Indeed is not. None of those arguments are correct.

This oughta be good.

Yes, China owns Iran. And if anything we were doing were actually going to change that, then perhaps you could argue that this is about China.

But it's not. China will continue to own Iran, because we're not changing any of the conditions that lead China to own Iran. In fact, we're exacerbating them.

Missed point #1. Instead of having an active proxy causing trouble for the west in Iran, China is now the one that has to spend energy restoring their mischief-making ability to what it was knowing that US and the Gulf nations aren't willing to allow Iran to threaten them anymore.

You've missed the significance of Iran randomly bombing its neighbors and how honked off they are. Think any of them are going to object if the US says, "Hey, we've noticed Iran is rebuilding a missile factory. Mind if we blow it up?" NONE of them are going to say no.

...because nothing we're doing is going to change the degree to which we have to manage Tehran. We're not changing the regime. We're not reducing their hostility to the West, or their control over some 90+ million people and a huge chunk of the world's oil, or their long-term threat profile to the region. We're not going to be in a position to declare "Mission Accomplished" and never have to pay attention to the Middle East again.

Wrong. You seem to think that the only way to eliminate an enemy is to completely change them over. There's such a concept as a "mission kill" whereupon you eliminate someone's ability to do the job they were doing. That's what you missed in Venezuela and that's what you're missing now.

We don't need to change Iran into an ally; we just need them to stop projecting power on China's behalf.

Beijing wants the Middle East to be a stable and secure source of oil and an economic engine for them to exploit and dominate.

Yeah? And? This point has nothing to do with the article. The Saudis are happy to sell the Chinese all the oil they want...and they do. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. But the Saudis will also understand that if China starts screwing with world trade that they get a vote in the form of sanctions against the Chinese, a vote that Tehran as China's b1tch would never allow.

Trump's strikes are a foolhardy move by an American president who, if he actually thought that the road to the Pacific runs through Tehran, would be completely and utterly wrong in that thought.


That's your opinion. Unfortunately, it's an opinion that merely looks at the world through the small lens of US democrat party politics instead of the broader one of worldwide strategic deterrence.