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What Is the Remaining Obstacle in Iran?

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InternationalCommentary

What Is the Remaining Obstacle in Iran?

A man cleans a billboard featuring Iran's late supreme leaders, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (left) and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (center), next to newly elected Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei. (Tauseef MUSTAFA / AFP via Getty Images)

Victor Davis Hanson / @VDHanson

Victor Davis Hanson, a senior contributor for The Daily Signal, is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and host of "The Victor Davis Hanson Show." His website, The Blade of Perseus, features columns, lectures, and exclusive content for subscribers. Contact him at [email protected].

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson.

We’re concluding the third week of the Israeli-United States effort to emasculate Iran, and we’re, sort of, in a standoff period. I think people have compared Iran to the black knight in the old Monty Python movie. The more that he loses a leg and arm, the more he thinks that it’s just a scratch.

By all traditional methodology and criteria, Iran is now inert. This is what President Donald Trump keeps saying. The navy is nonexistent. There is no air force. There are no missile defenses that can interrupt allied planes going over the country. The army is useless because nobody is fighting on the ground.

We keep hearing that, and I think accurately, that missiles and drones have been attrited, either by bombing or by being intercepted or being expended, to about 10%.

So, what is the remaining obstacle? Target-wise, it’s just two or three. There seems to be caches or secret locations where you have three or four ballistic missiles or three or four drone sites with maybe 20 or 30 drones, and those are very hard to find.

So, you’re going to be able to stop almost all of the incoming, but not all of them. And because they’re aimed at residential areas. Remember, the United States and Israel are trying to hit military targets and command and control, and any civilian damage is collateral.

But in the case of Iran, it’s deliberately targeting hotels in Dubai or hotels and airports in Qatar or cluster bomb attacks on civilian high-rises in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. That’s what they want to do.

So, what’s going to happen? The thing to remember, I think, historically, is that tactical success is not necessarily equivalent to strategic victory or resolution.

By that, I mean, you can argue that when Napoleon invaded Russia, he won almost every battle and he captured Moscow. But he did not have a plan to force the czar out, Alexander. He had no plan to force him out. He had no ability to go beyond Moscow to get the fleeing imperial forces of Russia.

Same thing with the Germans. They won every battle up until they were within the first subway station of Moscow around Dec. 10, 1941. But they did not have a plan to, or they were not able to take Leningrad, St. Petersburg, take Moscow, and drive all of the Russians out of European and industrialized Russia. Or, barring that, to bomb the factories that were on the other side of the Ural Mountains.

They did not have a plan. So, they didn’t have a strategic victory. They had impressive tactical victories.

We had impressive tactical victories in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s hard to think we lost a single battle in Iraq, but we did not have a plan of strategic resolution.

So, where we are now in this war is Iran’s strategy is the following: that it can withstand repeated attacks on all of its military assets because it believes the United States cannot afford either politically, economically, socially, culturally to put ground troops after the fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq. So, it doesn’t have to worry about an invasion to displace the regime.

It also believes that the more that we hit any civilian targets out of frustration, the more it will hurt the Iranian people and the more the theocracy will say, “You may not like us, but the fact that you don’t have water or power or fuel is because they hate you and us.” And that’s another strategy they are taking.

In other words, they’re saying as long as we have oil, Kharg Island, and as long as we have these huge oil fields, when you get tired of pounding us into rubble, you’re going go back to the United States. Israel’s going to go back and be quiet, and we’re going to get all of our oil revenues and we’re going have them.

And we are going to buy from Russia, North Korea, and China missiles, drones, recreate our own drone industry, and we probably have enough fissile material that you didn’t get, and nobody could get. It’s hidden deep in the mountains, that we will make bombs. And this time we’re going to use them because we understand what you will do next time.

And more importantly, we are planning practically that Donald Trump is an aberration. The last seven presidents didn’t attack us, even though we blew up your American Embassy in Beirut, your barracks and Marines in Beirut, Khobar Towers, behind the USS Cole, behind the embassy destruction in Africa.

So, we believe that the norm is not Trump. He will be gone in two and a half years, and we will get either a left-wing Democrat or a neo-isolationist Republican or some Republican that’s feckless and not going to do anything. So, all we have to do is outlast Trump and have the oil, and we’ll come back.

His opposition said he had no point, no agenda, no purpose. He did. He said it on March 1 and March 20. He said he had a multifaceted agenda. No. 1, he wanted to destroy the ability to launch missiles. He’s pretty close to that. Not completely. But get rid of their missiles, not just the missiles that they launch, but the ability to make them.

No. 2, he said he wanted to destroy their air forces and air defenses so that they would have no air superiority, but the Americans and Israelis have the air supremacy.

When you reach air supremacy, you can use tactical aircraft. That would mean Warthogs at low level, Apaches. You can do anything you want if you have air supremacy. And we do now.

He wanted to destroy additionally the navy. He’s almost done that.

No. 4, he wanted to preclude the ability of Iran not just to launch ballistic missiles, but to make another bomb. He’s bombed all of the nuclear sites that he hit before. He’s bombed the fabrication plants. He’s killed more of the scientists. He’s even attacked a university research area.

So, pretty much, it’ll be very, very hard for them for eight, nine years unless they get a lot of Chinese help and North Korean help, and they come in en masse.

The fifth agenda is a little bit less clear because he never said my reason is to go in there and—he might’ve thought that, he might’ve implied it, but if you look at his written statement and what he said formally, regime change.

And yet we all know that the regime change, whether it be the Venezuela model or a true uprising of the dissatisfied Iranian public to take control of the government and have a constitutional system, whichever the replacement is, it’s preferable to the mullahs.

But we are not going to be able to shepherd that in because we’re not going to go in on the ground. All we can do is emasculate the theocracy and then hope that there’s a popular uprising.

And then we have to be very careful because if we’re going to drain the theocracy of their ability to recoup and have money, then you have to go into Kharg Island.

If you go into Kharg Island and grab the oil or attack the oil fields, then you’re hurting the people that supposedly you want to help to take over the government.

At some point, and I don’t know what it is, you don’t know what it is, I don’t think anybody knows where it is, Iran will have no more viable targets.

The United States will be looking at its arsenals and wanting to make sure that we have enough if China does go into Taiwan because it’s angry that we have begun in Venezuela, kicked it out of Venezuela, kicked it out of Iran, kicked it out of everywhere we could. We have to be very careful.

At some point, the Israelis, the Americans and the Iranians will think it’s not in their interest to continue, and we don’t know when that point is.

For us in the United States, it’s when the economy and the price of gas gets to such a level that it becomes almost impossible, given the hostile media and the propaganda that’s coming from the Left that this is a disaster, that Donald Trump cannot win the midterms. And therefore, the entire MAGA agenda will be inert in the next two and a half years.

If that starts to crystallize, then he will probably say we’ve done enough, and we now turn it over to the Iranian people. Then it’ll be a question, will the Iranians, when there’s not an active war going on and when there’s such damage to the theocracy, will they come out? Especially if we arm them, or we have people in there that can arm them. And will that regime fall in the next four or five months?

If it should do that, that will be to the credit of Donald Trump.

As far as the regime, again, it will do anything, lie, steal, murder, anything to stay in power because it knows it’s on the back of a lion or tiger. If it steps off, they’re all going to be jailed and probably executed for what they’ve done to the Iranian people.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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