If Don and Juan’s Iran War Were a Poker Game, They’d Be Wiped Out. Iran, Of Course, Always Held That Strait

And Netanyahu didn’t even wind up with a seat at the table

(Photo credits, Associated Press and 888poker.com)

Actually, the US pretty much WAS wiped out if you read the Memorandum of Understanding that is hopefully easing Don and Juan’s War to an end. We call it that because, of course, Donald Trump started the misbegotten military effort, but also because Congressional Republicans such as Juan Ciscomani steadfastly refused to step up and demand some control over the situation.

The Sixth District representative hasn’t had much to say about the war since things started going south. ”The conflict is ‘very close to being over,’” he stated in early May (wishful thinking). When the bombing began at the end of February, he stepped right up: “I support fighting for the freedom of the Iranian people, a fight that President Trump has the courage to lead.” Now, of course, the government is MORE repressive, the vicious Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who will kill or imprison anyone who gets in their way, is firmly in charge, and Trump hasn’t said a word in some time about the Iranian people, except occasionally vowing to bomb them off the face of the earth.

As politicians, journalists, and foreign relations specialists are trying to figure out what America’s capitulation to a second-rate power means, our congressman is silent on the issue, although whatever diminishment of America’s stature in world power this brings about is partially on him.

The now-historic MOU has been analyzed so many times in the past few days that we’re not going deeply into its 14 paragraphs. Larry Bodine of the Blog for Arizona has a good summary of the debacle. But it’s clear that, among other things, America allows its enemy, Iran, to have billions of dollars of impounded money returned to it; to be free to sell the oil it pumps on the open market, and to have economic sanctions lifted. It can return to more or less full membership in the nations of the world, in other words, a place it hasn’t visited in a long time.

What the US gets in return is, well, nothing much. It must withdraw its forces, cease its sea blockade of Iranian ports, and do most of the work to lift those sanctions and, remarkably, set up a $300 billion reparations fund to restore the damage from US and Israeli bombs and missiles. Generally, the losers in a war pay reparations. We’ll leave you to ponder over that.

Oh yes, Iran agrees to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow body of water off its shores that is a place open to all shipping four months ago, but where the country can easily bring Persian Gulf sea traffic, including a fifth of the world’s oil, to a sudden halt. This has never been a secret to military and foreign policy experts, but Trump and his second-rate henchmen seem not have known it.

In return, the two sides promise that military actions will cease. This is tricky, because the Trump administration has a partner in this war, the government of Israel, which sent its forces to bomb Iran, but now concentrates on levelling the southern portion of neighboring Lebanon, where Iranian-supported Hezbollah forces, an Israeli mortal enemy, are centered.

The MOU includes an end to fighting in Lebanon, but what if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t agree? After all, “The United States denied Israel’s request to view the newly agreed-upon Memorandum of Understanding before the signing ceremony…a source confirmed to The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.” Can the US, having made so many concessions to Iran, bring Netanyahu to heel? Already formal talks to implement the MOU were delayed when Israel and Hezbollah went after each other. So, we’ll see.

The Trump administration cycled through several rationales for starting the war when American and Israeli missiles and bombs failed to break the Iranian defense of its own missiles and armed drones. The one that Trump kept coming back to was that the world cannot allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

That’s true, but it turns out there was no solid evidence the Iranian nuclear program was near to making one. The MOU basically allows Iranians to keep its nuclear program (the allies failed to blow it all up, as they had claimed), and promise, as usual, with fingers crossed behind their back, that they would NEVER make a bomb. This has always been their position, but once upon a time, there was the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, forged during the Obama administration, that provided for regular inspections of Iran’s radioactive stuff. Trump “tore up” the JCPOA (maybe because Barack Obama got credit for it), and now the comparison between old and new looks like this:

(Source, Facebook.com)

While the war “droned on” (pun intended) the American economy faced increases at the gas pumps (all that oil bottled up outside the Strait, remember) and rapidly growing inflation. Polling shows Trump 30 points or more in the red on his handling of the economy. The president confessed “in a rare moment of candor” why he agreed to the one-sided MOU: If the war continued, the Iranians wouldn’t reopen the Strait, and “the stock market would have, instead of going up…would go down at levels that no one ever saw before, maybe, except for 1929.”

The condition of the stock market has always been a major consideration for Trump’s views of political moves that affect the economy. After all, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans own 87 percent of the stocks. A lot of those people are his people.

There is much negotiation to be done to solidify the terms of the MOU. Iran is not bound to keep the Strait of Hormuz open indefinitely without imposing some sort of “fees” for transiting it, for example. And then, there’s Israel, Hezbollah, and Lebanon.

The negotiations can be compared to a game of poker, except that usually everyone gets dealt fresh cards for each hand. But the Iranians will always be holding that Strait.