How to Win Decisively in Iran
Winning Iran means: a new regime in Tehran, and one that is a friend. Not the same regime that is the same committed enemy to us, speaking “peace” for a moment but still plotting to destroy us as soon as it can get away with it, still making all the preparations that it can get away with for carrying this out. But a new regime that truly wants to be our friend.
There are a number of solid ways to actually win it.
The problem is not, “can we do it”? We can. The problem is to get ourselves to choose one of the ways to do this – one that is good enough to really do it — and then proceed with it. And proceed to completion, not cut another self-stopping deal when we’re most of the way there.
The 3 Steps for Winning Iran
- Knock opposition heads together so we have a solid replacement government ready in waiting.
- Either start it ourselves with a major U.S. strike on Iran, and then give Israel full support for it to finish the job and do all the detail work and cleanup for us.
- Or else leave it to Israel to do the whole thing — but with our full support all the way, without the kind of obstructionism that we have kept falling into for the last two years every time Israel has been on the edge of winning.
Follow through to the end this time, no matter how much the media scream and accuse us of doing terrible things. And no matter how much our isolationists say it’s not our business to do any of this, or to knock opposition heads together when that should be their job.
The answer is simple. Only by getting it done and over with is the bloodletting ever going to stop. Only we have the power to get it done right. Only we have the authority to get the various pro-Western oppositions together fast — and keep them together throughout the transition. And we need to get it done fast, for the sake of our own vital interests.
We cannot afford to go on complaining that the regime’s massive repressions have kept the vast oppositions from uniting across the span of their decades of intermittent mass quasi-uprisings. This time, we have to get them to congeal so we’ll have a solid replacement government ready in real time.
Fortunately, the Middle East Forum has done the main planning work in advance for America on this. It has worked out the core points of how to put together a good replacement government and what groups to include in it. Now we need to get on with putting it into practice: knock the heads together and get them into power.
No more temporizing. Time has run out.
No more fake peaces. No more chickening out on winning when we all but have it in the bag.
Don’t send in Witkoff until it’s all over with our enemies and it’s just a matter of making deals with our friends. He’s good at that kind of dealmaking upon transactional partners, He has a knack for tactical successes like that. But we need a different knack this time: a knack for strategic success against a determined enemy. All his tactical successes in the Mideast – Iran, Lebanon, Gaza – are in tatters at this time, because they left our enemies intact; indeed, they in effect rescued our enemies from defeat. The only way to salvage the earlier deals is by winning for real in Iran this time.
We need this one completed strategic success, the most important one, so the other halfway deals can finally stick.
It is much easier to win decisively in Iran, where 80% of the people want a regime change to a pro-Western non-Islamist regime, than in any of the other places. The conditions are actually more difficult for us in Gaza, Yemen, and even Syria and Lebanon.
Make it a full-service regime change in Iran. History is not made on the cheap, but it rewards us in buckets when it is really made.
It will repay us handsomely to win Iran for good, both in oil revenues and in our global diplomacy.
The past deals left our enemies intact in each country. They have all proceeded to start rebuilding their forces for acting on their enmity to us.
We kicked the can down the road on Iran, too, and it is coming back to bite us. Kicking the can again means letting a probably weak post-Trump president cave on Iran and let it get nukes; or letting Iran itself learn from its experience with Trump and figure out how to do it in a way that will get around Trump here and now. We cannot afford a nuclear Iran ever.
Trump can’t afford to stop halfway again. We have no space left for seeming to “chicken out”. We must follow through to the end this time.