The national press and its friends in the academic-Democratic Party complex have been relentlessly selling the fiction that America (and the Little Satan, Israel) have been “losing” the war in Iran. In this fantasy version of events, Iran has been winning the war that Donald Trump “started”.
The notion that Donald Trump started the war is almost certainly attributable to willful blindness. Iran effectively declared war on the US and the West back in 1979 when the Ayatollah Kohomeini overthrew the Shaw. Since then it has spread terror around the world, attacked western institutions, tried to assassinate Western politicians, successfully attacked others (like Salmon Rushdie) and launched several wars against Israel using its proxies. Each and every one of these occasions would justly serve as a casus belli.
Ironically, all this comes amid the charge that Donald Trump is a liar. Which of course, he is. But that doesn’t mean that the naysayers are telling the truth. If they are not guilty of willful blindness, then they too are liars. And that’s being charitable.
The old saw is that truth is the first casualty of war. (That’s if you believe there is such a thing as truth to begin with). If Iran is winning, it has an awfully strange definition of winning. After all, it is acting like Bagdad Bob.
Most of its senior military officers have been killed by the combined efforts of the US and Israel, not to mention its Supreme Leader, who was dispatched on the first day of the war. In fact, it is rare for a day to go by without a report of yet another leader perishing in an allied attack. And the current Supreme Leader, who is the son of the last one and mostly just a figurehead, hasn’t been spotted for a month. In addition, the Arab countries that Iran was counting on to lend it support are now threatening to enter the war on America’s side. And Iran’s allies, namely Russia and China, have barely moved a finger to help Iran out.
Yes, there is a political front as well as a military front to consider. But here too, Iran has been found wanting. All it has managed to do is anger pretty much everyone by effectively shutting down the Strait of Hormuz. Not only do the Gulf states use the Strait to ship out most of their oil, China relies on imports for about 75% of its oil.
Apparently Iran calculated that they could beat Trump on the political front. But the only allies they appear to have are the people (in the West) who are reflexively opposed to anything that Trump does. That includes virtually all registered Democrats, the media and academia. It is true enough that Trump’s popularity has sunk to the mid 30s according to recent polling data, and that the Democrats will almost certainly win the House and possibly the Senate in the midterms. If so, that would represent the time honored tradition of throw-the-bums-out. And so what? That prospect says little about the war.
Do the Democrats really want to run in 2028 with a Presidential candidate who resisted doing something about the Iranian threat while the regime lacked nuclear firepower? If so, it will represent the greatest political miscalculation since the same crowd nominated George McGovern. And we know how that turned out.
JFB
