Finish the Job, Mr. President (Part 2)

At the end of May, I penned an article here pleading with President Trump to finish the job in Iran. I argued that the ayatollahs cannot be dealt with in good faith, and that their entire raison d’etre is to eliminate non-Muslims in their drive for world domination. We can trust deals with them no better than Jews can trust deals with the Nazi high command.

It’s now mid-July, and after almost two more months of talks, negotiations, frameworks, memorandums, etc., nobody can say President Trump didn’t put forth every effort to give peace a chance. He tried hard, too hard in my opinion. I commend Trump for making the effort, but he wants peace and they want war. It is literally as simple as that. In the process, we gave away too much for too little to a group of sociopaths whose strategy is, clearly, to keep backpedaling and to drag this out to the point of not giving away anything at all.

Conservative defenders of the MOU argue that this is the least-worst deal we could have gotten. If only. Because the “peace agreement” looks a lot like the “ceasefire” that preceded it, i.e. Iran and its terrorist proxies continue to attack our allies, close the Strait of Hormuz, and renege on promises made less than a day prior.

The MOU isn’t dead. It can’t be dead because it was never alive. Rest assured, unless the course of events drastically changes, we will never see an American nuclear inspector step foot on Iranian soil.

Based on news reports from the past week, it appears that President Trump has come to the exact same conclusion. After the umpteenth Iranian breach of the ceasefire-that-never-was, President Trump declared the MOU “over” and the ayatollahs “scum” and “evil people.” Talks are continuing, but simply to stand on ceremony. President Trump knows they’re a dead end.

He gave Iran until this past Saturday to publicly renounce its claim to the Strait of Hormuz or else face military retaliation. Saturday came with no such renunciation. Rather, Iran increased attacks on civilian shipping. And to erase any ambiguity, the Iranian government also vowed to assassinate Trump. As of this writing, we’ve been running limited bombing campaigns on them for the last few nights.

That’s a good start.

We need a resumption (and the carrying through to completion) of the war to topple the Iranian government. Because that’s the only way out of this 47-year-old mess. This past spring, we decimated Iran's first-tier leadership, its second-tier leadership, and most of its military capability. And yet, throughout negotiations, they behave as if we haven’t hit them with so much as a spitball. Either they will learn to play by our rules, or we will learn to play by theirs.

There isn’t a choice for us. The Iranian government cannot continue to exist.

The danger, of course, lies in the resumption of our approach to Iraq and the no-fly zones in the 1990s, where the United States was left as the sole defender of a clumsily forged armistice, the enemy continued to increasingly harass us over the years with zero regard for any retaliatory strike we'd inflict, and the American people eventually tired of us being the world’s lone policemen yet again. There was no war, but there also was no peace. There was just an untenable situation that ended with the United States making a decision that was delayed by over a decade due to political paralysis.

But with Iran, the die is cast, and there is no going back now. Rightly or wrongly, Trump’s legacy will be written largely by how he handles the Iran problem. And here are the steps forward, based on my extremely limited information:

President Trump needs to make a forceful case to the American people that their short-term pain at the pump is worth the long-term benefit that a dismantled Iranian regime would bring. The fact that Trump has to shape his foreign policy around domestic public opinion on gas prices is a damning indictment of the short-sighted selfishness of us as a nation. We just spent early July celebrating the founding of our nation by men who risked and sacrificed everything for us. If a temporary price increase of a single commodity is enough to force us to retreat in the face of an existential enemy, maybe we don’t deserve our cultural inheritance.

Recommended: Mr. Obama, Are the Slaveowners in the Room With Us Right Now?

To the ayatollahs, the war is about ushering in their twisted apocalypse. To the Iranian people, the war is about their lives and their futures. To an unfortunately large number of American voters, the war disturbs their conviction that the purpose of the United States government is to make their personal lives as comfortable as possible every second of every day. But to the rest of the world, the war is about the resolve of Donald J. Trump and, to a lesser extent, his MAGA base. Friend and foe alike, everyone is watching. And they’re taking notes. And they will adjust accordingly.

President Trump, I again implore you: Be transformative. Be generational. Be the Lincoln or the Churchill who still commands reverence for generations hence. We can have permanent peace in the region, or we can have the MOU. But we can’t have both. You are right about the Iranian leaders. They’re slithering, parasitic tapeworms trying to squirm their way out of reach to survive until January 2029. Don’t let them write your chapter in the history books for you.

Finish the job, Mr. President.

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