While we do not yet know what sort of government will emerge in Iran, the President is adopting a policy much closer to the success of World War II’s unconditional surrender than the failure of the Iraq War’s regime change.
Last week, President Donald Trump demanded nothing less than unconditional surrender from Iran to end the ongoing hostilities. Posting on Truth Social, he wrote “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER! After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).” At the time, even the BBC noted that the definition of “unconditional surrender” was unclear. As they phrased it, “Trump’s latest intervention suggested he was not interested in a negotiated settlement to the war, though he stopped short of calling for regime change. Since the beginning of the conflict, Trump has avoided the term ‘regime change’, a sign he may be wary of drawing parallels between the attack on Iran and past US wars in the Middle East that he criticised before entering politics. Other senior administration officials have made that argument on Trump’s behalf in recent days, saying the president will not let the US get drawn into a protracted, open-ended conflict like in Iraq and Afghanistan.” When questioned about this further, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt added more details about our objectives and the timeframe. “We expect [the war] to last about four to six weeks, and we are well on our way to achieving those objectives,” we do not want “a radical terrorist or a regime that chants death to America” and “[Trump] wants to take an interest in and pursuing who the next leader of the Iranian country is going to be. And that has yet to be seen, the president is discussing it.”
On Monday, however, the President phrased things differently at a press conference, when he claimed the war was winding down faster than expected. “We’re achieving major strides toward completing our military objective. And some people could say they’re pretty well complete,” he explained. “We’ve wiped every single force in Iran out, very completely, most of Iran’s naval powers have been sunk. It’s on the bottom of the sea. It’s almost 50 ships. I was just notified, it’s 51 ships. I didn’t know they had that many didn’t last very long and these are fighting vessels, they’re meant to fight, but they’re not meant to fight against us. We continue to target Iran’s drone and missile capabilities. Their drones are way down. Their drone manufacturing has been hit starting today. We know all of the places they manufacture the drones and they’re being hit one after another. Their missile capability is down to about 10 percent, maybe less. We’re also hitting where they make missiles and where they deliver missiles. We’ve struck over 5,000 targets to date, some of them very major targets. ” Afterwards, he added that there are some targets we have chosen not to attack such as power plants and other critical infrastructure. “So we’re not looking to do that if we don’t have to. But they’re the kind of things that are very easy to hit, but very devastating if they are hit. We are waiting to see what happens before we hit them, we could take them all out in one day,” he added. After concluding that “We could call it a tremendous success right now, as we leave here, I could call it, or we could go further, and we’re going to go further,” he was pressed to provide a specific endpoint. Though he refused to do so for what I would consider obvious reasons, he explained “Very soon. Look, everything they have is gone, including their leadership. In fact, there are two levels of leadership and even actually, as it turns out more than that, but two levels of leadership are gone. Most people have never even heard about the leaders that they’re talking about. So it’s obviously been very — very powerful, very effective.” Pressed again by a reporter who noted Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said the effort was just beginning, President Trump responded “I think you could say both, the beginning. It’s the beginning of building a new country, but they certainly — they have no navy. They have no air force. They have no anti-aircraft equipment. It’s all been blown up. They have no radar. They have no telecommunications and they have no leadership. It’s all gone..We could — we could call it a tremendous success. Right now as we leave here, I could call it, or we could go further and we’re going to go further. But, uh, the big risk on that war has been over for three days. We wiped them out the first — in the first two days.”
