Can We Win Iran War Militarily and Lose It Politically?

 Everyone has an opinion of what President Donald Trump should do in Iran – or what he should not have done. Everyone should understand the first important fact: Democrats and Leftists oppose everything that Donald Trump does, not because it is bad policy but because it is Trump doing it. Therefore, the opinions of Democrats and Leftists do not really count for anything.

In his article titled “Trump Has the Law and Military Strategy on His Side in US-Iran War” and published at The Daily Signal, Victor Davis Hanson gives his opinion on some of the issues of the war. 

Issue one: The Left believes that President Trump “does not have authorization from Congress” to go to war. However, that claim is not true.

… the 1973 War Powers Act says that a president must notify Congress of his intention. And [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio has done that. And then he has 60 to 90 days to conduct a war without notifying Congress. And we’re now in one month. 30 days.

Issue two: Barack Obama, a constitution lawyer, has criticized Trump’s attack on Iran. However, he must have conveniently forgotten bombing Libya in 2011.

Remember that the [Moammar] Gadhafi regime had given up all of its nuclear proliferation sites. We had Americans on the ground, stealthily, so that we were dismantling them.

I was there in Libya in 2007, and I saw the country, and it was under massive transformation as Libyans were starting to be accrued to the idea that their children, the next generation of dictators, were going to liberalize the country. And Libya was terrified of the United States after its threats to denuclearize countries that had started bomb programs. So, it had given up its elements of it.

But the point I’m making is Obama then went in, in 2011, when there was a civil war, along with some NATO countries. It was the idea of Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, all keen critics of the current war, who demanded that we bomb.

And we bombed not for 30 days, not for 60 days, not for 90 days. We bombed for seven months. And we didn’t have 10,000 sorties. We had 26,000 sorties, and no one said a word. No one said a word, because the media was left. And they supported whatever Obama did.

Same thing with the most disastrous misadventure we’ve had in recent military history in Afghanistan. When we left, skedaddled out of Afghanistan, we left contractors, loyal Afghans behind.

We took unaudited Afghans with us, with, you know, a bustle completely unaudited, and many of them have turned up to be criminals or dependent on welfare.

And then, in addition, we lost 13 Marines. We’ve lost that many in 30 days of war, but Joe Biden lost that in one day. And then we left, I don’t know how many, record estimates, statistics say $30 to $50 billion of military architecture and weapons. A billion-dollar embassy. $300 million refitted Air Force base at Bagram. No one said a word.

There was hardly any criticism. So, take that with a grain of salt. The war is legal, and the hysteria about it is media-driven, as a part of the Left’s ability to weaken the presidency.

Issue three: The reasons that President Trump went to war – the aims of the war.

… Donald Trump listed four or five aims. He did on March 1. He did on March 20. We know what they were. [No. 1], We wanted to end their nuclear program … Stop their ability to make a bomb. [Almost there.]

No. 2, we wanted to end their missile program, their ballistic missiles. And we’re making progress. And we wanted to stop the ability of them to recreate them. Their industry. Israel’s going after that.

And we can’t really stop the resupply, if the Russians are sending new missiles across the Caspian Sea, as some reports suggest, but we’re trying to do our best. So, the war is not lost at all. And the aims have been systematically achieved.

[No. 3] was stop the money going to Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas. And they are all desperate. That was very unpopular with the Iranian people to give precious billions of dollars, while they were near starvation, and arm Arab terrorists. They were not in favor of that.

[No. 4] was to stop the killing of Americans. Over the last 47 years, no terrorist entity or cadre has killed more Americans in barracks, embassies, during the Iraq and Afghan wars, with shaped charges, than Iran has. It tried to kill Donald Trump. It tried to kill John Bolton, had tried to kill Mike Pompeo, had tried to kill [former U.S. Special Representative for Iran] Brian Hook, tried to kill the Saudi ambassador. So, we’re gonna try to stop that.

[No. 5 was to protect the Gulf states. Iran attacked “Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabis, all of these countries that are the main exporters of oil and the competitors of Iran.” Also to stop Iran’s intimidation of the Gulf states.]

[No. 6] regime change was not explicitly listed. That would be the optimum result. You want the regime out. Because whatever damage you do, and it will [be] considerable, in three or four or five, 10 years, it will be resupplied by the Chinese and the Russians.

But that was not an explicit agenda item. Donald Trump said help is on the way. He mused about getting rid of these theocrats. We’ve decimated their military and theocratic chain of command. But we never explicitly said we’re going to Iran to get rid of the government….

Issue four: “The war is lost!”

… All we can do is compare history. And as I said earlier, if you look at the first Gulf War, 42 days of bombing and some four days of ground troops. And as far as the air power, we lost 63 aircraft. Sixty-three.

We’ve only lost one major plane. We lost 63 helicopters and aircraft and 20 airmen dead. And in the Serbian campaign, it went on for 72 days. We had all our NATO allies behind us. And Serbia was a paper tiger compared to Iran.

So, in comparison to these types of operations, it’s been very successful.

Hanson explained that there is a political side and a military side to every war, and they cannot be mixed. “Militarily, this is a clear victory, and it will have political dividends or ill effects depending in a cost-benefit analysis, what the American people adjudicate.”

In other words, when they look at this war and they say it was not an existential war immediately, but it was necessary to stop this Iranian threat, of 47 years. Was it conducted in a way that the pluses outweighed the minuses? And then they will make a political calculation.

If the war is still going on and they feel that it wasn’t, then they will pressure Donald Trump through their representatives and the media to stop it, even though militarily it’s successful. Militarily successful operations are not always politically successful. We’ve learned that in Vietnam, where we didn’t lose a single conventional battle. We didn’t lose a single conventional battle in Iraq or Afghanistan. And we lost the war politically. Politically.

We won amazing victories in 1952 and 1953 in Korea. And politically, it was a stalemate. So, let’s not confuse the two. You can have a militarily brilliant campaign, as we’re having, and you can lose this war politically.

We haven’t yet. But something to watch for.

Hanson knows history. He also knows that history can be repeated if something does not change. The Vietnam War was the war of my generation, and several friends fought in Vietnam. The Left, including the media, were not supportive. Jane Fonda went to Vietnam and did nothing for the prisoners of war. The prisoners never forgot what she did.

What I remember most is the daily reciting of the number of Americans killed in the war. Each day the media reported how many American military had died that day and then gave the total number: 2,500, 3,000, 30, 000, 45,000, etc. The number kept growing. The official total of U.S. military personnel who died in Vietnam is 58,220, but that number does not include those men who came home and killed themselves – such as one of my husband’s friends.

When the soldiers arrived in their first airport in the United States, they changed out of their uniforms into civilian clothing. Otherwise, people who were opposed to the war spit on them, threw things at them, called them murderers, and said and did other things to them. My friends said that it was terrible to come home to such treatment.

I also remember that the Vietnam War affected presidential politics. President Lyndon B. Johnson recognized that he would lose the election because of the politics of the war, so he did not run for reelection to his second full term in office.

Democrats and Leftists are determined to stop Donald Trump in any way that they can. This shows in how left-leaning media report on the Iran war. It also shows in how Democrats refuse to fund Homeland Security in a time of war. They act the same way that they did during the war in Vietnam. Hopefully, the Iran war will be won both militarily and politically.