War is all about breaking the enemy’s will to fight. Clearly, we haven’t yet done that in Iran.
The regime continues to thump its chest in public, threatening its neighbors, threatening us, and claiming to have won the war. That is not the behavior of an enemy on its knees.
The regime’s latest peace “proposal” is no more than a rehash of the irredentist talking points it has been trotting out regularly for decades. The Iranians claim sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. They assert their “right” to enrich uranium (and to exclude it from the negotiations). They refuse limits on their ballistic missiles and drones and are not prepared to abandon arming proxies such as Hamas and Hezb’allah.
That’s no peace proposal. It’s a defiant declaration of war.
But even dictators reach a breaking point, when they throw in the towel, commit suicide, or sue for peace.
Iran’s revolutionary leadership is no exception. In June 1988, Ayatollah Khomeini “drank the chalice of poison” and ended the eight-year war with Iraq. Why? Many commentators believe that it was because the United States sank one third of their navy in a single day that April (Operation Praying Mantis).
That certainly played a role. But the determining factor was Saddam’s ruthless use of chemical weapons.
It began with the devastating chemical weapons attack on the Iraqi Kurdish city of Halabja on March 17–18, 1988, to punish the city for having temporarily fallen into Iranian hands. The Iranians sent a Revolutionary Guards video crew to film the aftermath, and those images lived on to haunt not just the Iraqi Kurdish survivors, but Iranian television viewers and regime leaders.
It continued with the final assault on Fao later that spring, when Lieutenant General Maher Rashid loaded the 200 tanks of an entire armored division onto West German transporters and shifted them from al Amarah, where the Iranians were expecting an attack, to the Fao Peninsula, some 170 miles to the south, all in a single night.
I was reporting regularly on the war at the time and will never forget the harrowing eyewitness accounts of terrified Iranian troops who fled from the lurid clouds of poison gas the Iraqis dispersed on the battlefield. They were literally frightened out of their wits. And Iranian television played those interviews abundantly — no doubt to buttress the political decision the ayatollah was about to announce that he was ending the war.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that the United States should use chemical weapons, or nuclear weapons, or any other weapon of mass destruction in Iran. But I do think we need to strike terror in the hearts of Iran’s rulers, and that starts by striking terror in the hearts of IRGC troops.
We must make them understand that there is no way they can survive the continuation of the war. Right now, they are pinching themselves. Hey, Trump, that’s the best you can do?
The president was briefed by CENTCOM commander Admiral Bradley Cooper at the White House on Thursday on his military options. As we learned during the takedown of Maduro in Venezuela in January, the U.S. has developed weapons whose existence has not yet been revealed. Then, it was what the president calls the “discombobulator.” Who knows what else they might have in store?
Donald Trump has weaponized uncertainty, blowing hot and cold on negotiations, praising the “new” regime” for presenting “new” proposals, all while our military deploys new capabilities in the region.
Will the blockade continue, or will we return to war? It will depend on the Iranian regime. Do these people actually want to make a deal, which means meeting Trump’s terms?
I think they have no intention of actually negotiating but are just buying time. Meanwhile, they are running out of oil storage capacity and have stopped making payroll to the troops, the bassijis, the schoolteachers and oil workers.
I do not expect the regime to implode from within. Not yet, at least. It will continue to fight — and fight its own people — until we make them stop.
We must break the regime’s will. And we are nowhere near that point yet.
