“Finish the job!” This is the advice given by those who want US bombing of Iran to be resumed until it achieves its goal. It comes from Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu, Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, prominent American commentators Mark Levin and Victor Davis Hanson, and leaders of the National Rising and People’s Mujahedin Iranian opposition groups in exile.
The problem is that it isn’t clear what the job that is to be finished consists of? Some of those in the finish-the job camp take it to mean regime change in Tehran without having any particular alternative in mind.
They believe that once the Khomeinist system is toppled, any form of government in Tehran would be tolerable just as in Syria what mattered was to get rid of the Assad regime and not the nature of its successor.
Others want a particular group to be installed in Tehran with a benevolent attitude towards Israel as a key condition. The two exile opposition groups mentioned above cast themselves as legitimate successors to the present leadership in Tehran.
US President Donald Trump started the war by implicitly promoting the goal of regime change but in its Venezuelan version, that is to say, replacing the top echelon of the Khomeinist system with a lower echelon amenable to working with the United States.
On several occasions Trump even asserted that he has already achieved that goal and was working with a “new regime” in Tehran.
But once it became clear that the imaginary “new regime” was the old big bad wolf, Trump declared the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz as the key goal of the war.
Yet, the strait remained closed because those who had shut it in the first place were killed by the Israelis, and the midgets who replaced them in the Tehran chain of command lacked the authority and courage go even suggest re-opening it.
It is now clear that Iran lacks the power to protect itself against airstrikes while the US-Israel tandem lack the will to achieve the famous three Cs of any war: Conquer, cleanse and control-something that requires boots on the ground, many boots.
Latest leaks from US intelligence sources show that the sensational numbers bandied by War Secretary Pete Hegseth were whimsical to say the least. He had said that US and Israeli bombings had destroyed 75 percent of Iran’s military capabilities without specifying 75 percent of how much.
Hegseth also claimed that the US-Israel alliance had attacked over 15,000 targets without saying how many were destroyed and how badly, and more importantly how significant those destroyed were in military terms.
Initially, Hegseth reported that Iran had 1,500 ballistic missiles, a figure based on no evidence and that the stockpile would be exhausted in a few weeks. Now, US services say they actually don’t have verifiable numbers and that Iran seems to have resumed producing more missiles and drones.
The number of Iran’s missile launching pads was put at 33 with 30 of them claimed to have been destroyed. Now we are told that 30 of them remain active.
To be sure the new leaked numbers may be as fantasy-based as the ones before; coming from sources that war waging a war within this war to destroy the Trump presidency.
In this war within the war, Trump’s many political foes inside the US, in Europe and elsewhere, try to force him into another bout of bombing that would prolong the global economic crisis without forcing Tehran to surrender because there is no one on the ground to surrender to.
And if Trump doesn’t walk into that trap, they hope to portray him as the loser he accuses everyone else to be.
However, and I may be wrong, I think Trump - whatever you think of the method in his madness or the madness of his method - is smart enough a cookie to know a bad deal when he smells one.
Taking stock of what has happened so far, he surely knows that the Khomeinist regime has been militarily, economically and politically crippled. It may plod along on crutches for a while but is in no position to resume its marathon of mischief any time soon.
In the first act of this war drama we were shown a gun.
In the second act that gun did what guns do.
In the third act we could witness the collapse of those hit by that gun.
In that third and decisive act the Iranian people including some in and around the crippled regime must write the denouement.
In the third act the crippled regime will face a long hot summer of discontent with hyper-inflation, mass unemployment, lengthy blackout, power shortages and inability to print money to buy silence. The mass risings that marked last winter’s political scene would resume with greater vigor. In fact, I think that had the war not happened today we would have been closer to meaningful change in Tehran than ever.
Trump now says his priority is a nuclear deal under which Tehran accepts to abandon uranium enrichment for between 15 and 30 years.
He also wants the famous 440 kilograms of enriched uranium, another number plucked from thin air, handed over presumably to US.
Tehran says it won’t agree to anything longer than five years but is prepared to dilute half of the 440 kilos and transfer the other half presumably to Russia.
The fight over the number of years Iran should freeze its nuclear project is surrealistic. Does Trump really think the Islamic Republic will survive for another 15 or 30 years to honor such a deal?
And does the crippled regime in Tehran think that Trump and Netanyahu will be there for another five years to honor their part of the bargain?
Trump says he doesn’t want China’s help.
Yet one could, as Beijing seems to suggest, pluck a compromise number from thin air, say seven years, and have a few barrels of enriched uranium handed over in front of American TV cameras as happened in Ukraine, Argentina and Kazakhstan decades ago, to allow all sides to declare victory and move to something tangible here and now that is to say the end of the twin blockades in the Strait of Hormuz.
The fight over ultimately meaningless numbers is no justification for prolonging a war that started with no clear objective. If there is no stomach for “finishing the job,” the least bad option is to end the war.
