Richard Miniter

But also, and they're financing pipelines to go around the Strait of Hormuz into Oman to deliver their oil to tankers outside the strait that the Iranians can't shut off.

That'll take months, if not a year more, to complete those pipelines.

There's some temporary pipelines, which have very small volumes.

But if you notice, other than leaving OPEC, they're starting to crack down on the immense amounts of Iranian money being held in Abu Dhabi and Dubai and starting to cooperate with SWIFT, with the US Treasury and others on seizing Iranian funds.

So this means that they, while they tremble in fear for what Iran could do to their people, also have taken a side and it's not for peace.

They understand this war is going to be, if the Iranians want to fight a war, it's continue to fight a war, which they seem to.

It's going to be long.

It's going to be a long slog.

I should say a word about geography here because people have trouble mentally picturing Iran.

If you were to pick Iran up and drop it over the continental United States, it would take

most of the territory from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River.

It's a nation of 93 million people, if you believe the latest census count, which is maybe it's off three or four million one way or the other, but it's a very large population and very, as this map shows, very mountainous territory.

So you have a Persian Gulf Coast that is nearly waterless,

with no navigable rivers, letting seaborne traffic go significantly inland, very little population on the coast, and almost 100 miles before you get to anything green.

And that only begins as the elevation steeply climbs.

I mean, if you remember, if you read Marco Polo's diary as a kid, the enormous,

angles and complexity of scaling those mountains it's a it's a fortress it's a fortress they think given to them by almighty god and if you tried to use ground forces first of all supplying them with water food ammunition and replacements would expose a hundred miles or more of logistical chains that would be perfect targets for artillery missiles and drones

But once you got to the mountains, you would be fighting inch by inch.

And the Iranians are very good engineers at tunneling, at bunkering.

That would be more of a slaughter than the US taking the bunkered positions of the Japanese in the Pacific War.