Monday, March 7, 2005

The Dominos Keep Falling

Adventures With Chester tips us to an article in The American Thinker titled The Next Domino. In the essay Douglas Hanson discusses elements of the United States' war on terror that the media apparently know nothing about. There are interesting operations afoot both in the Horn of Africa and Abu Musa Island off the coast of Iran in the Straits of Hormuz. Here are some highlights from the article:

With virtually no attention from the mainstream media, the United States has been taking actions calculated to ratchet-up pressure on the mullahs of Iran. A complex plan has been carefully crafted to avoid a direct military attack on Iran, which would inflame nationalism and build support for the mullahs. Once again, the scope, subtlety, and vision of President Bush's foreign policy confounds his carping critics.

Iran has been aggressively moving to export terror and build-up its ability to threaten the world in two places: the Horn of Africa, and the vital Straits of Hormuz, where the Persian Gulf's oil riches must pass on their way to market. There are now some serious indicators that the Coalition, including both French and German military elements, has been deftly executing a combined political and military operation to roll back Iranian gains from the last 12 years.

There are strong indications that the efforts of Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) are starting to push Iranian operators out of the Horn, if they have not gone already. United States naval and ground forces, French commandos, and Die Deutsche Kriegsmarine (German Navy), through a combined series of special and conventional operations, naval power, and humanitarian assistance projects, have established the conditions for the introduction of up to 7,500 troops from the African Union and the Arab League. This is a watershed event for the Coalition in this area, and shows that the Somali people are anxious to finally rid their country of bandits, terrorists, and Iranian agents, and are looking forward to having the government-in-exile return to Mogadishu.

The other prong of CENTCOM's operations against Iran involves Abu Musa Island. The island had been the object of a long-running dispute between Iran and the UAE because of its oil reserves and its strategic location midway in the narrow channel of the Straits of Hormuz. In 1992, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps took complete control of the island , and proceeded to fortify it and deploy thousands of troops, modern air defense batteries, sophisticated anti-ship missile systems, and, according to former SecDef William Perry, chemical weapons. For over a decade, the Iranians have had the capability of shutting down the shipping lane and paralyzing shipment of over one-fifth of the world's oil supply.

This past week, Expeditionary Strike Group 5 (ESG-5) completed an amphibious exercise on the coast of Kuwait. Keep in mind that a rehearsal is a phase of any amphibious operation, and allows the afloat Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) and the Navy to test the communications links, practice disembarkation, exercise the procedures for naval surface fire support and air support, and, of course, practice the assault itself.

Rather than risk a popular backlash by the citizens of Iran against the US by conducting a direct air or land campaign against the Iranian homeland, seizure of an island that has been disputed for decades would show the Iranians we were willing to support their fight against the mullahs without putting their lives at risk or destroying their infrastructure. The mullahs launched their gambit as an act of aggression; reversing it would demonstrate strength, but indicate no hostility to the Iranian people.

This analysis doesn't even include any possible covert Special Operations Force activities designed to foment rebellion in what is viewed as an increasingly restive Iranian population. Because of the pressure being applied in the Horn of Africa and the Persian Gulf, it may require only a slight push from the freedom-loving people in Iran to rid themselves of this oppressive regime, following through on the very visible promise to them made by President Bush in his State of the Union Address.

Bush's critics often seem to assume that because they're not informed by the MSM of any developments in the GWOT that therefore the administration must not be doing much. One might think that they'd learn not to "misunderestimate" the man, but in the hearts of some of them there is an invincible hope that he'll turn out to vindicate all their declamations of his utter ineptitude. Nevertheless, the dominos keep falling. Let's pray that that happy state of affairs continues.