Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,
Has a war between the United States and Iran become inevitable? That is what some in the mainstream media seem to be claiming, but let us hope that is not true, because such a war would mean immense death and destruction. If the Iranian regime felt that their survival was at stake, they would throw everything in their entire arsenal at the United States and Israel, and they would unleash Hezbollah to commit horrific acts of terror all over the globe.
That would include acts of terror inside the United States, and most Americans have absolutely no idea how nightmarish it would be to have Hezbollah terrorists striking soft targets all across the country. And in order to quickly win a war against Iran, the U.S. would probably have to use nuclear weapons, and that is a line that we do not want to cross. This wouldn’t be anything like our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but very few people seem to understand this.
And within the last 48 hours, such a conflict has gotten much, much closer. Here are 5 of the most important developments…
#1 According to President Trump, the U.S. Navy shot down an Iranian drone over the Strait of Hormuz. The following comes from NBC News…
President Donald Trump on Thursday said that a U.S. Navy ship “destroyed” an Iranian drone over the Strait of Hormuz — the latest in a series of tense incidents between Washington and Tehran.
Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday that the USS Boxer — a U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship — “took defensive action” against the Iranian drone that had “closed into a very, very near distance, approximately 1,000 yards.”
The drone was “threatening safety of the ship and the ship’s crew” and “was immediately destroyed,” he said.
#2 The Iranians denied that it was their drone. So either the Iranians are lying (which is a very real possibility), or someone else may be trying to start a war between our two nations. When asked about the drone, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif seemed to indicate that the drone which was shot down did not belong to them…
“We have no information about losing a drone today,” Zarif told reporters at the United Nations before a meeting with Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
#3 But the Iranians have admitted that they have seized a Panamanian-flagged, UAE-based oil tanker. According to Iran, the tanker was seized because it was illegally smuggling Iranian oil “to foreign customers”…
The tanker was seized by Revolutionary Guard forces on July 14 after getting intercepted south of Iran’s Larak Island in the strategic Strait of Hormuz amid allegations that the tanker was smuggling fuel from Iranian smugglers to foreign customers.
It remains unclear to which country or company the tanker belongs but a tanker based in the United Arab Emirates disappeared earlier this week.
#4 The U.S. State Department has condemned Iran for seizing the tanker, and U.S. officials are demanding that they immediately release it…
In a statement, a State Department spokesperson said the U.S. “strongly condemns the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy’s continued harassment of vessels and interference with safe passage in and around the Strait of Hormuz.”
“Iran must cease this illicit activity and release the reportedly seized crew and vessel immediately. We will continue to work closely with our allies and partners to ensure the Iranian regime’s extortion tactics and malign activities do not further disrupt maritime security and global commerce,” the spokesperson said.
#5 It has been announced that the U.S. is deploying 500 troops to Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. As tensions with Iran continue to rise, the number of troops being staged at this base is likely to increase dramatically. The following comes from CNN…
Five-hundred troops are expected to go to the Prince Sultan Air Base, located in a desert area east of the Saudi capital of Riyadh, according to US two defense officials. A small number of troops and support personnel are already on site with initial preparations being made for a Patriot missile defense battery as well as runway and airfield improvements, the officials said.
The US has wanted to base troops there for some time because security assessments have shown Iranian missiles would have a difficult time targeting the remote area.
I don’t know who is doing those “security assessments”, because the truth is that Iranian missiles can easily reach that base.
For a while there it seemed like things had cooled off a bit in the Middle East, and many were hoping that the threat of an imminent conflict had been averted.
Unfortunately, things are now more tense than ever, and a single mistake could set off a chain of events that nobody is going to be able to stop.
On Thursday, Iran’s foreign minister made the following very ominous statement…
“We live in a very dangerous environment,” the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, said Thursday at the United Nations before news of the drone was made public.
“The United States has pushed itself and the rest of the world into probably the brink of an abyss.”
And once we plunge into that abyss, there is no turning back.
Of course most ordinary Americans aren’t really thinking about Iran at all. They are just busy working hard, raising their kids and trying to build their lives. Perhaps they have heard a little bit about tensions with Iran on the news, but most of them have absolutely no idea that we could literally be on the verge of an apocalyptic war in the Middle East.
