Trump simply doesn't know how to win in Iran |
Trump simply doesn’t know how to win in Iran
The day the ceasefire began in Iran is the day President Trump’s war strategy began to fall apart.
U.S. and Israeli forces were crushing Iran’s military and were poised to begin systematically targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij, Iran’s street-level domestic security force and regime enforcers.
Then came Trump’s order to stand down. Operation Epic Fury came to a crashing halt, and the White House and the Persian Gulf have been mired ever since in a ceasefire that is on a road to nowhere.
Iran needed the breather. As Gen. Dan Caine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed reporters on April 8, U.S. forces had destroyed “80 percent of Iran’s air defense systems” and more than 150 Iranian ships “are at the bottom of the ocean.”
He also assessed that the U.S. had destroyed “95 percent” of Iran’s naval mines. Equally notable, Caine said, “We’ve devastated Iran’s command and control and logistical networks, destroying more than 2,000 command and control nodes and degrading their ability to target U.S. and friendly forces.”
Tehran was reeling. Yet, as we have witnessed, Trump’s premature ceasefire gave Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi and his fellow hardliners time to regroup.
Consequently, over the last ten days, Iran was able to fire 20 ballistic missiles at Israel, strike the U.S. base at Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, down a U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopter in the Strait of Hormuz, and on Wednesday, launch 21 ballistic missiles at U.S. forces stationed in Kuwait, Bahrain and........