Victor Davis Hanson: Iran’s Problems Are Just Getting Started

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**Victor Davis Hanson** (1:33)
Well, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. The so-called Iranian memorandum of understanding involving a 60-day period of negotiations that may or may not lead to an armistice was published just recently and it's got a lot of storm of criticism. It's kind of ironic.
All last month and up until the memorandum was published, the left said that Donald Trump was a mormonger. Now they're calling him Neville Chamberlain and an abject appeaser. The right was some on the right were saying he was the bravest of the last eight presidents, the first to take seriously the Iranian threat. In a sense, he didn't just talk about it. He tried and did end it, I think. And now they are saying he was had, he's a fool. So what's going on with this memorandum of understanding? I think everybody is confusing, first of all, military victory versus strategic victory. In a tactical sense, we have had an overwhelmingly historic victory over the Iranian military. There are no air defenses. The airspace is anybody who wants it. The Iranians cannot stop the Americans, the Gulf States or Israel entering its airspace. It's new. Second, they don't really have a navy. They have some mosquito boats, but now we've learned they have very few of those left. We have been at riding them in the evening, and there's about 160 ships we sank. Their missiles have been 90% destroyed, but we don't know the denominator. We don't know how many there were, but even then we are still aware of where they're stored. If there is another war, we could pretty quickly dispense with them. I could go on, 80% of their leaders, 80 of their key leaders have been taken out, including the Supreme Leader.
That's a military victory, but that is different than a strategic victory. Strategic victory means an unconditional surrender, and you dictate terms unconditionally to the defeated. We did that in World War II. We did it in the Civil War. We sort of kind of maybe did it in World War I with the Versailles Treaty that followed the Armistice of 1918
We did it with Saddam Hussein, and we initially did it with the Taliban, but here's the catch. You usually need ground troops to enter the foreign country, and then you remove the regime that you were fighting and install a new one. We did that with the Confederacy we destroyed. We did that with Germany, Italy, and Japan. We did that with the Taliban. We did that with Saddam Hussein. But the key is you have to have ground troops. To do that, that required 7,000 American deaths, 53,000 wounded, $2 trillion, and a combined chronological frame of 30 years, 10 in Iraq and 20 in Afghanistan, and then the regimes we installed completely flipped or were replaced. The Taliban came back in power, and now there's a consensual government in Iraq, but it's heavily dominated by our enemy's radical Shia. Do we really want to do that in Iran? It's 93 million people. It's one and a half times the size of Texas. If you want to go in there and remove the regime, and then of course you can say you are not going to have missiles, you are not going to give subsidies to terrorists, you are not going to send agents throughout Europe and the United States.
But that would require a strategic victory. And right now the American people poll overwhelmingly. They do not want any more ground troops in the Middle East. They feel like Bismarck did about the Balkans when he said it's not worth the bones of one German grenadier, meaning the Middle East isn't worth that type of expense. So we're not a colonial power, and Iran is not a protectorate that we're going to micromanage. That said, our ability to go in any time and severely damage, it means that we can get the objectives that we talked about, specifically the Strait of Hormuz open and no more nuclear weapons. And that would be a fantastic achievement. And so far, we've tragically lost 13 soldiers. That's about the accident rate every two weeks in the military. So it hasn't cost a lot of blood and treasure yet.