Conrad Black - Trump’s Path to Victory in Iran Is Simple, Short, and Relatively Bloodless

 Incredibly, the surviving claimants to leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran have drunk so much of their own bathwater that they think they have survived the enemy onslaught, and they think that survival is victory. 

Not so surprisingly, the anti-Trump forces in America and elsewhere have eagerly subscribed to this fraud. 

The Iran War is the most one-sided victory between serious combatants in modern history. The fall of France in 1940 was the Russian defense of Leningrad or Stalingrad compared to the overwhelming defeat of Iran’s military and warmaking capacity. It is a doubly spectacular triumph for America and Israel because they have done terrible damage to Iran as a military power, including the outright burial of its nuclear program, in 20,000 airstrikes causing only a claimed 3,500 Iranian dead. 

One death on every seventh airstrike is so gentle an imposition on the civil population that the Iranian propagandists and hemophiliac bleeding hearts that take them seriously are unable even to mount the usual claims of “genocide.”

The Islamic Republic has not survived; it is doomed. 

At time of writing, the charade of negotiations is over, and President Trump has correctly refused to extend the cease-fire. The path to American victory is simple, short, and relatively bloodless. The United States must destroy by air the oil storage and shipping facilities on Kharg Island, to force the Iranians to shut down their own oil wells for lack of anywhere to send the oil. And they must seize or destroy the reserves that Iran built up in a number of loaded tankers on the high seas or in third party ports, to complete the elimination of Iran’s oil revenue.

America should also deploy the relatively minor additional naval and air forces necessary to clear the way before and defend convoys of approximately 30 tankers at the time, three of which could be conducted out of the Persian Gulf every day, and stabilize the world oil supply. Marines would have to be placed on each tanker to strengthen defenses and Iranian attack points on shore would have to be strenuously assaulted by air. 

Unless the Russians and the Communist Chinese, neither of which is awash with cash right now, would choose to transfer $500 million a day to the Islamic Republic, in bullion or comparatively hard currency, Iran will be completely bankrupt in less than a month, with stratospheric inflation and unable to pay any of the thugs that prop up the regime and terrorize the public.

If in that time, the Iranians should become so desperate as to try to return to active warfare despite the almost complete destruction of their military capacity, it would be perfectly in order for the United States and Israel to complete the destruction of their initial target list. 

And if Iran is still purporting to resist militarily, then the long announced “bridge and powerplant day” (of the destruction of those targets), would be at hand. There is no exit for the Islamic Republic and there will be no deliverance for the Trump-haters who clung to that bandwagon even as the wheels came off it in all four directions.

It is always difficult to tell when Mr. Trump is deliberately confusing his enemies by giving different versions of events on succeeding days, and when he has himself misread events. When he was speaking last week of possibly going personally to Pakistan to sign a peace agreement, it was hard to believe that he did not have some level of optimism that the surviving fragments of the official Iranian leadership had come to their senses, and wished to end the war, and had prevailed in the bomb shelters where what passes for the Iranian leadership now meets. 

This is excusable; there is always a possibility, even at Tehran, that the most sensible voices will be heeded. But this possibility has now perished.

No one can claim that Mr. Trump has not tried to give peace a chance, both before the outbreak of this conflict on February 28 and throughout its duration. His critics who shout “TACO” (that he is chickening out), whenever he suggests negotiation, will be silenced. It is now relatively easy to end this war, completely defeat the evil regime at Tehran, win the war on terror, end any serious question of the legitimacy of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, and pursue a policy of peaceful reconstruction in the Middle East. 

Mr. Trump knows better than anyone how close he is to this goal and he knows that achievement of it is the key to his being an indisputably successful and important president. He will not drop the ball now.

The bipartisan fear of Mr. Trump’s destruction of the Washington backscratching and log-rolling society’s long drift to the left, with all its apparatus of politicizing the justice system and the intelligence services, has fueled and inflamed Trump-hate.

 Yet in doing so it has pushed Trump’s enemies into espousal of hopeless causes: an open border, rampant crime, the green terror, appeasement of America’s enemies, insane gender policies and a recrudescent Marxism that the American public cannot possibly accept. 

Mr. Trump is racking up a tremendous series of victories that it may be impossible for his enemies to run against in 2028, when he will retire and Trump-hate will no longer be electorally relevant.

https://www.newenglishreview.org/trumps-path-to-victory-in-iran-is-simple-short-and-relatively-bloodless/