The Iran Circus Most Come To A Viable Conclusion

On February 28th of this year, American and Israeli forces struck Iran's military infrastructure and command in a coordinated operation that, for one promising moment, put the Islamic Republic back on its heels.

It was a winnable fight. We wiped out their leadership. We had the initiative.

We had the firepower. We had the moral clarity that comes from confronting a regime that, in even the words of the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, said has been at war with us for 47 years.

Iran did declare war on the United States 47 years ago, and only now, under this president, we decided to fight back, and we fought, and then we punted. But what has followed, has not been victory, but a managed retreat. We gave a two-week ceasefire to Iran with the president threatening to blow up their infrastructure, bridges, power plants, and water desalination facilities if they didn’t capitulate, but instead, this campaign has become an open-ended, non-ceasefire-ceasefire circus, where the president is now intent on redefining what the word “ceasefire” means.

It is Trump’s version of “depends on what is-is” moment. Talks have collapsed without a deal. While Trump has been focused on de-escalation, Iran has used the time to evaluate the situation, reorganize, rebuilt, replace spent or destroyed ordnance, thanks to China and Russia. It has now mined the Strait of Hormuz, the artery through which a fifth of the world's oil and gas moves through. They've closed it down.

The Pentagon now tells Congress it could take six months to clear the mines from the Strait of Hormuz, meanwhile, twenty percent of the world’s oil and gas supply is being held hostage by a regime, whose neck  we had on the rope. Makes some people wonder how far Trump was willing to go. But the question should not be how far? The question should be, does Trump possess the constitution, intestinal fortitude to go as far as it is needed?

This week, Iran fired missiles and drones at Kuwait, Bahrain and Iraq, striking American military positions and also civilian targets inside Kuwait. A drone hit Kuwait's international airport. Inflicting heavy damage and casualties. Our Arab partners and the Israelis are now left to absorb the blows of a war that we started and so far, have declined to finish. We did this. It's the worst of both worlds.

Then there's the situation in Lebanon. The president demanded Israel hold its fire. He talked Benjamin Netanyahu out of striking Beirut. And he claimed, that we would get peace with Hezbollah. He announced it to the world that he had secured another ceasefire. That all shooting will stop, he wrote on social media after claiming he got assurances in a phone call with Hezbollah. Within hours of him saying that, the rockets were flying again.

Why? Because Hezbollah never stopped firing, so Israel resumed firing. The president's word pledged on the world stage was overtaken by events before he could even retweeted on social media about it. This is where we are. It looks like a mistake that we ever went in. We have mistaken the appearance of peace for the substance of peace. A ceasefire is not a press release or a tweet, it is a condition on the ground. And the condition on the ground is that Iran has rearmed with help of China and Russia. The Strait of Hormuz is sealed up. Our allies are under fire. And the man who started this, the president of the United States, is now reduced to redefining the word “ceasefire.”

The strategic strategy writes itself. We took a winning position and now we're losing it by our own hand. If the president is neither going to act decisively, nor let Israel finish the job, and Israel is willing to finish the job, we should let them, otherwise, we'll have done something almost unheard of in the annals of American power. We've started a war against a belligerent adversary and what have we accomplished?

We've handed that adversary the prize of controlling a chokehold on the world's energy supply. Iran doesn't have to win, it only needs to survive long enough for the Trump administration to crumble under the weight of economic and political pressure, or for the Democrats to take the House of Congress in November, while it controls the Strait of Hormuz.

At the current pace, that's the outcome that we, not Iran, are arranging. If Trump is counting on economic pressure to collapse the regime, know this. A well-armed tyranny, ruling an unarmed population, is remarkably durable under economic pain. The Iranian regime can starve its people and shoot the ones who object. It's done so for decades. It'll absorb $200 a barrel and call it resistance against the “Great Satan” and the American left will cheer them on while salivating their expected victory in the midterms elections.

Ours is not a theocratic republic.

Ours is a republic built on the idea of the rule of the people, by the people,  and for the people. And so ours is a different sort of republic from Iran’s. And it answers to voters and democratic processes we call elections, not rigged shams of ones like they have in Iran, but actual ones. And the voters of this country elected a president on the promise to crush the inflation Joe Biden left behind, and instead they've watched costs climb under tariffs, trade wars, and now an actual war that has skyrocketed energy prices with no end in sight.

The Iranian regime can outlast economic misery. Your supporters Mr. President, the ones who trusted you, elected you, and brought you to power, they cannot wait it out. They can’t afford it. As it stands today, you, and our party, are poised to lose and lose big, in November, to a highly motivated Democrat electorate unified under one message, “affordability.”

The honorable path and the way out of this, is finish what we started or just get out of the way, and let Israel do it. Reopen Hormuz by force if Iran's not willing to do it by agreement. Stop calling a war a ceasefire, and stop dignifying a rout as diplomacy. We were winning this war against Iran and then we chose to lose it. The verdict come November, is going to be brutal and merciless.

We did have Iran beaten and we talked ourselves out of the win. We led a regime that shoots its own citizens, lecture us on what a ceasefire means, while we nodded along. That's not victory. That's defeat. And it is not a defeat that Iran handed us. It is a defeat we ourselves handed ourselves  as it stands today. I’m beginning to wonder if the President even knows who he’s dealing with?

The Iranian regime was  fundamentally established on the idea that [it], must wipe out Israel to bring about the apocalypse, and you cannot rationally negotiate with a country whose founding idea, is to bring about the end of the world, so that the 12th and last Mahdi, returns and Islam reigns supreme. That is the founding principle of Iran. The president was absolutely right. They should not get nuclear weapons.

And to stop them, we need their nuclear materials, which they're not going to give to us.

The president is looking like a fool who doesn’t seem to understand that he’s negotiating not with rational Western secularists, like he’s used to, but with irrational Islamic theocratic personalities, who believe that it is God's mandate for them to start a nuclear war to wipe out Israel. In the words of the former Ayatollah, Israel is a one bomb nation. That's all they need. And now we've given up?

It was a strategic blunder on the president's part to give them the ceasefire when he had them on the run. And now to allow them to rebuild, regroup, rearm, resupply, that's just incompetence by the president on this. There’s no sugar coating it.

You cannot let go of a tiger when you're holding it by its tail. If you have not de-clawed it, de-fanged it or killed it, and we have done none of those things, we've allowed its claws to grow longer and its fangs to get sharper. If we let go, American citizens, not just soldiers, will die, and a lot of other people will die as well, because the president of the United States started a fight that he appears not to be willing to conclude in our favor.

Our president took a successful military campaign and turned it into an American military defeat, because he's allowed the enemy to come out on the other side, controlling the choke point for 20% of the world energy, something they did not have before the war started, and he needs to fix this.

I would like to think there's some grand plan at work here. That maybe, we're plotting something in the background. I know that some people say, “trust the president, trust the president.” Maybe. But what I do know is this. We must finish what we started and destroy the Iranian regime whatever it takes or we will reap the consequences of this colossal blunder.