The ceasefire is shaky, but we know this: After what everyone said wouldn’t happen, magically happened, they still concluded that what happened was bad, all without missing a beat.
It’s impossible to capture the insanity that President Donald Trump’s detractors attempted to pass off as wisdom over the past five weeks in a single post, but I will try. Less than twenty four hours after it was announced that the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a man who had ruled the country since 1989, and other members of his top leadership had been killed in our initial strikes, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared the effort a complete failure, and it didn’t get better from there. As the United States proceeded to strike Iran some 14,000 times, sinking most of their navy, destroying most of their planes, reducing manufacturing facilities and other critical military infrastructure to rubble in addition to targeting other leaders with precision strikes, progressives and their enablers in the mainstream media proceeded to claim that, despite this obvious damage, the United States was losing control over the war, running out of weapons, and had become unable to stop it if we wanted to because Iran was gaining strength by the day, poised for some kind of dramatic David versus Goliath victory. To support these claims, so-called exports invented some rather bizarre theories out of whole cloth as they say. Suddenly, wiping out your enemy’s leadership was no longer a path to victory but one that led only to defeat because the Iranian regime had developed some never before seen level or resilience, such that no matter how many people you killed it only grew stronger, like some mutant organism out of a science fiction movie. Though the number of missiles and drones they were able to launch plummeted by around 90% over the course of the first week alone, somehow their targets were getting more strategic and they retained the capacity to destroy all of the infrastructure in the entire Middle East along with all of our bases. When Iran did succeed in taking down one of our F-15E fighter jets, it was immediately perceived as some huge victory, puncturing the illusion that we were maintaining military superiority.
Throughout it all, next to none in the chattering classes wondered how it could be that the new Ayatollah, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the deceased one had never appeared in public, not on so much as a video or audio recording. They didn’t find it the least bit strange that the survivors of the regime might have elevated a dead man to power at worst, or anointed someone in a coma who could not speak for themselves at best, reading absolutely nothing into it either way. Instead, it was assumed they would never make a deal of any kind under any circumstances, would hide in the hills rather than come to terms, even at the risk of what was left of their country going up in flames. To reach this conclusion, detractors were happy to rely on the propaganda of the Iranians themselves, readily broadcasting every ridiculous claim as though the losing side of the war generally advertises their tenuous position, while readily questioning if not outright rejecting the statements from the administration. They were also willing to propose any number of nightmare scenarios for the United States, things that didn’t happen but they were certain would happen including the massive destruction of our ships in the Strait of Hormuz and a land invasion akin to Iraq. Even though the war had only proceeded for a few weeks, it was proclaimed a quagmire and compared to Vietnam. The Nation, for example, combined all of these threads into a single narrative of defeat. As they saw it, “there is no avoiding the truth: The United States is, in fact, losing this war,” “as anyone with eyes can plainly see, the Iranian military continues to fight, not just in a flailing and minuscule way as the president implies, but with consistent levels of ballistic missile fire towards both Israel and American bases in the Gulf,” remains capable of “additional waves of attacks and shows no sign of stopping or even dropping the number of missiles and drones it fires,” and despite “claims of the destruction of the Iranian Navy, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed to all shipping from nations the Iranian state deems to be hostile.”
As a result, seemingly “all other objectives of the war, be they degrading the Iranian military’s capabilities or overthrowing the Islamic Republic, have fallen by the wayside as the American government desperately attempts to control the price of oil, and reopen the Strait that was previously completely open before the war.” From there, they leapt to the Vietnam comparison for no real real reason save it feeds their false narrative, calling it an “apt historical comparison for this over-emphasis on sorties flown, strikes conducted, and commanders killed, over all other obvious, abundantly clear indicators of victory…General William Westmoreland, the American military chief of staff whom Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has compared to Trump officials, regularly boasted of weapon loss statistics and kill ratios as evidence that the tide was turning against Ho Chi Minh. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told the Senate in 1965 that the US was flying 13,000 sorties a month against the North Vietnamese, that 1,900 ‘fixed targets’ had been hit, and that the US had been ‘hurting North Vietnam’s war-making capability.’ Westmoreland would declare in 1967 that ‘we have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.’ The war would rage on for another 8 years, ending with the fall of Saigon to the communists.” Of course, Vietnam was an effort that ultimately saw around 550,000 troops deployed in the country, resulting in over 58,200 fatalities compared to zero troops deployed in Iran and 13 casualties, seven from an accident, suggesting such a difference in scale we might liken NASA’s ongoing Artemis II mission around the moon to a trip to Pluto. To square that proverbial circle, The Nation assumed we are on the verge of deploying some unspecified number of troops and that many of them will die, “there is a growing consensus among the Trump administration that ground troops are, in fact, needed to impose the control that the US has supposedly already taken. As of this writing, thousands of US troops are heading to the Persian Gulf region, as reports swirl about a potential landing on Kharg Island, or perhaps any number of other Iranian islands in the Gulf and in the Strait, where thousands, if not tens of thousands of Iranians, could soon come under direct American military occupation. The Iranian military, for its part, has been increasing its previously bombarded defenses on Kharg, anticipating the kind of invasion its military strategists have been anticipating for most of the Islamic Republic’s history.”
