Why Hegseth Is Certain to Be Trump's War's Biggest Casualty |
As he declared a “decisive military victory” over Iran on Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth repeated his favorite self-arousing monosyllable as he read a list of regime leaders.
“Dead…Dead…Dead…Dead…Dead,” Hegseth said, his Stars and Stripes pocket square making his death chant seem even less American.
He then said, “I skipped over a bunch and I could go on and on and on to include the new so-called new Supreme Leader, wounded and disfigured.”
But the new leader is 56-year-old Mojtaba Khamenei. He is the son of 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed at the start of the war and headed the death list Hegseth recited as proof of an historic triumph. What the Trump administration insists on calling regime change involves replacing the leader with someone 30 years younger who now has a personal vendetta.
A statement attributed to the successor son on Iranian state TV in early March hardly sounded less radical.
“I had the opportunity to visit [the former Supreme Leader’s] body after his martyrdom. What I saw was a mountain of strength, and I heard that his healthy hand was clenched in a fist.”
He added, “The lever of blocking the Strait of Hormuz must definitely continue to be used.”
And because Iran is an actual deep state, the list of other replacements no doubt also went on and on. Iran was thereby able to keep a hand on that lever of the Strait of Hormuz even as Trump set a deadline for 8 p.m. Tuesday to reopen the strait or “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.“
Trump made the threat on Truth Social and shocked even some of his reflexive supporters. Hegseth had been pledging unrelenting “death and destruction from above without mercy and no quarter,” but that had seemed just a toy........