Iran’s
Retaliation For The Loss Of Is Beloved General
My readers I am not going to make a specific
prediction on how Iran will retaliate. Rest assured that payback is coming.
Let us get something straight before we
begin to look into the minds of the Iranian planners as follows:
1) Wars burn cash at a startling speed.
Iran’s oil provides 10% of its GDP. If Iran loses its oil production
capabilities or its ability to transport oil, its cash dries up and what
happens afterwards is dire. Iran will find itself without oil, gas, etc. to
keep the economy going. “The natives are already restless there.” If the
economy totally collapses, there will be social unrest on a level that could
bring about a forceful regime change like what happened in 1979.
2) Rest assured that China, India and
Japan are right now madly scrambling around for other sources of oil; already
anticipating that oil shipments from Iran will stop.
3) Russia and China are not going to
start World War III over an Iran vs US/Israel/Saudi Arabia battle. The Russians
will use such a conflict to make money supplying Iran with arms, technology etc.
and with the increase in the price of oil.
Now let us put ourselves into the shoes of
the Iranian military planners deciding what action to take. Please do not
underestimate these people or laugh at them. They control the 14th
largest military machine in the world. At first, they will feel enraged. They
will want to make some grand move like sinking a US aircraft carrier lurking
near Iran.
Then cooler heads will prevail. If I were
in their place, I would employ the principle of “Plausible Deniability.” They
are going to make some moves that cannot be easily traced back to Iran. But
people will strongly suspect that Iran is behind these actions. Here are some
possibilities as follows:
1) Some cleverly-hidden cyberattacks
that make life miserable for people in the US that could include taking down
the air traffic control system (I saw this done in Argentina some years ago. It
is possible.) Taking down the banking system. Taking down the electricity grid.
Launching massive and crippling Ransomware attacks.
2) Terrorist attacks are an option. They
will need to be cautious here. The US, Britain, Europe, Russia, etc. have
gotten much better at stopping such attacks.
3) Use of a nuclear weapon comes to
mind. We assume that the Iranian nuclear program has not advanced to the level
of building an actual war head. We cannot be 100% sure of this. Iran also could
buy a nuclear warhead “off the shelf” from some Pakistanis sympathetic with
their Muslim brothers or from money-hungry Kim Jun Un. Such a warhead would not
be delivered by an aircraft or a missile. It would be smuggled into some
country by terrorists and detonated in a big city. Please read a most-interesting
book The Right of Boom. It describes a hypothetical nuclear terrorist
attack. Most disturbing is that six months after the detonation of the nuclear
weapon, the best scientific minds in the US could not figure out the origin of
the nuclear device with the explosive yield of the Hiroshima bomb.
4) Assassination of US leaders
My conclusion is these few words: “Get ready
for a rough, expensive, and painful ride.”
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