Trump’s Peace Deal With Iran Looks Like an Unambiguous Success for America and Israel

If the end of the Iran War, just announced, brings the removal or destruction of the enriched uranium and permanent and verifiable guarantees that Iran will not seek to become a nuclear military power, as announced, and if it also contains verifiable promises not to subsidize international terrorism, which has been hinted at, then it has unambiguously been a successful war for America and Israel. Under any circumstances, Iran would happily trade the end of the blockade of its own ports for completely unobstructed passage of the Strait of Hormuz so we may take it as a certainty that international shipping will be back to normal traffic within a few days of completion of an agreement.We may also be certain that Iran will try, from the beginning of the implementation of the peace agreement, to cheat and to pull back everything that it will have given up. For these reasons, it will be important that the United States increase the level of forces that it normally retains in the theater so as to be able to descend on a moment’s notice on Iran in cooperation with local allies, to punish it and drive it back to strict acceptance of the concessions made in the peace agreement. If the provision of an assurance that Iran will not support terrorist organizations is in the agreement, it will not be honored and if it is not in the agreement, then the peace will have achieved the primary objectives of denying Iran nuclear weapons and reopening the Strait but nothing else, though positive realignments among the Gulf states and a more cautious attitude from Teheran should result.We saw with the defeat of Saddam Hussein and his expulsion from Kuwait in the first Gulf War that he represented this as effectively a victory because he was still in power, although the entire armed forces of Iraq were quickly and completely overwhelmed and much of the country was swiftly occupied. The Islamic method in conducting and treating wars is generally one of claiming victory if any remnant of the apparently defeated regime survives. Especially if the opponent power is not a Muslim country, the defeated Islamic power will claim to be the underdog fighting a fanatical and beastly enemy. So the survival, even in hovels, of the disarmed population is still a victory of sorts. We must prepare for this and for the Democrats and their ventriloquists’ dummies in the press to allege it also. President Obama said on Sunday that a Trump agreement will be similar to his agreement with Iran. This is false. Under his agreement, Iran would, with the world’s blessing, be a fully nuclear armed power by now.It is hard to conceive that any promise by Iran to avoid the subsidization of terrorist movements would be any more believable than Hamas’ pledge to disarm, which, of course, it has never had the slightest intention of doing. The next step in the Gaza war was always going to be a final offensive by the Israeli Defense Forces physically to exterminate the military and terrorist apparatus of Hamas. Otherwise, the terrorist provocations of Israel will resume and the reprisals will follow and war will continue ad infinitum. Early hopes have been expressed by Vice President Vance and others of an improved Iranian attitude and more positive orientation. Any such hope should be recognized as fragile.Removal of the Iranian nuclear threat will be another demonstration of the new Trump technique of employing American technical military superiority and the extraordinary expertise of the United States’ forces and the skillful use of espionage and the subornation of enemy cadres that severely damaged the deep-underground Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities last summer. The same technique enabled the United States to remove the president of Venezuela and his wife to the Brooklyn, New York house of detention from their palace at Caracas without either operation causing a single American combat fatality. The more than $1 trillion damage done to Iran and the complete destruction of its air defenses and navy and most of its offensive missile and drone capacity only cost eight American combat fatalities (though five other servicemen died in an air crash, but it was not combat -related). Approximately 35 Israeli civilians died in cluster bomb attacks, but the Trump method of achieving extraordinarily ambitious strategic objectives with zero or minimal American combat deaths is intact. And it is a strong contrast with the nearly 60,000 combat deaths of the United States in Vietnam, much less the more than one million casualties of the Russians as they flail ineffectually about in Ukraine. As of Saturday, Democratic spokesmen were claiming that Mr. Trump had agreed to a surrender. This won’t fly. When Hamas, on Iranian instructions, invaded Israel and massacred over a thousand Israelis on October 7, 2023, Iran was confidently expecting to deploy nuclear weapons under the nose of the pitiful Biden administration within two years, hoped that the Hamas invasion of Israel would raise a general revolt in the West Bank and that a flying column would threaten Jerusalem, and stood ready to activate a powerful Hezbollah that had 150,000 rockets ready to fire at Israel. Hamas had 25,000 to 30,000 armed and trained terrorists in Gaza. At the cost to the United States of 13 servicemen, barely a third of those lost in liberating the hijacked freighter Mayaguez in 1975 under the Ford administration, Hamas has lost more than half of Gaza and approximately 80 percent of its trained terrorist personnel, and Hezbollah has lost more than half its forces and almost all of its arsenal of missiles, Iran has lost its nuclear program, its navy, its air defenses, its leadership, and has been severely defeated. The October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel has been a disaster for Iran and its allies.Mr. Trump never explained the war properly and fluctuated in his enunciation of his war objectives and strained both credulity and public patience as he oscillated between draconian threats and confident predictions of imminent peace. Yet any version of the outcome of this war that is now believable is a major strategic victory in denying Iran nuclear weapons, driving a number of Arab states into the arms of the Israelis, and curtailing Iran’s ability to generate terrorism, all at minimal cost in American lives. It is an undoubted Trump victory, and no one will remember recent gas prices on midterm election day.

Trump’s Peace Deal With Iran Looks Like an Unambiguous Success for America and Israel

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