Though none of this happened, that didn’t prevent detractors from becoming increasingly hysterical as President Trump’s deadline for a ceasefire approached. They veered from insisting he was on the verge of committing an atrocity the likes of which the world had never seen, deploying nuclear weapons against a country of almost 100 million people, to insisting he had no choice in the matter because American credibility was at stake. Not surprisingly, it was the classic no win situation. If he carried through on these admittedly bombastic, quite vague threats, he was a war criminal, perhaps the worst whoever lived, but if he didn’t, he would be revealed a fraud, losing credibility and unable to achieve his objectives because Iran had already won. Throughout Tuesday, we were told that negotiations had broken off, Iran had rejected any and all terms, and the impossible choice was inevitable. Simultaneously, calls for President Trump to be removed from office by any means possible began to percolate in the usual precincts. Democrats calling for an impeachment were somehow saying something new though they already impeached him twice. CNN reported on an “eclectic” group that was demanding the 25th Amendment. Others repeated the canard that the military should not execute illegal orders, claiming that the top leadership was ready to reject the Commander in Chief’s final decisions. Would the President essentially vaporize an entire country or would he chicken out? For some reason, those were the only two possible alternatives – right up until they weren’t.
Approximately 90 minutes before the 8:00 deadline, an apparent miracle occurred when President Trump announced a two week cease fire with the outlines of a long-term deal conditioned on Iran opening the Strait of Hormuz. Suddenly, the country that would never under any circumstances agree to a ceasefire and would never open the Strait unless they were guaranteed security in perpetuity and reparations, agreed to do so. While the details remain unclear and anything could happen, see the final paragraph below, the reality is that Iran changed their position at the last moment, accepting what had been rejected that very day. Perhaps needless to say, detractors were still unimpressed, promptly abandoned all their prior positions to begin claiming that Trump chickened out, pulling a TACO as they said, and was either intentionally or unintentionally strengthening Iran, meaning that he was a monster for the threat and then feckless for not nuking an entire country. In other words, after what everyone said wouldn’t happen, magically happened, they still concluded that what happened was bad, all without missing a beat and without even remotely acknowledging that the administration insisted a deal was a distinct possibility all along, even predicting the timeline down to a few days. Somehow, it never occurred to them that perhaps the President was right the entire time and the combination of an unprecedented military campaign combined with intense diplomacy worked. To anyone paying the slightest bit of attention over the past decade, this should not be surprising. Despite their continued proclamations of impending doom, President Trump is simply better at any of this than they are – and they hate him for it. Personally, I cannot say why the President continually defies the odds. I understand some of their concerns about his style, his penchant for bombast, and his mixed messages. He is a frustrating individual at the best of times. At the same time, I can posit that he has a unique ability to see things others don’t, to identify opportunities where most see none, combined with the audacity to do what others won’t and an inability to accept defeat. Whatever the case, they used to call Teddy Roosevelt the best herder of emperors since Napoleon. Trump is either the best since Roosevelt, or he holds the title outright.
To some, this post might be premature. The ceasefire, such as it is, is shaky, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has not resumed full capacity and there are many details remaining, any of which could cause a resumption of hostilities. I am aware of that and this might well be one of those posts that do not age well, but I don’t think so. I think this both misunderstands President Trump as a non-stop negotiator who views every deal is merely a temporary step to a better one, and the reality that once the idea of a deal springs into existence, there becomes immense pressure to make it a reality, especially when everyone benefits from it becoming a reality. We see this less than six months ago in Gaza, where initial disputes and flare ups between Israel and Hamas threatened to derail the effort, only to be resolved, albeit on a still shaky basis. I would expect the same here, but I guess we will see. In the meantime, there is no doubt that the President did what most said would never happen.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 