One of the most astonishing manifestations of the chronic reluctance of Western media to grant President Donald Trump and his administration an impartial evaluation is occurring in the so-called Iran war. Trump came to office denouncing so-called “forever wars” and promising to avoid the deployment of American forces in substantial numbers in combat zones, “boots on the ground”. He had been severely critical of the Vietnam war in which the United States suffered nearly 60,000 combat deaths and 300,000 injuries, and its allies were ultimately defeated after US departure because the Democrats ended all assistance to South Vietnam, to assure defeat in the war into which they had led the nation. He had also been severely critical of George W Bush’s occupation of Iraq, which ultimately succeeded in perhaps the least desirable of all possible outcomes, the delivery of control of that country, apart from Kurdistan, to Iran. And he had criticised almost every aspect of the prolonged failure in Afghanistan and then-president Joe Biden’s shameful flight from that country abandoning America’s allies and at least a million Afghan citizens who had cooperated with the Western effort there. He correctly described this as the greatest military humiliation in American history. It was surely taken as a successful encouragement to the Russian government to conduct its completely illegal invasion of Ukraine.
Trump had also renounced the nuclear arrangement that the Obama administration, along with the permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany had signed with Iran, which effectively deferred the development of Iran’s nuclear military capability for 10 years from 2015 to 2025, and made it clear that the United States absolutely would not allow the Islamic Republic of Iran to become a nuclear power. No sane person who espouses the fundamental interests of Western civilisation can dispute that that was the correct position to adopt. The possibility of the quasi-suicidal sociopathic despotism in Tehran being in a position to threaten all of the Middle East and Western Europe with nuclear missiles does not bear thinking about.
As Israeli and United States intelligence deduced that Iran closely approached the point of being able to fit nuclear warheads on its intermediate range missiles, and as the long-suffering masses of Iran peacefully protested the hideous despotism that has had its foot on the windpipe of the Iranian people for nearly 50 years, and the regime imported Iraqi terror squads to massacre tens of thousands of Iranians since not even the Revolutionary Guard can be counted on to fire that much live ammunition at its own countrymen, President Trump deployed deep penetration bombs to remove the immediate threat. When Iran, with the complicity of China and North Korea, began immediately to try to reactivate its nuclear military programme, the Israelis and Americans engaged in extremely comprehensive and precisely targeted bombing that did terrible damage to Iran’s military capacity while only inflicting a claimed 3,300 civilian casualties, an astonishingly humane aerial campaign. Trump has single-handedly revived the concept of nuclear non-proliferation.
America’s nominal allies denied the United States the use of its own bases in their countries for aspects of the air war against Iran, and declined to make any significant contribution to a maritime force to assure the free flow of oil and other strategic exports through the Strait of Hormuz. With no useful allies except Israel and the United Arab Emirates and to some extent Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain, after completely eliminating the Iranian navy and air defences and laying that country stark naked to whatever pummelling he chose to inflict upon it, and after over $1 trillion (€870 billion) of damage to its military capacity, Trump has successfully devised a policy for squaring the circle of his promises. There will be no boots on the ground and this conflict will not go on indefinitely and the United States has only lost 18 servicemen (a bad weekend for shootings in Chicago), and oil and phosphates are departing the Persian Gulf at about half their normal volume, while Iran is being economically strangled by an almost watertight sea, land, and air blockade.
Iran has absolutely no way to lift or penetrate this blockade and is reduced to futile lashing out at Saudi pipelines and trying to disturb the odd tanker as it goes through the Strait and unleashing the Houthis on the entry to the Red Sea. A moron can see that these are desperation tactics: The Houthis have no ability to shut that strait and oil could in any case be delivered to the Atlantic coast of Europe. Iran is going to go completely bankrupt and inoperative within a few months. It is already dealing with chronic unemployment, widespread cash shortages and official inflation approaching 90 per cent.
Yet the Western media, which is under no illusions about the evil of the Tehran regime, is so distressed at the ability of the United States to do what it wants, whatever any other country in the world thinks about it, that it has effectively signed on to the Tehran claim that as long as the regime is in place it has won, never mind that its grandees are fleeing the country and Iraqi terror squads are necessary to prevent the violent overthrow of the regime, and a regression to the Stone Age impends. The ayatollahs are cooked and the world should be rejoicing. Instead, like the 19th-century Habsburgs, Europe will astound the world by its ingratitude.
