One has to wonder why President Trump is still negotiating with Iran. Mr. Trump has said that the cease-fire is over because Iran is still launching missiles and drones against our bases in Qatar, Bahrain, and Jordan and shooting at ships in the Strait of Hormuz. We have undertaken several nights of air raids against Iran, hitting dozens of military targets. But he has agreed with the Iranians that negotiations toward a peace deal will continue.
Why?
The regime in Tehran has threatened to assassinate Mr. Trump which is the rough equivalent of a declaration of war. Wars throughout history — including World War One — were started (or widened) by such assassinations.
Tear up the “Memorandum of Understanding” Mr. Trump and return us to what should have been our major objective at the beginning of the war: overthrowing the Tehran regime.
We cannot take those threats lightly as evidenced by the fact that the president returned from the recent NATO meeting not aboard the fancy new Air Force One that the Qataris gave him but an older aircraft which had better missile defenses aboard. Mr. Trump’s aircraft should never go anywhere without fighter escorts.
The Tehran regime is expert at stalling negotiations and then ignoring the result. They want to drag out negotiations as long as they can, then agree to some deal that they have no intention of abiding by. It’s what they do as the past 47 years have proved beyond doubt.
Many famous people are misquoted regularly. In the case of Albert Einstein, perhaps the most famous misquote that’s attributed to him is his definition of insanity.
Mr. Einstein purportedly said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” There’s no evidence that he actually said or wrote that, but it’s still called his theory of insanity.
So why is Mr. Trump living up to that definition? It is truly insane for the United States to do this.
Iranian officials have reportedly told the U.S. in private that the attacks on our bases and the ships in the Strait should be blamed on “hardliners in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)” according to CBS News.
The Iranians want us to think that they are divided among hardline factions and those who Mr. Trump said were more reasonable. And Mr. Trump is apparently falling for that line of nonsense.
The Iranians may well be divided but it is only between those who are total fanatics and those who may only partially be fanatical. It’s not up to us to discern the difference between fanatics, only to restore peace. And as this column has repeated ad nauseam, there can be no peace while the Tehran regime remains in power.
We may or may not be able to reopen the Strait of Hormuz but we can topple the regime with airpower as my friend, Lt. Gen. David Deptula (USAF, Ret.), wrote last month. But that would require Mr. Trump to realign his airstrikes with reality.
As Gen. Deptula wrote,
Sometimes those objectives require territorial control, regime removal, or long-term stabilization, in which case land forces may indeed be essential. But many successful campaigns seek something else entirely: to compel an adversary to stop an activity, to force a withdrawal, to halt atrocities, to abandon a course of action, to degrade a military program, to paralyze command structures, or to impose costs sufficient to change behavior. In such cases, coercion, denial, disruption, and punishment may be enough to achieve the desired end without conquest or occupation. In fact, “owning the ground” can also drive owning too many liabilities.
We don’t need to “own” Iran but we must defeat it.
And what should we do with New York Mayor Mamdani and his staff? One of them — or perhaps a team of them — were about to meet with the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations when Secretary of State Marco Rubio intervened to cancel the meeting. Remember the Logan Act, which precludes private citizens from interfering in foreign policy? It carries criminal penalties which should be enforced on Mamdani’s team.
As the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, the Trump administration is increasingly pessimistic that any peace deal with Iran can choke off its nuclear ambitions. As Mr. Trump told reporters on Wednesday, “They violate the agreement every day, they lie, they cheat, they kill people … They’ll never build a nuclear weapon under our deal, but I don’t know if we’re going to have a deal.” That is clearly contrary to Mr. Trump’s continuous assertions that Iran is desperate to make a deal. They obviously aren’t.
So what should we be doing? Instead of negotiating with Iran, Mr. Trump should cancel all talks — and we should be attacking Iran, re-imposing our blockade on Iran’s oil exports and the severest sanctions we can think of. We should bomb the rail line that resupplies Iran from Beijing. And we should not relent until the regime falls.
Tear up the “Memorandum of Understanding” Mr. Trump and return us to what should have been our major objective at the beginning of the war: overthrowing the Tehran regime.
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