A White Swan Event

Late last week, if you were to believe the Democrat's trained hamsters in the main stream media, the country of Iran was in mourning over General Qassem Soleimani, who was a revered and beloved leader. Liz Warren called him a "senior government official," as if the guy worked for Iran's Treasury Department instead of coordinating Iran's worldwide terror network. This, of course, perfectly fit their narrative that Donald Trump is a warmonger who assassinated Soleimani without justification.

Now we find that all of that was fake news. Sure, there were Islamists who mourned Soleimani's death, but recent events in Iran indicate that the general was far from loved. Protests are mounting after the mad mullah's first lied (what else is new?) about their downing of a Ukrainian airliner, then admitted to the shoot-down. Not to be deterred by reality, a number of leftist Democrats and their media shills decided that the airliner tragedy was Trump's fault, even though Iran had been acting provocatively and aggressively for months, and Trump refused to be provoked (until an American was killed and our embassy was attacked). When the airline-shoot-down-was-Trump's-fault tack encountered a combination of derision and push-back they decided that "Trump lied" when he stated that four embassies were Iran's next target. Anything to reduce the positive impact of Trump's aggressive actions.

While Donald Trump and many GOP politicians have expressed support for the Iranian protest movement, it's interesting to note that as of yesterday, not one of the Democratic candidates for president have tweeted or stated support for the masses of Iranian protesters, who unlike the #Resistance in the USA, actually do put their lives on the line by going into the streets. It's almost as if the Dems are somehow supportive of the Mullah's efforts to maintain high tension with the U.S., hoping that Trump will miscalculate, and we'll be dragged into a broader shooting war. Cynical, yes, but with the exception of his bombastic and sometimes obnoxious style along with the collusion and impeachment hoaxes, Trump hasn't given the Dems much to work with in 2020.

Roger Kimball writes:

Iran had indeed shot down the commercial airliner, but inadvertently. It was a mistake. The trigger-happy chap who sent the Russian Tor M1 surface-to-air missile hurtling toward the aircraft apparently mistook it for an American cruise missile.

Fun facts: a Tomahawk cruise missile, with booster, is a bit over 20-feet-long, with a wingspan of less than nine feet. A Boeing 737-800 is a few inches shy of 130 feet long with a wingspan of nearly 113 feet. Students of interpreting radar cross-sections will find that interesting.

Frances Townsend, a former Homeland Security adviser to President George W. Bush, expressed a thought that will have occurred to many observers. “A country that cannot competently operate its air defense system aspires to possess #nuclear weapons! Really?! Just contemplate that for a moment.”

But the Dems insist that the Obama approach—you know, the one that gave Iran $150 billion and accepted a promise that the Mullahs wouldn't build nukes for 10 years is the best one—lead from behind, baby! Those would be the same Mullahs who lie about everything—including the shoot down of the Ukrainian aircraft. That would be the same Iran who technical incompetence mistook a large airliner for a cruise missile. What would they do with nuclear weapons? Ooops ... we didn't mean to launch on Tel Aviv, it was a "mistake."

The trained hamsters in the media refuse to consider an alternative to all-out war with Iran. Trump's aggressive stance with the Mullahs and the growing unrest that it has precipitated within the country, might, just might, lead to a different outcome. Ross Clark comments:

It is easy to construct a scenario in which tit-for-tat actions by the Americans and Iranians lead to all-out war, close off the Gulf, send oil prices soaring, crash the global economy — and, if you are really going to go for it, end in nuclear conflagration. But what about the alternative outcome: that conflict between Iran and the West precipitates a counter-revolution against the mullahs and leads to an end of the 40-year Iranian theocracy?

The overthrow of the Iranian regime is the black swan event — or maybe it ought to be called a white swan event — which no-one is talking about, which is odd given that there have been plenty of indications over the past couple of years that ordinary Iranians are finally growing fed up with their regime.

In May 2018, Iranian truckers began a nationwide strike over wages. The following month, market traders in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar staged a mass protest against the sinking Iranian currency, the rial. The protests quickly spread to over 200 cities.

Last spring, Iran’s teachers staged a sit-in, culminating in a mass protest against inflation outside the Parliament building in Tehran on May 1, with some protesters adopting the yellow vests of French fuel protesters.

The trigger for these protests, as so often in the collapse of dictatorships, is economic. Donald Trump might not think that existing western sanctions are sufficient, but the truth is that they have hurt the Iranian economy. People who might not be politicized or motivated to protest against a regime purely on the basis of individual freedom, the right to free speech and so on, do nevertheless tend to rise up in anger when their living standards are attacked.

What? Until yesterday, you didn't get many details about unrest in Iran? That's because the trained hamsters in the media (not to mention the Dems) desperately need to promote their WWIII narrative, hoping that American voters with flock to their failed appeasement agenda. As I recall, the Dems labeled Ronald Reagan a "warmonger" when he took a tough stance with the Soviet Union back in the 1980s. It's just possible that the result we saw with the USSR and Reagan then just might be the same result we see with Trump and Iran now.

UPDATE:
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Relatively few Americans are old enough to remember the Shah of Iran, a dictator no doubt, but secular, a friend to American, a man who tried to modernize his country, and a leader who resisted the crushing weight of radical Islam. Even fewer remember that when the Shah was deposed and hardcore Islamists took over, they were applauded as heroes by the Western Left. Yet again, the left was wrong, picking the side that ultimately abused its own people.

I can still recall that I warned those who applauded the Shah's departure that the Ayatollah Komeni was a bad guy. I was right. One dictatorship was replaced by another, but the new one was comprised of religious fanatics who were anti-American and even more repressive than the Shah. The Shah is accused of killing thousands. Ayotollah Komeni and his crew are responsible for the deaths on more than a million.

Komeni's successors are equally bad, and Donald Trump is the first American president refused to engage in the shadow war of the past four decades and instead, do something about Iran. The sanctions his administration have imposed are crippling. David Goldman writes:

Iranians face desperate conditions, if not actual hunger, due to the effect of economic sanctions. Add to this the long-term effects of mismanagement of the country’s scarce water resources. Afshin Shahi wrote recently in the Journal of Asian Affairs: “Approximately 97% of the country is experiencing drought conditions. Due to gross water mismanagement and its damaging impact on the country, Iran faces the worst situation in the water resources of any industrialized nation. Tens of thousands of villages have been deserted and most of the major urban centers have passed their limits to absorb new rural migrants. Some officials predict that in less than 25 years, 50 million Iranians would be displaced from their current homes because of the pressing ecological conditions.”

Few countries have endured this level of deprivation outside of full war mobilization, and few have seen such a drastic decline in the number of births. The only modern comparison is Venezuela. Governments with a monopoly of economic resources and the willingness to kill significant numbers of their own citizens can stay in power for quite some time, but there seems no question that Iran’s regime is fragile and prone to destabilization.

The sanctions are harsh, but if they ultimately result in regime change, they will have been worth it. Let's hope that fragility becomes more and more brittle and the mad mullahs' regime ultimately cracks.