From there, the President expressed his disappointment in the selection of Ayatollah Khamenei’s son as the next Supreme Leader, more on that in a moment, and continued to describe what he is looking for in the leader who ultimately emerges, contrasting that with our approach to Iraq more than two decades ago. “I like the idea of you know internal and eternal come to think of it, but I like the idea of internal because it works well. I mean, I think we’ve proven that so far in Venezuela we have a woman Delcy who has been, you know, president of the country, very respected, very doing a great job and it’s, you know, no disruption. We had, as you remember, Iraq where everybody got fired, the military got fired, the police got fired, the politicians got fired. There was nobody and you know what they turned into ISIS, and we don’t want that. We don’t want that. So uh, I would like to see people that are inside go now.” He even expanded on this a little further, adding “Where they’re not going to be starting the following day to develop a nuclear weapon where they’ll look at that man and some other people from the administration and say, all right, we’re not going to do it” and “they will no longer have any capacity whatsoever for a very long period of time of developing weaponry that could be used against the United States, Israel or any of our allies,” but to some or even many observers, these were both contradictory messages and an indication that the President is not prepared to prosecute the war until victory is achieved because he will not fully pursue regime change. To those who follow this line of thinking, it was promptly interpreted as a betrayal of the Iranian people, and that the President has in fact, chickened out on this front because of the spike in oil prices and the broader threat to the economy. Therefore, despite authorizing one of the boldest possible foreign policy moves in recent memory – if not in all memory – less than two weeks earlier, the TACO, that is Trump Always Chickens Out meme suddenly resurfaced, accusing him of seeking a sudden off ramp rather than finishing the job.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the contradiction is mostly in their own minds. To begin with, the phrase “unconditional surrender” dates back to World War II and the demands we made of the Japanese to end the conflict. Then, as now, a key consideration was what kind of government would continue after the country viciously attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor and waged a ferocious war against us. On July 26, 1945, the United States, the United Kingdom, and China laid out the terms of an unconditional surrender. Crucially for our purposes, these terms did not call for the replacement of the entire Japanese government and every possible governing body. Instead, the Allies, led by President Harry S. Trump demanded, that the “authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest” be eliminated for “all time,” that the Allies would be able to station forces at “points in Japanese territory to be designated,” that Japan’s control over its territory would be limited to the lines drawn prior to the first war with the Russians in 1894, and that “Japanese military forces, after being completely disarmed, shall be permitted to return to their homes with the opportunity to lead peaceful and productive lives,” and we “do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation, but stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners.” Further, what came to be known as the Potsdam Declaration contained a number of positive, proactive clauses. These included “The Japanese Government shall remove all obstacles to the revival and strengthening of democratic tendencies among the Japanese people. Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for the fundamental human rights shall be established,” “Japan shall be permitted to maintain such industries as will sustain her economy and permit the exaction of just reparations in kind, but not those which would enable her to rearm for war. To this end, access to, as distinguished from control of, raw materials shall be permitted. Eventual Japanese participation in world trade relations shall be permitted,” and “The occupying forces of the Allies shall be withdrawn from Japan as soon as these objectives have been accomplished and there has been established, in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people, a peacefully inclined and responsible government.”
Overall, Japan would largely be allowed to govern itself with the many in the government remaining after the war under the provision that there was an Allied Commander providing supervision and there would be certain fundamental reforms to prevent more military aggression and improve the lives of the people. Further, this extended to the Japanese Emperor, Hirohito who was allowed to remain on the throne because his removal would have been too disruptive, he was considered key to providing stability, and he was perceived as an ally during the rebuilding process. Incredibly, he ultimately reigned until 1989, though he renounced his divine right to rule in 1946. Whatever the specific details, the “unconditional surrender” approach that ended World War II was measurably different from the “regime change” approach we pursued in Iraq and Afghanistan some 60 years later. In that case, the United States and our allies effectively disbanded the entire government as President Trump suggested, sent home the entire army leaving them prime targets for the insurgency to recruit, and assumed day to day control of the country through the Coalition Provisional Authority. In addition, the CPA mandated key aspects concerning the nature of the future government including the ratification of a Constitution and the holding of elections in an attempt to remake the country as a Western-style democracy. The combination of a dissolved government and the sense that democracy was forced on the country at the point of a gun were undoubtedly huge contributors to the chaos that followed, chaos President Trump has clearly learned from and doesn’t want to repeat this time around.
While we do not yet know what sort of government will emerge in Iran, it’s clear that the President is adopting a policy much closer to the success of World War II’s unconditional surrender than the failure of the Iraq War’s regime change. Whatever his detractors may claim, the Supreme Leader when the strikes began is dead and his replacement has not been seen in public outside a cardboard cut out, leading some to conclude he’s dead as well and most to believe he is seriously injured. The top ranks of Iranian leadership have already been decimated and though vestiges remain, there is reason to believe that the rank and file aren’t fanatic enough to lose their lives in a war they simply cannot win. It is a reasonable assumption that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard which was assembled by the Ayatollahs’ for their evil purposes is intractable, but the regular army and police are not, suggesting that our goals can be achieved with a significant portion of the government remaining in place afterwards. Whether you call that regime change, unconditional surrender, or whatever is up to you, but allow me to close with a hypothetical: If someone in a position of power within the Iranian government were to call up President Trump right now and agree to certain verifiable reforms – no longer pursuing nuclear weapons, producing ballistic missiles and drones, threatening their neighbors, and some reasonable protections for the populace – does anyone truly believe the President should say no because it would count as a loss? Of course not, that would be madness, and yet the madness persists as it does whenever Trump is involved.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 