The bold standard
To the editor:
The most important lesson the U.S. should have learned from the Vietnam debacle is “Know your enemy.” Both the Johnson and Nixon administrations vastly underestimated the will of the Vietnamese people to keep fighting; both presidents believed they could bomb the Vietnamese into submission. And now the Trump administration is making the same mistake.
Let’s be clear: Bibi Netanyahu goaded Trump into attacking Iran. Now he might not have required much persuasion given his need to justify the tearing up of the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, but clearly Trump didn’t think things through. He believed that once the Ayatollah and much of the Iranian leadership had been assassinated, the survivors, having tasted U.S. military might, would be falling over themselves to surrender. Perhaps the Iranian people would rise up, cast off the brutal theocracy, and consider the Americans as liberators.
When asked about his goals, Trump talked up regime change, confiscating Iran’s nuclear materials and ridding the world of a major sponsor of terrorism, but after 100 days of war it’s clear Trump is going to achieve nothing. When it looked like a deal to end the war was possible, Trump described the Iranians as “nice, reasonable people.” Now that the ceasefire is over, the Iranians are “scum” who want nothing more than to use a nuclear weapon against Americans.
Trump has essentially three options at this point. The first is to go all in: boots on the ground, Iraq II, march on Tehran, regime change, confiscate nuclear material. But this option is not palatable to the guy who aspires to the Nobel Peace Prize and promised MAGA world no new wars. Option two is to declare victory and walk away. Of course, this option will require a lot of lying and deflection, but Trump is good at that, and he has a TV network dedicated to backing whatever dubious narrative he pushes.
Option three is to keep doing what we’re doing; keep up the bombing, maybe not as intensely, and keep looking for a deal that will allow us to claim Iran has given up their nuclear weapons ambitions. JD and Trump can easily explain away the billions in financial incentives we’re offering the Iranians. Sooner or later the Iranians have got to come to the table and Trump, the master of the deal, can work his magic, yeah? Right now, the Iranians are calling Trump’s bluff, confident he’s never going all in.
The big winners here are the Israelis. Trump’s war has prevented the Iranians from helping Hezbollah in Lebanon where the Israelis are doing to that country what they did to Gaza. We assassinated the father of the current Ayatollah of Iran, yet we expect him to knuckle under to American military might. A quick study of the history of CIA meddling in Iranian internal affairs, including instigating a coup in 1953 that ousted a democratically elected prime minister and installed the brutal dictatorship of the Shah, might shed some light on why many in Iran have no love for the USA. Know your enemy.
Ray Clasen
North Fort Myers