By Conrad Black
President Trump must raise his game. He was probably robbed in the 2020 election but that is now academic. The Save America Act should pass as 80 percent of Americans approve of photo identification and the requirement of American citizenship to vote.
Yet the president needs a drastic change of course. Instead of pretending the Iran War is a side-show on the way to victory, he should remember how popular low-casualty successful wars can be. Feature, say, the conflicts against Mexico and the American Indians, as well as the Spanish-American War.
The Democrats have effectively endorsed Iran, are proclaiming an American defeat, and are trying to justify President Obama’s contemptible ten-year green light to Iranian nuclear weapons. Their party is splitting with the steady penetration of Marxist anti-American Jew-baiters playing footsie with those who already hate America. Mr. Trump has probably picked up ten House seats with interim redistricting and has hundreds of millions of dollars more than the Democrats to spend in the race to the mid-term elections.
Mr. Trump’s popularity is now unacceptably low because of confusion over Iran. It resembles, in a couple of important respects, the Vietnam War: There is a credibility gap about the administration’s endless assertions that the enemy has been practically defeated even as its resistance and insolent provocations continue. Iran has suffered the most severe defeat in a short period from adversaries who have suffered minimal casualties in the conflict in the modern history of war.
Yet because the president has never explained thoroughly to Americans the purpose and nature and gravity and progress of the war, and the ayatollahs have sold the fraud that their survival is victory, it appears, like Vietnam, to be unwinnable and costly, though not in American lives. The oscillation between claims of imminent victory and an absolute bone-crushing onslaught on Iran has confused and disquieted the country.
It is time for the president to lead in Iran in public as he has as commander-in-chief. There can be no reliable peace in the world as long as the present government of that oil-exporting country of nearly 100 million people is in the hands of pseudo-religious lunatics who are prepared to massacre scores of thousands of their own population for holding legitimate grievances, who aspire to intimidate and dominate the entire Middle East, who wish to hold much of the world to ransom over the shipment of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, who are the world’s principal state-sponsor of terrorism, have sworn to exterminate the people and state of Israel, and are unshakably determined to become a nuclear military power.
To someone of Mr. Trump’s forensic talents, few things could be easier than selling the country the need to win a war against such an adversary, especially when he can promise minimal casualties and no boots on the ground. Nothing could be simpler than explaining why this is not a war like Vietnam, or the disasters in Afghanistan or the second visit to Iraq.
It has become a tedious cliché amongst Mr. Trump’s critics that this is “a very unpopular war.” It would swiftly become popular if the commander-in-chief just made the case for it clearly. America has already reimposed a complete air, land, and sea blockade of Iran that will strangle the regime within a few months. And it could isolate successive regions of Iran as arms are helicoptered into centers of dissent in successive regions and foment an insurrection. The end of this appalling tumor on the world would be greeted with almost universal pleasure and relief.
And instead of fretting about the midterm elections, the White House can reflect that successful wars are always popular. The fiasco of the Memorandum of Understanding can be successfully, and probably truthfully represented as a pause to demonstrate the impossibility of dealing with this criminally diseased tyranny. The Middle East that would emerge from the defeat of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its replacement by an unexceptionable government, would be practically free of terrorism, and it would be possible to rebuild Gaza as a modern Mediterranean community as Mr. Trump has envisioned, which could form part of the Palestinian state, and it would be possible to stabilize Lebanon and Syria and Iraq either as pluralistic confederations or with some consensual redrawing of borders. Whatever happened in the midterm elections, this would be a crowning triumph of Mr. Trump’s presidency.
With the prestige of victory in the Middle East, it would be much more possible to pass the Save America Act. It is time to let 2020 go. The popular vote between 2016 and 2020 rose by an unprecedented 21 million as a result of a great many initiatives undertaken supposedly to assist voters in casting their ballots during the Covid pandemic, involving millions of unscrutinized mail-in votes cast anonymously, in an election which could have flipped with 50,000 switched votes. In the 2024 election the number of votes cast declined by over 4 million which is also unprecedented and gives some indication of the numbers of illicit votes cast in 2020.President Biden served the term, it was a disaster, and the Democrats paid for it in the collapse of their status as a viable alternative government. This has made them vulnerable to the penetration of the extreme Marxist like Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and it has reduced their ability to capitalize on the temporary unpopularity of the president.
It is time for the president to turn the page, finish the ayatollahs as he has threatened to do, and sail through the Indian summer of his presidency and into history as a distinguished and successful occupant of his great office.
First published in the New York Sun
