Victor Davis Hanson: When Will the Iranian People Overthrow the Regime?

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Victor Davis Hanson (0:37)

We are six months out now from the beginning of the Iran War. We should remember that it's not like any war we've seen. There's two laws that we haven't seen before. Under no circumstances will there be American troops on the ground. We can't do enough damage that would impair the Iranians' ability to eat, sleep, get fuel, and exist. This leaves us with a new situation. In that void, finally, as happens in war, we have a new comprehensive strategy.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. We are six months out now from the beginning of the Iran war. That's what it is. It's not a formerly declared war. It's not even like any war we've seen in the past. It began on February 28th with a 38 to 39-day bombing that did enormous damage to Iran. And ever since then, it's sort of evened out to a tit for tat every couple of weeks, negotiations, a memorandum of understanding. But we should remember that it's not like any war we've seen. One of the reasons it isn't is we can get no reliable information. There are no embedded reporters because there are no American or Western troops on the ground. And the Ministry of Information in Iran is less reliable than Saddam Hussein's Baghdad Bab. And to the degree there are foreigners within Iran that are trapped, they don't risk their lives by trying to communicate with us. And Iranians themselves know if they call relatives in Europe or the United States and disclose information, they can be killed or executed. So we, there's a complete noose blackout in that vacuum.

Of course, it didn't stop the Washington Post, but especially the New York Times from telling the American people, we've essentially lost the war. We've even had illustrious people like Robert Kagan, as I've mentioned in the past, or John Meishamir from Harvard, saying that essentially the war is lost. I don't know how they can draw that conclusion when we don't have reliable information. We do have information that comes from Israel, who did a lot of damage to Iran and has photo reconnaissance and us, but of course they don't trust the Trump administration. The other thing to remember about this war is, there's two laws, cannons, protocols that we haven't seen before. The first, under no circumstances, will there be American troops on the ground. No American troops on the ground, given the misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. So we are not invading, we're not going to overthrow the government, we're not going to arm the resistance for good or evil. That's just not going to happen because it's politically impossible.

The other sideline or parameter that we cannot violate is or we have to respect, we can't do enough damage that would impair the Iranians' ability to eat, sleep, get fuel and exist. If this was a true enemy, as was Germany in World War II, as was Japan, as was North Korea or Vietnam, we would be taking out power plants as we did in Serbia with Bill Clinton, or we would be taking out dockworks like we did with Barack Obama in Libya or bridges, all of them as Bill Clinton did on the Danube.

But we're not doing that. And I guess the rationale is the Iranian people are now short food, they're short water, they're short fuel. And we count on them to rise up at some point in the fashion of Eastern Europeans or Russians during the period following the Cold War. So we do not want to do enough damage to Iran to hurt the viability of a successive free government and we don't want to put troops on. So that means that it has to be air power. There's another consideration. The countries that would benefit just as much or more than we do, Japan, South Korea, most of Europe, who import oil either from North Africa or from the Gulf States, or themselves are terrified of terrorism, specifically European countries who know that even Arab terrorists, who seem to be Sunni terrorists are indirectly subsidized by Iran. So they know that if this government falls, there will be no interference with the Strait of Hormuz. But more importantly, you can criticize anybody you want. If you criticize the Iranian government now, and you're a European country, or you take sanctions against them, they will retaliate by closing the Strait, and that's what they were afraid of. It's not quite true, as we were told by the left, that the Strait was always open until Trump got us in this war, and then they closed it. It was open conditional on the attitude of the particular country using it, using it.