Truces Drag War On toward Nov, Endanger Trump
Winning a war is rewarded in American politics. Sticking out even a very costly, not very useful war is better politically than bugging out.
Johnson-Humphrey tried to bug out, in keeping with media-peacenik demands – and lost the 1968 election. Nixon in Vietnam and Bush II in Iraq did the opposite. They continued trying to win, learned from past mistakes so they could fight better, and won re-election handily – Nixon by a landslide.
The Iran war is many times less costly than were theirs. And many times more useful.
But in this war, it is the interminable series of truces of the last three years, always in the name of peace, that have demoralized the public. The peace pretensions have always proved mirages; the truces that have in reality dragged the war out into the present, preventing victory, setting us back each time we moved forward, enabling the enemy to recover and find ways to make it harder for us to win – and causing far more people to die. Those are the costs of a fake policy. If continued much longer, it would carry the war and the demoralization alike straight into the November elections.
President Trump has an urgent political need to do the right thing for America: stop the pattern of truce mirages and proceed to win the war.
The actually threat to Trump in November: yielding to the Biden-media line
Were Trump instead to continue in the same pattern as Biden – the pattern of stopping every military step our side takes in midstream, imposing one truce after another, and making claims of victory and peace that always prove mirages – the war might well continue into November and beyond. Trump will lose big in the elections in that case.
This is in fact the unstated calculation of his enemies, Democrats and the media alike. They keep acting to maneuver him into doing more truces and fake peaces. They tell him that one more truce, one more deal on bad terms for us, is just what he needs to survive in November.
Every time he falls for the bait, it fails him. The same media immediately jump on the bad results to blame him all the more.
If Trump really wanted to get credit for peace from the legacy media, he’d have to literally sell out every American position of strength in the world and surrendering them all to America’s enemies. Surrendering Western positions is, after all, what the media habitually say is “for peace”. Of course, even that would not bring peace, nor praise from the media after it was done. The media would just say he did it wrong and should have done it sooner.
Trump could, of course, get praise for peace from the media by an opposite method: invade the offices of every media outlet, arrest all the journalists, and appoint new ones of his own. But the praise would be even less convincing than his FIFA peace prize.
Trump still has one option to get real peace instead. It is not one that the media will ever suggest to him. It is not one that the media will ever praise him for. But it would work. And it will be worth it for America.
The way is: to win the war he is in.
What exactly is meant by “winning”
We can expect to be confronted here with a number of obfuscatory questions. It takes only a bit of commonsense to find solid answers to them, but since commonsense is sometimes lacking in our political discourse, it is worth spelling them out here:
- What does it mean to “win”?
It means: actually defeat the enemy and end the war on conditions of gains for America and its allies. It is the opposite of the surrender policy – “declare victory and go home” – that the media have been urging on him from the start.
- What does it mean to “actually win” against the Iranian regime?
It means to replace the regime there – an enemy regime – with a friendly one.
- What is “the enemy regime”?
It is the Islamist Republic of Iran. It consists of the IRI’s Ayatollahs, its IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), its parallel terrorist militias, its parties, and its control structures in the regular military and government.
- What does “replacing” this regime mean?
It means putting in power a provisional replacement government, and disbanding or destroying the bulk of terrorist and control structures of the existing regime.
- Is there anyone who could serve effectively as this provisional replacement regime?
The answer is right there in front of us: the mainstream, pro-Western opposition. It could govern easily. It has grown decade after decade, new layers emerging with every new wave of popular uprising and regime repression. Solid surveys show that it has the support of about 80% of Iranians. It is only the murderous power structures of the Islamist regime that are keeping down the people.
- But isn’t the opposition disunited? Why not just wash our hands of it?
No. It has made great strides with uniting, and we can see to it that it finishes the process fast.
As with all totalitarian regimes, the Iranian powers have violently atomized the opposition. They have massacred and demonized each part of it when it emerged. This has forced new and old oppositions to renounce one another when they are trying to find a bit of political space for themselves inside Iran. It takes extraordinary maturity for them to get together across these divides that have been imposed on them.
Despite this, they have made a lot of movement toward uniting in recent months. This is seen especially in the affection toward the Crown Prince. But we don’t have time to wait for this process to mature all by itself.
We have to knock heads together, get them in the same room to figure it out, and make them agree on the most plausible personnel leadership structure to unite them.
- What does “make them agree” mean?
It means using our huge economic and political authority to get it done, then and there in the room where we bring them together. Guarantee our real military and economic support in taking over the governing of Iran, if they get together on terms that we think make sense. Review their proposals and lay out the draft for them all to sign.
How to Win, Here and Now
After we’ve gotten the pro-Western opposition to unite for a joint transitional government, support it in proclaiming themselves the transitional government and in taking some territory as a base for it. Provide them with the weapons to build up their own military, so they can follow up on their own for the long run.
Start at minimum with taking over an important part of Iran as the formal location of their power. There they can receive the surrender of the regime forces that Trump has often urged on the Iranian military and IRGC. Move on from there.
President Trump can still win, both abroad and at home, if he does this and sticks to it – if he plays RealTrump this time. If he won’t allow any more interruptions from the Biden-Witkoff-Vance-Obama people. If he will correct his mistakes the way every great wartime leader does: to find the way to win with our vastly superior power, not to come up with yet another way to lose.
If he does this, he will go down in history as a great American wartime leader. And as a global statesman who ended a fifty years cycle of wars in the Mideast – ended it by winning. Ended it by loving our good and decent friends, not loving our cruel and evil enemies as Jimmy Carter did. Ended it on terms that will endure.
And he will win a resounding victory in November.