Must Read:  The Worst is Yet to Come: The Third and Final Act: Attacking Iran

Lind’s hard-hitting peace of October 31st, entitled The Worst is Yet to Come: The Third and Final Act: Attacking Iran,” is unduly pessimistic.

  My forecast as a life-long professional in the field is that neither Israel nor America will attack Iran.  The reasons are simple.  Lind misses the clincher.  Iran reportedly has enough Stinger missiles, though only heat-guided, to sink every tanker daring to ply the waters of the Gulf, as well as every troop ship by sea and especially every troop transport by air. 

  The isolated U.S. bases in Iraq presumably could survive for an extended period.  Most of the troops probably could escape to Saudi Arabia despite thousands of fatalities. 

  They would arrive too late, however, to protect the Saudi oil wells.  These could and would be disabled by simple mortar attacks on seven pressure pumping stations, which could restore pressure even in the best of conditions only after two years.  The impact of disrupted oil supplies would hurt our (former) allies much more than it would hurt America, and this, in turn, could cause boycotts of American dollars and an economic collapse that would make the 1929 catastrophe look like a blip in the stock market.

  The case for bombing Iran is simply much weaker than the case for not doing so.  Of course, so was the case for invading Iraq, as I described it in my seven-page editorial in The Middle East Affairs Journal, of which I was Managing Editor, in February, 2003, three weeks before the NeoCons’ ill-begotten march into infamy.  The big difference is that we could never again orchestrate or even fake a U.N. resolution to cover our actions, and our armed forces might collapse from within because we could never again convince American youth to die ostensibly for freedom and democracy.