The desperate fishtailing of the Iranian government factions is still being construed by President Trump’s opponents as a masterpiece of Iranian tactical and diplomatic maneuver while the great and boastful American monster lurches ineffectually about the stage. Blind and terminal hatred of Mr. Trump as a public
personality, in America and some other countries, has so far largely prevented recognition of the current Iran war as the overwhelming and seismic triumph of the United States and Israel that it is. It is the swiftest military defeat of a country since the German occupation of Denmark in less than six hours in 1940.
There have been few episodes in international relations more comical in recent years than Iran preening itself on having apparently struck the Achilles’ heel of the West in the Strait of Hormuz, and then accusing America of ”piracy” for blockading Iran. The last such absurd accusation that comes to mind was Hitler’s denunciation of Stalin as “a cold-hearted blackmailer” in 1945. He may have been, but it was hardly Hitler’s place to complain about it.
It is easy to forget the sequence: Iran relaunched its nuclear weapons program after the Americans had destroyed it with deep penetration bombs last summer. The United States and Israel resumed air war on Iran to destroy its military capacity completely. The Iranians attacked the unoffending Gulf oil-producing states and claimed to shut the Strait of Hormuz to create an oil crisis that would inconvenience the Americans and cause extreme economic damage to oil-importing countries. The Americans promised complete destruction of Iranian infrastructure if Iran did not end its purported closure of the Hormuz Strait. It was agreed that there would be high-level talks between Iran and America in Pakistan, a two-week cease-fire was agreed, and Iran promised to open the strait. The talks failed after one day, Iran’s claim to close the strait continued, as did the cease-fire, and the United States announced the blockade of Iranian ports ending Iranian oil exports. Iran announced the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, America announced the continuation of its blockade of Iran, and Iran announced the resumption of the closing of the Strait after one day.
America continues the blockade of Iran which costs that country over $400 million a day, and has warned that if there is any violation of the cease-fire by Iran, the United States and Israel will destroy Iran’s electricity supply, oil refining capacity, and all of its major bridges. This is generally known in American military circles as “bridge and powerplant day,” when all of those are destroyed and Iran involuntarily retreats into an atomized society with no electricity and little communication between its thousands of communities.
It is a little like what President Eisenhower described as “a Gilbert and Sullivan war” when Communist China’s premier, Chou En-lai, announced in 1958 that Beijing would bombard the tiny Free Chinese islands in the Formosa Strait, Quemoy and Matsu, every other day. America and Israel have destroyed 90 percent of Iran’s ability to fire conventional missiles against other countries and all of its naval vessels above approximately 40 feet in length and its entire air defenses, and have closed its airspace and its ports.
America has suffered eight combat fatalities plus a noncombat air crash in which five of their personnel died, and Israel has suffered 35 deaths from Iran missile attacks. Despite the almost complete destruction of their armed forces and heavy damage to their administrative and police apparatus and their defense related industries, Iran has lost a little over 3,000 people.
We are almost back to the age of chivalry where casualties were confined to military personnel and very few of those. The world’s principal terrorism-supporting state can no longer afford to support terrorism. Historians will consider it inconceivable that prevailing press coverage and widespread world opinion have largely endorsed the delusion that because the government of Iran still functions, erratically and in factions, it has won this war: the Islamic Republic’s mythology that if it survives at all, it wins.
This is a fallacy. It has lost and the regime can be eliminated entirely either by an indefinite air and maritime blockade or by the next phase of unanswerable aerial attacks: bridge and powerplant days. This war has been so one-sided, syncopated, and swift, and with minimal civilian casualties so that there is very little film footage to permit the usual claims of war crimes and genocide, that there is an unreality about it.
The war on terrorism has almost been won. The right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, albeit with continuing uncertainty about its exact borders, has been accepted by everyone except the decapitated and fragmented regime in Tehran, and the nuclear non-proliferation regime has miraculously revived. Iran cannot possibly continue to pretend to be fighting a war for more than a few more weeks. After that there will be the first serious opportunity for peaceful local self-government in the Middle East in all of its history going back to the Old Testament. The peculiar antagonism of some people to Mr. Trump is just a passing personality maladjustment. They will get over it, in
https://www.newenglishreview.org/hostility-to-trump-bars-global-recognition-of-israeli-american-military-defeat-of-iran/