MCarhill

Brent Oil has hit $100/barrel for the first time since late May - up 6% today and up 40% from a low of $71/barrel on July 1st. The trend reflects escalating tensions around the Strait of Hormuz and renewed Houthi threats to Saudi shipping in the Red Sea.

With all due respect to Drew, he misses my point completely. I don’t believe and never claimed that The Odyssey should “fit into my ideology.” Rather it should fit into, or at least accurately represent, the ideology of the characters and time period it portrays. The worldview of a Greek warrior 3,000 years ago is certainly not one I would share on every point. And yet that is the worldview that the film should try to capture. It doesn’t. At all. I’m not sure why this point is so hard to grasp.

WTI crude $91/bbl… Brent $99/bbl… ouch

I feel the need to explain this. Why Iran still has capability. I’ll answer the initial question with a question: Do you think you can crush an enemy’s ability to mass combat power even though they can still retain some isolated/dispersed capability elsewhere? The answer should be yes. In GWOT we dealt with this. There was no doubt the U.S. military had overt control of the battle space. Where we went, we won. But we still dealt with asymmetric threats. And that’s what you’re seeing now, albeit at the strategic scale. GWOT vets will remember the 107mm rocket barrages. They happened frequently. We played whack a mole trying to prevent them from launching but they were crafty. The rockets were designed to harass, and they did. Did they cause mass casualties? No. Did they get a few of us? Yes. Did the enemy control the field as a result of these attacks? Absolutely not. War is complicated yet simple. Iran has been a pain in the ass like this for a long time. You are not dealing with a rational state actor. They are religious fundamentalists who don’t care about a centralized chain of command. If the Ayatollah says “ceasefire”, some zealot can easily say “yea don’t care, FIRE.” They have no ability to mass meaningful combat power. They can only harass with the missiles and launchers they’ve been stockpiling for generations. And every one they exposed, almost certainly gets deleted by CENTCOM. This is the dance we do with these evil people. The problem is America has to be exceptional everywhere all of the time. A terrorist only needs to be successful in one place a portion of the time. Iran is doomed. Mistaking harassing ballistic missile fire for meaningful offensive capability is foolish. And for every hair harmed on an American head, the cost visited upon the whole of Iran will become too costly to bear. There is no universe where they succeed. Unless you are an enjoyer of Marxist media like The Washington Post or The Atlantic. Where they cheer for the Ayatollah like he’s David versus Goliath. Pure copium.

"From this point forward, any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT..." - President Donald J. Trump