As long as mullahs rule Iran, no peace possible |
Six weeks ago, I praised Donald Trump for taking action against Iran. I even suggested that Trump's willingness to use American power against our enemies was one of his few redeeming virtues.
In private conversations and emails, however, I attached a caveat that I probably should have expressed publicly in that column — so long as Trump, being Trump, didn't muck it up.
With the success of the initial attacks, including the elimination of much of the loathsome Iranian leadership and the destruction of much of their military capabilities, that caveat fell into the background, only to slowly rise to the forefront in the days since.
As many noted, Trump hasn't exactly been clear as to what our goals were in the campaign; let alone how we would achieve them so that we could recognize victory when we saw it.
Regime change was cited. Also, the destruction of Iran's nuclear program. Preventing Iran from spreading terrorism throughout the Middle East through proxies as well.
All laudable, although also intertwined, since the only way to forever stop the Iranian nuclear program and their support for terrorists is to end the regime forever.
Implicit in Trump's approach, as always, has been a simplistic transactional element — that everyone has a price and that everyone will therefore make a deal. The problem is that ideologues don't make deals, or at least not any they intend to honor over time. To the contrary, the theocratic nature of the Iranian regime is its only rationale for existence. And that theocratic foundation (a perverse form of Islam) is necessarily revolutionary and imperial.
The purpose of the Iranian regime is to spread radical Islam, and that spread requires unrelenting struggle against the primary barriers to that expansion, the United States and its junior partner, Israel.
Indeed, Trump's failure to predict the Iranian response to our attacks — more precisely, the mistaken assumption that they would immediately surrender, unconditionally — almost certainly flows from how a man with no ideology misunderstands those driven purely by it.
One could, of course, argue that the survival of Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution requires the survival of the regime above all else, a consideration which has often led revolutionaries to make short-term compromises in the past (as Lenin famously put it, "one step forward, two steps back"). But in the case of the mullahs, one encounters a perhaps troubling distinction between political and theocratic ideologies—the communist revolutionary believes heaven on Earth is possible and dearly wants to live long enough to see it, whereas purveyors of radical Islam take solace in the idea of heaven after life and going to see Allah sooner rather than later.
This has always been the crucial difference in arguments regarding Iran and nuclear weapons — that, unlike the thoroughly secular revolutionaries in the Soviet Union, deterrence just might not hold when it comes to the non-secular fanatics in Tehran. It has never been clear that the mullahs wouldn't invite their own incineration if it were possible to take Israel and a considerable chunk of the American population with it, courtesy of a few long-range ballistic missiles topped with nuclear warheads.
Thus, however battered our campaign has left Iran, if the regime remains in power, its nuclear program and sponsorship of terrorism will continue, only now emboldened by de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz (and thus global oil prices). This will not have been a victory of any kind for us, but an improbable one for them.
The Iranians will restock their missile arsenal with help from Russia and China and, more importantly, be able to count on the reluctance of future American leaders to ever again use military force against them.
When Iran violates the agreement that ends the current hostilities (and provides Trump with the off-ramp that he now seems to eagerly want), as it surely will, and once again closes the strait at its convenience, no future American president will respond, and the Iranians will do those and other noxious things armed with that reassuring knowledge.
The Democratic Party's hatred for Israel will prevent any future Democratic president from taking action against the country that is Israel's greatest foe and the primary backer of the Palestinians/Hamas; in this sense, the Democrats will become, if not already, functionally pro-Iran.
After witnessing the stock market drop, gas prices soar, and the MAGA base splinter over Iran, no Republican president, certainly not a reflexive isolationist like JD Vance, would embark upon a repeat of what we are now experiencing either.
In short, the the mullah's refusal to surrender and the failure of our attacks to spur an internal rebellion now leaves us with two dismal options: Invade Iran to topple the regime (yes, ground troops, in large numbers), or leave the regime in place to become vastly stronger and more dangerous in coming years.
Correction: As a couple of folks knowledgeable about such matters pointed out, last week's column on classic rock mistakenly claimed that Harry Nilsson wrote the song "Without You," when it was actually written by Pete Ham and Tom Evans of Badfinger.
Which made my mistake two-fold — misattribution, and leaving Badfinger ("Baby Blue," "No Matter What," etc.) off my "underrated" list.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.