If a full-blow war with Iran erupts, events are going to start escalating very rapidly and it will set the stage for many of the nightmare scenarios that I have been relentlessly warning about.
A lot of the talking heads on television seem to think that “the worst case scenario” would be having the U.S. dragged into another endless “quagmire” like we witnessed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
No, that is definitely not the worst case scenario.
The Iranians have been preparing for this conflict for decades, and they would hit us with everything that they have got.
In order to defeat them quickly, we would have to go beyond just using conventional weapons, and that is somewhere that we do not want to go.
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The Iranians will hit us with everything they have?
Seriously, if this goes military, it is high time the US quit screwing around and demolish the enemy. No more screwing around like in Viet Nam, etc. Destroy the enemy. And the US is capable of reducing Iran to ash.
Hope it does not come to that – but endless ongoing war is not in the interests of the west.
The military will stand down… or more accurately, be stood down.
Snyder’s picture should be in the dictionary next to Cassandra. Not that the current Iran issue isn’t a big problem, but I can barely tolerate reading his stuff anymore. They sky has been falling on his blog for countless years now. Regarding Iran, I think they are playing chicken with the US and the other Arab countries. They are betting they can exert pressure to get sanction relief and make it easier to sell their oil by seizing ships, scaring folks and the like. But UAE, Saudi’s and the US aren’t too excited to go into a hot war when they know Iran can make that area bottlenecked for a long time. So the price of oil and shipping in that area is bound to go up, but war would make it skyrocket and likely shut it down for awhile.
I just wonder how much China is really excited about Iran playing chicken in that area, given alot of the oil they consume comes from there. I can’t imagine they want oil prices to skyrocket with China’s economy already taking on alot of leaks. But all the big players have something to lose in that area. The messed up thing is besides oil prices going up the US should actually care less about that area than most of the other countries. Iran is doing its own version of maximum pressure, but that can go badly for them and the rest of the world. Hopefully its resolved peacefully, but I don’t think seizing tankers or tit for tat shooting down drones is going to lead to stability. But lets be realistic that whole region is a shit show, they have so many groups hating eachother, all the oil countries are competitors at this point, and countries like Iran need a boogeyman to try and keep their religious zealots in line and full of righteous hate. I wish the US would quit playing the water police, or at least in that region, maybe focus more on our side of the world instead.
Much better analysis than Snyder, the one trick “sky is falling” pony. The Iranians may be filthy Muslim heathens but they are not stupid, they are seeking negotiating leverage through their provocations. Iran is actually betting on the forbearance of Trump…..that DJT will not be swayed by the MOAR WAR caucus of the deep state, Saudi and the Small Hats. Good points on China’s role, they are in much the same position as Japan pre-WWII. China is the real problem.
Seriously! Do you mean to think that Iran has drones? Of course they could have drones, but what could be gained militarily by sending a drone towards a ship? Are we to assume that Iran wanted to assess the true power of that particular ship? Were they unaware of the missile defense systems on US warships? Or perhaps it was their intent to use the drone to shoot a missile at the war ship. Yeah, that could be the ticket. We can all agree that we don’t want our war ships to be shot with missiles.
Either this new crop of lying bastards in washington are really bad at what they are supposed to be doing, or they have given up on even trying to make sense because they know that merkins are too stupid to see that they are lying. I suspect that it is the latter.
Iran has loud noisy slow drones without great sensors….but they do have them. Probing the limits before the US responds is good information and is all about raising the price of oil, keeping China and Russia engaged/interested/focused and moving towards a climax where hopefully they get a new deal with the West. The Uranium enrichment so publicly leaked is the same thing.
Yep. The Taliban didn’t have loud noisy drones, they didn’t have any. Yet they kicked the US ass fair and square. The same will happen with Iran; it’s just Persians are twice as smart.
Yep … complete fabrication that “our ship” was “threatened” by a drone. That’s a good one!
