Tehran

The Seventh Fleet will attack in a week, ten days.  On CNN, Admiral James Stavridis, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO recently gave it a 60% chance of it happening in 7-10 days. Kidnapping the Ayatollah will be a trifle harder than the antiseptic operation that moved Maduro from Caracas to the Metropolitan Detention Center. Imagine the Supreme Leader imprisoned there. Well, it's not far from the site of 9/11. Succession may be the biggest issue. Will the Shah's son rise to the occasion? Word has it that his rhetoric is already extreme. Iran is a country of 80 million people. Thousands of demonstrators recently died in a massive crackdown by the Revolutionary Guard. The problem is not simply regime change, but the aftermath. How to juggle all the varying interests, political, religious and economic? Lastly, there is the impact on the region.  During the initial attack US bases in friendly nearby countries like Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan will be threatened. In the aftermath, regime change in Iran is likely to unleash extremist elements throughout the Middle East. In Syria, Bashar al Assad fell, but ISIS still has a stronghold.  Remember that Iran is also part of the Axis that includes Russian and North Korea. It's the Domino theory and also--"spheres of influence," a vestige of the 50s political order which has ironically been reignited by Trump in his Greenland grab.

read "Current Events" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star