Richard Vigilante:

As an instrument of policy, war is a disaster. War is chaos and confusion. However strenuously rationalized as strategic it negates any coherent strategy.  The imperious requirements of victory narrow freedom of action to a choice among evils.  War invites corruption and subversion and demagoguery and deceit and causes nations to fail and fall, the fruits of victory hardly less bitter than defeat.

That does not matter now.  We have been brought to a point where we have no other good choice.  It is time for war, brutal, unavoidable war, to smash Hamas, kick the Russians out of Ukraine, destroy the Russian army, and behead the Iranian regime before it goes nuclear.

It does little good now to say it all could have been avoided; that failed US leadership is as much to blame for the war in Europe as it is for Iran’s dominance of the Middle East or the alliance between the two. Those are the very reasons we have no alternative. It is because U.S. foreign policy since 1989 has been so anti-strategic, so fundamentally unserious, so vain, that now we must fight.

Of course, we should not have overthrown Iraq, our most relevant ally against Iran, and especially not for the benefit of Kuwait, a long-standing Soviet ally.

Of course, after 1992 we should have welcomed Russia into Europe, acknowledged Russian fears of NATO, and gradually withdrawn from that alliance leaving Russia and Germany to work out their relationship.

Of course, the Bushes deserve to go down in history with Wilson as the worst Presidents in our history, ever reviled for the blood on their hands and the grievous wounds they inflicted on their country.

Of course, it was all just intolerably stupid and unserious.

It no longer matters. Allowing a Russia confirmed in its enmity to the US and aligned with China  allied with Iran to win in Europe would be a disaster. Our Russian strategy should have had one single objective: to keep the Chinese worried about their western flank. Instead, we now need to worry about our eastern flank. For that the Russians must be not only defeated but diminished. If we cannot have them as an ally, we must have them as an example.

Blessedly, this may now be possible to do with little loss of American blood. With the Russians and the Ukrainians pinned down in a macabre reenactment of the first World War, interdiction of vulnerable Russian supply lines from the air would be decisive. The war of attrition ends the day the Russians at the front run out of ammunition.

As for “widening the war” or inviting nuclear retaliation, we have every right to bomb Ukrainian territory with Ukraine’s permission. We should make that clear publicly. Privately we should make clear to the Russians what we will do if they threaten to go nuclear. There are times when being the only country in the history of the world crazy enough to have used the atom bomb is convenient.

Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan squandered the nation’s resolve to take on Iran.  That resolve must be recaptured. We cannot let them get nukes; our problems then would make today’s look like a silly game.

With luck we might avoid a ground war.  The mullahs have invested so much in their navy and air force that destroying both, along with their oil fields, might be enough to bring them to the table. Once there the only acceptable bargain would be to allow us to destroy all their nuclear sites. They will give in; we have nukes, and they don’t, yet.

At the very least, we should never let another drop of Iranian oil get up from the ground.

In the aftermath the mullahs are unlikely to survive

It would be horrible to see American soldiers dying in Gaza. Yet, thanks to the Bush family’s adventures, the awful truth is that the American army is the best in the world at the bloody task of rooting out a guerrilla army, house to house, block by city block.  Perhaps if we deal with Iran it won’t come to that.