” line was delivered despite the strenuous objections of those credentialed idiots. I only wish he had ignored their advice about Beirut, too, because it was clear nobody knew why we were there or what we were supposed to accomplish. Beirut was an eerie harbinger of the pointless waste of men, money, and material in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Within hours of the launch of Operation Epic Fury, the foreign policy establishment took to the op-ed pages and green rooms in a desperate attempt to frame the operation with their preferred narrative: Orange man bad, Iran bad, Epic Fury reckless. Nobody outside the NE Acela corridor was listening. The Democrats obviously think we are stupid and don’t remember their failure to invoke the War Powers Act during the 20-year-long disaster in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the dozens of countries Obama bombed. They immediately started their tired, preening, performative para-empathy routine of Oikophobia bigotry, which resonates only with die-hard Democrat clusters inside dysfunctional shit-hole urban centers.
There are no longer credible elite media gatekeepers who can curate the news and craft a narrative for the public. The COVID-19 fiasco revealed our credentialed managerial class to be incompetent, anti-American, if not anti-human, pompous buffoons. Thanks to Elon Musk, we now see think tank mouthpieces warning us about Trump’s recklessness, side by side with Iranian Americans flooding the streets of LA and Washington, DC, waving American flags and shouting God Bless the USA.
But the hardest hit by this reality bomb have been Special Forces Vet Bro Podcasters. Shawn Ryan has spent months showcasing former CIA officers warning us about tens of thousands of well-trained, dedicated terrorist sleeper cells in our midst that are going to rise up and simultaneously unleash Mumbi-style attacks across the fruited plains. Where are they? The recent Jihadi-style attack in Austin, Texas, by 53-year-old Ndiaga Diagne of Senegal was clearly a lone-wolf attack carried out by an obese dimwit. It is a safe bet that the massive attack on American cities by Iranian-sponsored sleeper cells is not going to happen, or it would have happened already.
Sgt. Valhalla VFT posted a video titled Operation Epstein Coverup, but he probably took it down because he was losing clicks. Since then, he’s posted videos bitching about the 6 KIA we have sustained, being snarky about the American F-15 jets Kuwait shot down, and claiming multiple US bases in the region have been “completely destroyed.” I thought SF Vet Bros were supposed to be warfighting experts, cold, steely-eyed professionals who know better than to believe initial reports from distant battlefields they know nothing about. I’m no Vet Bro, but I know better than to make hay from the deaths of US servicemen for personal profit. I also know Iran doesn’t have the ability to “completely destroy” a military base with poorly aimed ballistic missiles and drones.
Non-Vet Bro podcasters Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly are also firmly against Operation Epic Fury, but they have slipped into the George Will levels of irrelevance, so who cares?
The CIA is also irrelevant in this operation, despite planting stories in the New York Times about helping pinpoint the gathering of Iranian leaders we bombed last Sunday. The CIA is good at planting stories in the New York Times, but not so good at intelligence. CIA incompetence led to the creation of the Eclipse Group in Afghanistan, which was sunk by stories leaked to the New York Times. I wrote about my experience as an Eclipse operative here and explained why the Netflix show “Spy Ops” proved the CIA was worthless at human intelligence here. I don’t believe anything I read about the CIA, and I believe the entire organization should be disbanded.
My take on Operation Epic Fury is that it could well go pear-shaped. President Trump, like me, is uninterested in regime change, so we have little influence over what follows if the Iranian Mullahs are toppled. I personally don’t give a shit what follows, but President Trump will not get off easy if Iran implodes like Libya did when Obama bombed the shit out of them. If the Iranian military takes over, so what? There isn’t much of a military left. The Iranian Navy is sitting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf, and the Iranian Air Force has no planes. Iran is rapidly depleting its stocks of ballistic missiles and has no ability to produce or procure more. If the military takes over from the mullahs, there is little they can do besides plead for peace and reconstruction money.
If the Iranian people rise up and take over, it is going to be messy. Iran is a Persian country with many non-Persian minorities. Azerbaijanis, who live mostly in the northwest of Iran, comprise 25–30% of the Iranian population. Another 10% of the population is Kurdish, and they live in the west along the border with Iraq. In the east, the province of Sistan and Baluchistan is home to the Balochis, and the northeastern province of Golestan is full of the Turkmens. None of these minorities are Shia Muslims – they are Sunnis.
The Kurds and Baloch have large, well-armed, experienced militias. The Kurds have been fighting Turkey and the Baloch in Pakistan for decades to create their own autonomous countries. Most multicultural countries in the world are not happy places where citizens experience the joy of living in diversity alongside neighbors from different cultures. The only way multicultural countries function effectively is through strong laws that severely limit religious and cultural expressions, like Singapore, or through ruthless suppression of minority populations by internal security forces, like Iran. With the implosion of Iran’s authoritarian theocratic regime, it is likely that the Kurds, Baloch, and Azerbaijanis will try to break away from the Persian republic.
The worst (and least likely) outcome would be the mullahs hanging on to power. The mullahs don’t need to win; they only need to survive. If they do, we know they will sue for peace and promise not to enrich uranium or build more ballistic missiles. We also know they will immediately start trying to enrich uranium and build more ballistic missiles. Leaving the authoritarian theocratic regime in power could be the end state, which would be bad. But that would justify going back for another punitive raid, which would be good. That’s the advantage of being the hegemon. As long as you don’t surround yourself with whiny Ivy League pussies, you can punish the shitheads who spent the past 47 years killing American servicemen while chanting “death to America.”
S/F my friend. Just fucking S/F........
Well said Mr. Lynch, well said. The desk jockeys are worse than useless. You are a voice of acknowledgement about that.