Truth is stranger than fiction — like a cease-fire in which no one ceases firing. The reality is a stark choice: Defeat an implacable American enemy or take a bad deal.
What’s next, a clip from Bananas?
Actually, truth being stranger than fiction, I don’t think President Trump needs to keep reposting lefty catnip video — this time of Jed Bartlett, the Dem idée fixe of Clinton without sex scandals, blathering about “proportional” military strikes with the late John Amos (as “Admiral Percy Fitzwallace”). The top New York Times story this morning (like every morning, it seems) is about how all the brutal fighting is the most daunting challenge yet to . . . yes . . . the cease-fire.
As we’ve observed many times over the years, proportionality (like discrimination) is a law of war term that has been distorted beyond recognition in media commentary, usually by progressives who are upset that, in our power-structure dystopia, Israel and the United States have military forces that can crush terror cells and the militias of rogue regimes. The idea is that, when they strike against us, we are supposed to respond, if at all, with roughly equal force — no more than necessary to keep the score relatively even.
In reality, proportionality has nothing to do with reactive responses, much less tit-for-tat retaliation. Rather, it is an assessment of the force that is reasonably necessary to accomplish a legitimate military objective. “Proportional” doesn’t mean that if the Iranians down a U.S. Apache helicopter, we limit ourselves to downing an Iranian helicopter (if they had one we could down), or even limit ourselves to eliminating the facility from which they launched the attack on our aircraft. It means, instead, that if the president, for example, decided his objective was to break the Iranians’ will to close the Strait of Hormuz, our armed forces would try to figure out what targets would have to be hit to do that and the quantum or force (personnel, armaments, and time) that would be necessary to accomplish that mission. A major premise is that, while collateral damage is inevitable in warfare, keeping the use of force proportional to whatever the legitimate objectives are — not to whatever the enemy has just done — will minimize civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure (though reducing them to zero is highly unlikely).
It is maddening to find the American commander in chief feeding into nonsense narratives — though less regrettable, to be sure, than the emboldening effect his barely concealed desperation for a deal has had on the Death to America jihadist regime. According to the latest reporting, Iran has responded to several rounds of U.S. retaliatory strikes (mainly in the area around the strait) with drone and missile strikes on U.S. regional allies. The deal that Trump keeps saying is just a day or two away is nowhere.
Having now contended umpteen times that the president does not grasp the sharia-supremacist, apocalyptic Islam of the Iranian regime, it’s impossible to do anything but sigh at today’s Truth Social message: “They’ve taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!” (My emphasis.)
What I’ve highlighted illustrates the enduring problem, which is not unique to Trump (though his what’s-on-his-mind-is-on-his-tongue style makes it easier to spot): His make-up allows him to think of this stalemate of his own making only in terms of what Donald Trump thinks would be great for the Iranians. The Iranians have their own view of what would be great for their revolutionary jihadist regime, founded on an understanding of the world that the president either can’t understand or doesn’t think it’s important to try to understand.
Bottom line: The president is not going to be able to change the reality of the war by his erratic, often fictional commentary about it.
Trump chose to start a military conflict without public support or congressional authorization, and in so doing portrayed the initiative as “regime change” and the eradication of Persian civilization, inducing a regime that doesn’t need much inducement to believe the war was existential and therefore to rapidly escalate to its aces in the hole — closing the strait, attacking American allies — that Trump had been warned about but dismissed because his gut told him the regime would surrender after a few days of decapitation strikes and aerial bludgeoning.
That Iran didn’t surrender hardly meant the war was unwinnable, but it is not winnable at the price Trump is willing to pay because he has other political priorities that would be disserved by adding troops, casualties, and additional months of fighting to what is already a deeply unpopular war — one Americans see as unnecessary because he never tried to persuade them that it was necessary; he thought he’d be in and out, just like Venezuela.
On this record, he can’t pull off what he’s trying to pull off: claim the war ended because he called a cease-fire with the fighting still ongoing (i.e., at a point that made no strategic sense but was, instead, an attempt to stave off a congressional war powers resolution). In this fiction, we’re to see the war the president started as having ended over two months ago; ergo, if Iran is now conducting attacks, that should be seen as unprovoked aggression to which we must respond — proportionally, of course — in “self-defense.”
Down here on Planet Earth, the war, once started, has never stopped, and Trump has insisted on objectives — surrender of nuclear material and objectives, reopening of the strait (that was open until Trump decided to attack), and no more support for Hezbollah and other proxies — that the regime will never agree to. Hence, however serious or unserious the president may have been about his regime change and Armageddon rhetoric at the beginning, he now has to defeat the regime. Either that or cut a bad deal, that’s the choice.
As this is written, the Consumer Price Index report was released, showing inflation rose to 4.2 percent in May, year-over-year. Inflation soared higher under Biden, but the media played defense, portraying it as unavoidable pandemic fallout. There was never a clear line drawn from the gargantuan fiscal stimulus Biden recklessly dropped on a recovering economy and price spikes, not the way a straight line is being drawn in press coverage between from the Iran War to inflation, gas prices, and grocery prices. And early voting in the midterms starts in about a hundred days.
So, I think we’re going to get a bad deal.