Trump’s Half-Hearted Supporters in the GOP Risk Legitimizing the Democrats’ Sniveling Over the Iran War

The populations of Great Powers don’t simper over small and temporary inconveniences when the vital national interest is at stake. It is demeaning to see prominent American press figures normally favorable to the Trump cause and even impressive Republican senatorial and congressional candidates carping and whining about the Iran war and the cost of gasoline. The president should have stated at the outset that the prevention of an Iranian nuclear weapon that could threaten all of the Middle East and Western Europe was a low price to pay for a brief and far from spectacular rise in the cost of gasoline. He could easily have counteracted any foreign pressure on that price by a temporary rebate on state taxes on the sale of gasoline.If the president had made the point more convincingly that being a Super Power did impose such inconveniences, he would not now be bedeviled by half-hearted supporters urging a quick end to the war and legitimizing the Democratic sniveling about ongoing casualties that are not only the lowest of any significant war in history on both sides, but this is, as I have often written before, the most one-sided exchange of fire between serious combatants in the modern history of warfare. It is not too late for the administration to make this case with adequate force.Instead, we have had the very unedifying spectacle of many of the president’s supporters distancing themselves from him and uttering not only lamentations about gas prices but masquerading as pacifistic opponents to the war generally. The president has astutely outmaneuvered the Democrats who have been desperately trying to portray this as another “forever war” dragging on endlessly and reminding people of Vietnam. Lest we forget, Vietnam involved 545,000 largely conscripted ground forces with 200 to 400 coming back in body bags almost every week between 1966 and 1971. It is now a notorious truism that the Trump administration and the president himself could have done a much better job of explaining the Iran war as it proceeded. At the outset there was no shortage of enthusiasm from those who recognized the wisdom of the deep penetration attack on the underground enrichment facilities that could supply warheads for Iranian atomic weapons. There was a perfectly adequate level of approval for the follow-on joint American and Israeli aerial blitz of Iran which caused a minimum of civilian casualties and only 18 American combat deaths and caused more than a trillion dollars of damage to Tehran’s carefully built-up military capacity.After that, the president became locked into a pattern that gradually squandered his credibility, of oscillating between hair-raising promises to reduce Iran to a Stone Age condition and promises of an imminent satisfactory negotiated end to the war. When that negotiation was concluded with an agreement, Vice President Vance hailed it as the beginning of a new era in the Middle East, but the president was more cautious. Of course, the peace was a complete fiasco and Iran proved again that it regards any such agreement merely as a steppingstone to the achievement of its war aims.The Iranian claim to being able to close the Strait of Hormuz and treat it as its own coastal waters has been effectively shattered by the United States though it took its time focusing on the subject and even now there is more harassment from Iran than is convenient in the reduction of the world oil price. The American administration seems now to have a working and successful method of strangling Iran by a total blockade of its exports while promoting an almost normal flow of oil out of the Strait. The United States has still suffered only 21 fatalities in this entire action and it is capable of holding Iran’s feet to the fire indefinitely until the palsied regime collapses at minimal cost in American personnel. Mr. Trump has outsmarted the pacifistic Democratic War Powers Act clock-watchers trying to stir up congressional challenges to his right to maintain the level of military pressure that he does in the Gulf area. There seems to be no reason to doubt the president’s preparedness to take draconian measures or his determination to assure that Iran shall not become a nuclear power. He does seem to have lost credibility by waffling between conciliatory and severe options and by being caught exaggerating the destruction of Iranian military capabilities by its continuous interception of a small quota of outgoing ships.The Iranian practice of attacking the Arab oil-exporting states to try and get them to prevail upon the United States to end its blockade of Iran has failed completely, although it has highlighted the absence of great combat willingness among the Arab petroleum exporting countries. Most have not yet withdrawn their ambassadors from Iran despite war-provocations that have regularly arrived from Iran over the last two years. The Turks and the Persians are the ancient enemies of the Arabs and are again arousing those long-standing concerns. The United States seems steadily to be improving its relations with the Arab powers opposite Iran and the incursions of Turkey have so far been confined chiefly to Syria. Indeed Turkey is the last successful governor of Syria, having been evicted by the British in favor of the French in 1918.The demise of the Iranian regime, which is more imperative than ever, can and must be achieved whatever the midterm elections bring. That is the only road to peace in the Middle East.

Trump’s Half-Hearted Supporters in the GOP Risk Legitimizing the Democrats’ Sniveling Over the Iran War

Trump’s Half-Hearted Supporters in the GOP Risk Legitimizing the Democrats’ Sniveling Over the Iran War

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