Victor Davis Hanson: The US Needs to Hit Iran Harder to End the War

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to The Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take. On July 16th, the hawk lands on Netflix. From the mind of Will Ferrell, Oh mama, I'm back.
Comes a new original series. Get ready, get ready. That's it.

**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:19)
Did I stutter?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:21)
When an iconic pro golfer, Lonnie? Lonnie?

**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:23)
Hawkeye!

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Takes one last swing of greatness.

**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:26)
You were a big shot golfer. I still am a big shot golfer.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:29)
No one. Dad, I'm the hawk now. Will stand in his way. That's how it's done. The Hawke, only on Netflix July 16th.

**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:38)
We need to up the level of damage we do to Iran. And unfortunately, that might entail dual targeting, electrical plants, roads, bridges, and the actual barracks, camps, military facilities of all the various aspects of the Iranian military. And then once we feel that they are so attrited, they're not going to pose a serious threat to those who are keeping the Strait open, then we can go and remove most of our assets back home.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We're now in the 134th day of quote unquote the war with Iran. I'm speaking on July 12th.
But we gotta remember that we really only had March and April, we started on February 28th, about 38 days until we stopped fighting on April 8th. We're really talking about 90 plus days of negotiations and 38 days of actual fighting. That should tell us something about what the Iranian strategy is. They want to talk, talk, talk and they do not want to fight, fight, fight. We want to fight and get over and go home and they don't. Because of the length of the negotiation, vis-a-vis the kinetic part, they may be in an advantaged position. Part of the problem is that we have knocked out the four centers, at least three of the centers of the four of their government. The theocracy with the death of Komeni and the disabling of his son and killing of many of the others is sort of inert. We've taken out a lot of the heads of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. There's a lot of military planners that were central to Iran's military, industrial, nuclear complex that are gone. And we have a few elected leaders. And so that's who we're dealing with. But we're not sure if they are good cops and the rest of what's left are bad cops, or if anybody is any cop. So where do we go from here? What's happening right now is we have no war and no peace. That is about every day and a half or every other day what's left of the bad cops, that is the theocracy, the military and the Guard Corps freelance and they hit one of the Gulf States or a tanker. Notice they don't ever hit Israel. They don't ever hit Israel because Israel has announced that their response will be disproportionate and aimed at the surviving government. So they don't do that. We haven't said that.
But every other day they do that and now we're starting to respond disproportionately and that means for every 50 or so strikes we have 120 or 130 But that itself will go on and on and on. What we need to do is to find a way to do two things. One, stop their ability to make any strikes.
That can be accomplished various ways. We can either stop all of their supplies, and I mean all of them, that is we can take out their airlift capacity, their airport. We can take out all the rail lines over land to China. We can take out the Caspian Sea ports. We can not allow any seaborne traffic into Iran. And we can take out their electrical generation plan, short out the grid, take out more... We can stop their ability to make war rather than just hunt for an individual target, missile target or a launcher pad or something like that. And then we have to make the conditions for which we can go home. We did the hard work. They're no longer a threat. We've taken out their 47-year, half a trillion-dollar military investment. There's a lot of other vested interests would like the Gulf open, particularly the Gulf Council states, the Europeans, the Japanese, the Chinese, South Koreans. So we need to make Iran so weak if they do not want to negotiate, and we're not going to get into this tit for tat cycle, that these other countries will be able to keep the Strait of Hormuz open.