The Geography Of The Assassination of General Soleimani

I was hoping to post pictures of flowers or something like that today.  Australia is burning because we can't give up our luxuries to fight climate change.  But we are in a huge crisis of our president's making. We are focused on possible war with Iran.  (No I don't think it will be anything like a conventional war.  It will be a 21st Century guerrilla war, with lots of cyber terrorism.)

So let's just look at something simple - geography.  

Distance from Tehran to Baghdad.

For those with vision issues, and whose computers can't read text in images, Tehran is 433 miles from Baghdad.

Here's a map from StatsAmerica of all of the US within 425 miles of Washington DC. to get a sense of how far 432 miles is.

Distance from Iranian border to Bagdad.

Baghdad is 209 Km = 129 miles from the Iranian border


Distance from Washington DC to Bagdad.

DC is 10,009* km (or 6,219 miles) from Baghdad.
*different sites show slightly different distances.

Imagine if an avowed enemy of our country had troops within 130 miles of our border.  How would the US react?  (I'd note that when Castro took over in Cuba  (90 miles from the US border) he came to the US and ultimately both had issues with each other. And the US imposed an embargo on Cuba.  But when the Soviets put missiles in Cuba, we risked a nuclear war confronting Soviet ships coming to Cuba.)

If we only consider geography, it is clear that Iran has a much larger vested interest in what happens in Iraq than the US does.  Imagine if any country assassinated a top US official in while he was in Toronto or Acapulco. I was told the other night by an Iranian/American who had just returned that a special position had been created for Soleimani that made him, in essence, second in command.  Reuters says he reported only to the Supreme Commander.  CNBC quotes defense policy expert Roman Schweizer, 

"This is the equivalent of Iran killing the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and then taking credit for it."

The US came to be when a relatively small, rag-tag army, used some conventional and some essentially guerrilla warfare to defeat the greatest power in the world at that time.  Eventually the US took over that position.  In Vietnam we discovered that guerrilla soldiers, fighting for their own land, could defeat the world's most powerful conventional military.  And that's the way General Soleimani advanced what he saw as Iranian interests.  He killed a lot of Americans as well as civilians that way.  But the president has taken an action now that demonstrates his belief that  killing enemies is not wrong.

We couldn't win in Vietnam.  We haven't been able to win (whatever that might mean) in Afghanistan.  We can't win in Iraq.  What would it even mean to 'win' against Iran, 6,000 miles away?  Against people defending their homeland? Ask Iraq War vets in the United States how it felt to battle in a foreign land where they didn't speak the language or know the terrain.

The geography is telling.