Victor Davis Hanson said he was exasperated by the reaction to the Iran war from Democratic leaders in Congress, the liberal media and some voices on the right, arguing that many of them wanted the operation to go badly because it would reflect poorly on President Donald Trump and his administration.
In a lightly edited transcript of an edition of Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words, Hanson said critics who declared the war lost, said it had gone south or warned that it could spiral into World War III were not making historical or empirical judgments. He said the real measure was what had happened in the first five weeks, when the United States, working with the Israeli Air Force, had wiped out most of the top echelon of the four ruling cliques in Iran: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regular army, the theocratic apparatus at the top and the elected politicians.
The transcript was recorded before Friday’s announcement that the Strait of Hormuz is open, which gives his remarks a narrower time frame than they might otherwise appear to have. But within that window, Hanson’s point was blunt: the fighting was being judged in Washington less by battlefield results than by politics, with Democrats seeing a chance to build momentum heading into the midterms if the war faltered and some disaffected former supporters hoping events would prove they had been right about Trump all along.
Hanson said the argument should be measured against history, not reflex. He said critics ought to have compared the conflict with World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the bombing campaigns in Serbia and Libya, the first Gulf War, the second Gulf War and Afghanistan. By his telling, the evidence so far showed all four Iranian ruling cliques had been attrited and that the people left in charge were either unknown to others or terrified of being identified and killed.
That is the contradiction at the center of the debate: while opponents on both left and right were warning of disaster, Hanson said Iranian leaders were the ones grasping for power in the dark, unsure who still held authority. His answer to the question his critics were asking was no less political than their own. On the record he gave, the war had not collapsed. It had badly damaged the machinery of power in Tehran.