Victor Davis Hanson: Iran Deal Can Work If We Hit Them Every Time They Break It

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Welcome to The Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take.
On June 26th, summer belongs to the super.

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Your powers are going to start kicking in right about now.

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This does not look like this is going to end well for you guys. You always have it, I knew it.

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Supergirl arrives.

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What's superman like?

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He sees the good in everyone, and I see the truth.

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We haven't been formally introduced.

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DC Supergirl, only in theaters June 26th. Get tickets now.

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Rated PG-13 may be inappropriate for children under 13

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**Victor Davis Hanson** (1:49)
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There's a lot of confusion, controversy and disagreement about the latest phase of the so-called Iran War. Remember, we bombed kinetically 38 to 40 days, then we had 60 days of negotiation, and here we are in mid-June, in which Stonefront was announced yet another time there was going to be a peace deal coming with a 60-day period for all the elements of the deal to be enacted. A lot of people are upset, they feel that Iran was on the ropes, they're going broke, and that had we continued, or if we were to continue now, we could put them out of commission and then dictate a non-conditional surrender to them. That's absolutely true, but what this deal then hinges on, because there's no history of Iran ever keeping their word or following any agreement, explicit or implicit, is the willingness to keep maybe one carrier group in the region to ensure that the Strait stays open, that the missiles are not launched against our allies, and of course, the enriched uranium is turned over. And if we're willing to do that and hit them hard every time they break it, then it might eventually work.
There's a lot of misconceptions, though, about the deal and the war in general. I'd like to address just a few of them. A lot of the critics of this administration are saying, I think Heikem Jeffries said that not long ago, well, the Strait was open and now it's closed. So the deal didn't accomplish anything. In fact, it made it worse. Well, the Strait was open because Iran had no reason as it did now to close it. And the reason they didn't have any reason to close it was the seven prior presidents, Carter, Reagan, George HW. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden didn't want to disarm Iran. They didn't want to go in there and try to stop their proliferation agenda. Donald Trump did. Anybody who did was going to be confronted with a desperate effort of Iran to close the Strait. Now, we'll open the Strait, but the idea that we made things worse is ridiculous. And then second, people are saying, well, it's just like the Obama deal. Why did Trump get out of the Obama deal? Well, they enriched uranium all through the Obama deal. We know that. They wouldn't let inspectors in. During Joe Biden's presidency, he begged them to go back into the Iran deal. They didn't want to do it. Why? Because they, we now know, they had pretty much already enriched to the point, 60 or more percent, that they could make a bomb in a month should they want to. But here's the big difference. In the Obama atmosphere of that deal of 2015-16, Iran was ascendant. Everybody was scared of it. Its military was heavily equipped with Chinese and Russian weaponry. People were afraid of it. Israel didn't want to attack it. The Gulf States didn't want to attack it. Europe was advising caution. It was an appeasing deal because nobody wanted to use force. Now, whatever your disagreement is with the current war, most people, and we don't have boots on the ground, we don't have journalists on the ground, but they agree that the Iranian military and its economy are devastated through 40 days of intense bombing with probably 1,000 planes in the air at any one time. So we're dealing with a much diminished Iran that we can hit again and again because they have no air defenses. Obama was dealing with an ascendant Iran that he was scared to even mention the use of force to make them comply.