... the United States lacks the military means to impose its will on Iran in a long conflict. In 1991 a million soldiers from more than 40 countries were needed to reverse the invasion of Kuwait carried out by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a country less sophisticated than Iran and a fraction of its size. When Iran and Iraq fought each other to a standstill in the 1980s, deaths ran into the hundreds of thousands on each side. The United States would have to send a significant portion of its armed forces — which total only 1.3 million troops — to stand a chance of subduing Iran, and that force, if successful, would have to stay for a long time. ...
Here.
Caldwell is just as blind as Trump.
Neither one gets it that the lowly Houthis already beat us to a draw last year in the Red Sea.
Nothing is moving out of the Persian Gulf today, and tanker traffic through the Red Sea is less than half what it used to be in 2022, even under the new conditions of a world desperately thirsty for the Middle East oil no longer coming out of the former.
And neither one gets it that you can't have an American Empire without paying for it.
We're $39 trillion in debt and can no longer impose our will in the world's vital choke-points because elites have pretended since Reagan that low marginal income tax rates are sufficient to maintain American Empire when what those rates have done is impoverish us and enrich our adversaries.
1,135 billionaires are the symbol of our lost empire.
Caldwell steers well clear of naming the obvious remedy, and Trump's Big Ugly Bill will do nothing but put America $62 trillion in debt by the end of 2032.
Taxes must be raised . . . a lot.
