There Was No Sense

It was a time of great and exalting excitement.
-- Mark Twain, The War Prayer

Well. File this under the category of HOLY SHITH (via Joe Hernandez at NPR): 

Iranian state media is reporting that a helicopter carrying President Ebrahim Raisi and other top officials suffered a "hard landing" Sunday, with no immediate word on casualties.

The state-run IRNA media outlet reported that the aircraft carrying Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian and other senior officials went down in a mountainous part of northwestern Iran as they returned from an event along Iran's border with Azerbaijan.

Two of the three helicopters on the trip reportedly reached their destination safely, but crews were still searching for the one carrying Raisi, according to state media.

Iran's Interior Minister, Ahmad Vahidi, reportedly confirmed the "hard landing" of the president's helicopter and said the search-and-rescue operation is underway...

And by "hard landing" they mean "holy (expletive) this is gonna be messy." (These are religious extremists, they don't get to curse like us Unitarians).

Rescue efforts by all reports are hampered by massive fog and bad weather. To which my response was "what the HELL were they doing flying through bad weather in the first place? Just delay the next meeting and wait for clearer skies."

So why is this a Holy Shith moment?

Because Iran's leadership is riled up by the current Israeli-Hamas-Hezbollah conflict, stirred by decades of mistrust between the hardline Israeli government and the hardline Islamic Shi'a government that has backed the likes of Hamas to prevent any successful two-state solution involving Palestine. We just dealt with the two nations attacking each other in April:

When he came into office, Raisi said Iran would continue to honor its nuclear deal with the U.S., despite former President Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the agreement in 2018.

Still, Raisi has been viewed as more of a hard-liner than his predecessor, former Iranian president Hassan Rouhani.

Last month, Raisi celebrated Iran's attack on Israel following an airstrike in Damascus that killed seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran blamed Israel for the bombing, but Israel never claimed responsibility. Israel said it intercepted 99% of the missiles and drones Iran fired during its retaliatory strike. (personal note: in truth the US and regional allied forces helped shoot those missiles down)

Iran's president is the head of its government, but the country is ruled by (Ayatollah Ali) Khamenei, its supreme leader...

Raisi is (maybe was) considered next in line for the Ayatollah position as Khamenei is up there in years (85 years old, hey New York Times tell him to retire). If Raisi turns up dead from the crash, the immediate effect is that the Iranian Vice President takes over as acting President for 50 days while a special election takes place.

The political effects would be Iran ramping up their level of mistrust to full-blown paranoia. They reacted to that targeted Israeli strike on Damascus with a missile spam of their own. It won't even matter if this helicopter crash was a legitimate accident - due to weather or to mechanic failure - because the death of one of the top leaders is a casus belli (cause for war) the hardliners want.

Think I'm exaggerating? Look up the War of Jenkins Ear. The Brits went to war with the Spanish over that. The United States almost went to war with France in 1797 over the XYZ Affair. We did go to war with Iraq in 2003 over unfounded claims - in some respect outright lies - around Weapons of Mass Destruction that turned out didn't exist.

Just think what a nation like Iran - controlled by authoritarians desperate to keep their restless and angry citizenry under heel - would do triggered by their President's (possible) death: Willing to blame Israel (and the U.S. and other regional powers) and escalating the madness and bloodshed in Gaza and the rest of the Middle East. Even if Raisi survives, don't be surprised if Iran claims the crash was an assassination attempt.

We are as a planet stuck in the Middle East because of terrible regional factions - Iranian vs. Saudi vs. Israeli vs. Syrian vs. Turkish vs. religious extremists vs. authoritarians across multiple nations vs. Russians vs. Americans - all eager in their own way to resolve their differences through blood, because no one dares want to try peace or diplomatic resolution to end the cycle of violence and hate.

There's thousands of civilians dead across Israel and Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon and Syria, with more to follow. All because the drumbeats go on...

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.
-- last line of the War Prayer

Update 5/20: This morning, waking up to confirmation Raisi and others died in that copter crash. It's too early to point to a specific cause, and U.S. Senator Schumer is telling reporters that our intelligence agencies are finding no evidence of foul play. But the Iranian leaders will draw their own conclusions. Things can well escalate to more violence from here. Gods help us.