{"id":361199,"date":"2018-05-15T02:14:15","date_gmt":"2018-05-15T01:14:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/gearing-up-for-the-third-gulf-war\/"},"modified":"2018-05-15T02:14:15","modified_gmt":"2018-05-15T01:14:15","slug":"gearing-up-for-the-third-gulf-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/gearing-up-for-the-third-gulf-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Gearing Up for the Third Gulf War"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p><span class=\"wf_caption\" style=\"display: block; max-width: 640px; width: 100%;\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/images\/images_2018_05\/2018_0514td.jpg\" alt=\"An Israeli soldier stands next to Merkava Mark IV tanks in a deployment area near the Syrian border in the Israel-annexed Golan Heights on May 10, 2018. (Photo: Menahem Kahana \/ AFP \/ Getty Images)\" width=\"640\" style=\"width: 100%; margin: auto;\"\/><span style=\"text-align: left; margin-top: 3px; display: block;\">An Israeli soldier stands next to Merkava Mark IV tanks in a deployment area near the Syrian border in the Israel-annexed Golan Heights on May 10, 2018. (Photo: Menahem Kahana \/ AFP \/ Getty Images)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>With Donald Trump&#8217;s decision to shred the Iran nuclear agreement, announced last Tuesday, it&#8217;s time for the rest of us to start thinking about what a Third Gulf War would mean. The answer, based on the last 16 years of American experience in the Greater Middle East, is that it won&#8217;t be pretty.<\/p>\n<p>The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0recently\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/05\/03\/us\/politics\/green-berets-saudi-yemen-border-houthi.html\" target=\"_blank\">reported<\/a>\u00a0that US Army Special Forces were secretly aiding the Saudi Arabian military against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. It was only the latest sign preceding President Trump&#8217;s Iran announcement that Washington was gearing up for the possibility of another interstate war in the Persian Gulf region. The first two Gulf wars &#8212; Operation Desert Storm (the 1990 campaign to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait) and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq &#8212; ended in American &#8220;victories&#8221; that\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/2015\/6\/2\/8703059\/bush-isis-middle-east\" target=\"_blank\">unleashed<\/a>\u00a0virulent strains of terrorism like ISIS,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.unhcr.org\/en-us\/figures-at-a-glance.html\" target=\"_blank\">uprooted millions<\/a>, and unsettled the Greater Middle East in disastrous ways. The Third Gulf War &#8212; not against Iraq but Iran and its allies &#8212; will undoubtedly result in another American &#8220;victory&#8221; that could loose even more horrific forces of chaos and bloodshed.<\/p>\n<p>Like the first two Gulf wars, the third could involve high-intensity clashes between an array of American forces and those of Iran, another well-armedstate. While the United States has been fighting ISIS and other terrorist entities in the Middle East and elsewhere in recent years, such warfare bears little relation to engaging a modern state determined to defend its sovereign territory with professional armed forces that have the will, if not necessarily the wherewithal, to counter major US weapons systems.<\/p>\n<p>A Third Gulf War would distinguish itself from recent Middle Eastern conflicts by the geographic span of the fighting and the number of major actors that might&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/news\/item\/44475-gearing-up-for-the-third-gulf-war\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An Israeli soldier stands next to Merkava Mark IV tanks in a deployment area near the Syrian border in the Israel-annexed Golan Heights on May 10, 2018. (Photo: Menahem Kahana \/ AFP \/ Getty Images) With Donald Trump&#8217;s decision to shred the Iran nuclear agreement, announced last Tuesday, it&#8217;s time for the rest of us [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-361199","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}