America’s awesome might is blinding enough. Hegseth doesn’t need to blow out his predecessor’s candles so that his might shine brighter.
So far, America and its allies are routing their Islamic Republic foes.
Anyone who avails themselves of the briefings provided this week by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, would conclude as much. With the dispassion and skill of an emergency room surgeon, the general itemized the destruction U.S. and Israeli forces are dealing out to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and security services from the air, and he previewed what’s to come.
Iran’s capacity to launch drones and ballistic missiles has been decimated — those launches are down 86 percent and 73 percent, respectively, from the outset of hostilities. The Iranian navy is now, in large measure, serving a new role as fodder for artificial reefs. The Islamic Republic’s command-and-control and leadership hierarchy have been killed or driven into hiding. With air superiority over Eastern Iran established, U.S. and Israeli forces are shifting from stand-off, long-range weapons to the deployment of its nigh bottomless supply of precision-guided gravity munitions against Iranian targets. And all while sustaining relatively modest casualties given the scale of this operation — a result of both the U.S. military’s unmatched technological and logistical capabilities as well as the professionalism of its men and women in uniform.
Americans who are understandably trepidatious about this, the largest sustained U.S. combat operation in the Middle East since the Iraq War, might be reassured by Caine’s infectious self-confidence. His assuredness is, after all, a reflection of the impressive capabilities U.S. and Israeli forces are deploying in the theater. So why, then, does Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth sound so unsteady?
“To the media outlets and political left screaming ‘endless wars,’ stop,” Hegseth scolded reporters during Tuesday’s briefing. “This is not Iraq.” That’s correct. If anything, those who are betting that Iran will dissolve into Iraq-style chaos after the fall of the regime will have to contend with the fact that Iran doesn’t have another Iran right next door to it — a rogue, suicidally delusional terrorist outfit institutionally committed to drawing American blood. Hegseth’s admonition is justified, but he seems to be trying to persuade himself.
“He called the last 20 years of nation-building wars dumb, and he’s right,” Hegseth said of Trump. Perhaps the representatives of an administration beholden to the MAGA movement’s origin myth — forged as it was in opposition to the Iraq War and “nation building” — feel they must gratuitously slight its Republican predecessors. But Hegseth’s effort to conduct a census of angels dancing on the head of a pin sounds to the unconverted like incoherence.
“This is not a so-called regime-change war, but the regime sure did change, and the world is better off for it,” Hegseth declared. Huh? Presumably, the secretary is suggesting that the decapitation strikes on Iran’s leadership effected a “change” in its structure, which is true. But only insofar as changing one’s clothes amounts to a profound revision of the status quo.
The regime retains the character it had going into this war. Indeed, what remains of the clerisy is defiant in its intention to preserve continuity. And Hegseth’s declaration that there will be “no nation-building quagmire” and “no democracy building exercise” is, like boots on the ground, not something he is in a position to rule out.
The point of these mini-mission statements seems less an exercise in clarifying U.S. policy than in needling the administration’s predecessors. In the second of this week’s briefings, Hegseth returned to this comfort zone. “Thus far, Operation Epic Fury has delivered twice the air power of shock and awe of Iraq in 2003,” he informed the nation, “minus Paul Bremer and the nation building.”
Hegseth is not alone in displaying a crippling insecurity over the prospect that someone, somewhere, will compare this war to topple a Middle Eastern regime with the last war to topple a Middle Eastern regime. But if the administration succeeds in its unstated but unavoidable goal of neutralizing the Iranian nuclear, missile, and terrorism threat through regime change, standing up Iran’s enervated civil society in short order will become a project of paramount importance to both the region and the West. That doesn’t mean the U.S. will be solely responsible for that effort, but nor will it be divorced from it.
Hegseth’s primary objective in these briefings seems to be to project maximum albeit superficial bravado, but that objective is undermined by the defensive crouch he assumes while fending off the accusations that are flying about only in his own head.
Buck up, Pete! America is on the offensive, and it’s winning. There is no alternative sequence of events in which the U.S. and Israel can finally take the war Iran has waged against the West for a half-century to the heart of the Iranian war machine without all the antecedents that contributed to this moment — including the ouster of Saddam Hussein and the terror state his gangsters oversaw.
America’s awesome might is blinding enough. Hegseth doesn’t need to blow out his predecessor’s candles so that his might shine brighter. Oddly, he doesn’t seem to see it that way.