Daniel McCarthy
President Trump is giving peace a chance in the Persian Gulf, and for Iran’s leadership this is literally a matter of life or death. If Iran had continued to fight, one of two things would have happened. Either the war would have resumed its original tempo, leading to the extinction of another generation of Iranian leaders and the loss of yet more of the nation’s military capabilities, only for Tehran to strike a deal much like this one after realizing the futility of its efforts; or the war would have escalated, as the US employed greater force, potentially including ground troops, to force open the Strait of Hormuz.
The latter scenario would have been costly to America, and the world, but it would have been fatal to Tehran. President Trump preferred from the outset not to conduct the Iran War like George W. Bush’s Iraq War. He could have chosen to do so. Iran’s leaders, having already seen what had happened to their immediate predecessors, did not want to lose their own lives along with their regime.
Israel has much at stake in Trump’s success. Iran’s leaders have even more at stake
This of course is not how America’s cartoon pundits of cable news or glossy magazines see things. They were convinced that Iran was winning the war and, in so many words, that Iran was right – so why should Iran’s leaders stop? The real villains were Donald Trump and the Israelis. They started the war, and if Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon was their reason for doing so, they, and not the Iranians, deserved the blame for Iran’s nuclear program as well. Trump had withdrawn the U.S. from the JCPOA – the Obama-negotiated Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – that was meant to have put Iran’s nuclear ambitions on hold, in exchange for sanctions relief and other benefits. Iran was an innocent victim of the modern humanitarian left’s real enemies, Trump and Israel.