Bolton has already forecasted war on Iran in 2019. Israel has ordered it and now it’s up to muricans to murder innocent people once more who mean us no harm. Trump is just the Potemkin sap pretending to be relevant. Same old shit.
Hey you voting fools there’s a bright side. According to wesley clark Iran is the last in the long line of wars ordered up by israel and saudi arabia. So after slaughtering the next batch of children we all can go back to tending the terminal decline of america.
Vox populi vox bullshit
If Trump wants to lose badly in 2020, war with Iran is a good way to do it…Nor would the US win a conventional war with Iran (supported by Russia and China) without massive casualties and the possible destruction of Israel…
Nobody is beating Trump in 2020, live with it……or leave.
If a “terrorist” action takes place in the USA, it will have israel’s fingerprints all over it, just like the WTC 9-11. Saudis with box cutters?–yeah, right…
Not going to happen.
This is a media/intelligence operation being used to distract from whatever else is going on (the never ending human invasion? the child sex slavery story?).
And Iran is still busy trying to negotiate their way out of sanctions-
https://nation.com.pk/19-Jul-2019/iran-rolls-out-substantial-offer-to-washington-in-exchange-for-lifting-sanctions
That doesn’t happen when you’re on a war footing.
agreed, this is a distraction to keep people from noticing the impending bubble popping operation of the fed, as they raise rates on an economy that can not handle a rate increase.
There are plenty of signs we are not in a booming economy, but you will never hear anyone talk about that, until the stock market starts declining. Then, that is all MSM will be talking about. Any fighting with Iran would just increase the rate of decline of all economies, world wide.
Raise rates? Last I heard they were cutting by 1/2% at the next meeting.
Yes. Shit is getting real with the Epstein saga. Names are about to drop. DC is freaking out. This is a distraction. And it’s not working.
Epstein did not get bail…..definitely getting real! Cry havoc and unleash the dogs of (civil) war, the anticipation is worse than the event, well not really but you get the point.
Just my opinion … NOTHING substantial is going to come of this Epstein affair … the entire deep state is involved in all likelihood. Like everything else …. the Epstein matter is just further obfuscation. Yes …. I will remember I said this. Along these lines …. where is Q? Seriously. The sealed indictments? Remember? Its is only 3 years an running. That was just another mind-screw! How quickly we forget and how easily we are manipulated.
Agreed.
People aren’t just eating factory food, they’re eating factory news.
Between the rabid, incompetent and demonic , on both sides, it won’t take but the inevitable miscalculation or fuck-up to light the short fuse on this contemporary production of Armageddon.
Not to worry tho’; the NFL preseason is getting ready to provide American Lumpen with the real deal.
why would I blame the Iranian Allied terrorists in the country, if god forbid they took out a few schools full of children ? who the fuck allowed them into the country to begin with ? You can bet in that scenario all of us will lose more freedom, and most likely by design. No, it can all be laid at DC’s feet. Not the supposed terrorists the State rolls out the red carpet for.
Trump’s claim about downing an Iranian drone appears to be one of his countless Big Lies.
He may actually believe the rubbish he rants, a sign of his psychopathological/delusional serial lying.
The same goes for his extremist geopolitical team, notably Pompeo, Bolton and Abrams.
IRGC Releases Surveillance Footage in Rebutal to Trump’s Claim about Downing Iranian Drone:
http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13980428000528
http://en.farsnews.com/player.aspx?nn=13980428000644
With respect to the tanker, Iran subsidizes fuels, so there is a substantial price gap between Iranian fuels and fuels in other countries. This provides an incentive to smuggle fuel OUT of Iran. So, the Iranian version of the tanker story makes sense and is likely to be true.
Hey Snyderfuck, they fooled our parents with fake nukes for 70 years.
Constant sabre rattling and mushroom cloud movies on the TV.
The whole thing was hoaxed for fun and profit.
Today is just an extension of yesterday.
WW3 ? Shit, Iran would take 2 weeks.
Indeed.
A few aircraft carriers at the bottom and Trump’s surrender pact with NK becomes RED DAWN (1984).
More crap from Snyder – the twat who said world collapse is gonna happen on 23rd September 2015- And TBP cites his shit! Pathetic!