A MAGA Split Over Iran? What MAGA Split?
Transparency shouldn't be controversial.
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.
There’s a lot of talk about a Make America Great split among Trump supporters, and this originated here in context with the Iranian war. I’m speaking on a Monday, the 10th day of the war. And there’s talk in the air that the MAGA base may desert Donald Trump because, after all, MAGA’s credo was no optional wars in the Middle East.
That came out of a disgust with the 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan and the skedaddle from Kabul that left billions of dollars of weapons, and, of course, the 8,000-plus dead and more casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan war. But this is different.
This war is only conducted by air, and there’s certain characteristics of it that we haven’t seen before. It’s a top-down war.
We are targeting the leaders, not the military rank and file. We have been taking out, along with the Israelis, 50, 60, a hundred scientists, generals, mullahs, political leaders to decapitate, not try to organically destroy the entire Iranian military.
Second, they were all part of negotiations. We were negotiating with Iran and gave them a lot of options. Just don’t fund your terrorist proxies. Don’t create a bomb, knock it off. And they didn’t want to do it. It’s just like the prior Iran strike last year where we gave them another option.
It’s very different. You can’t really change a regime, we’re told, if you don’t have ground troops. But maybe there’s something different about the modern age with the sophisticated satellite imagery and reconnaissance, that you know where individual people are by their GPS footprint, by their cell phone communications.
And then you couple that with these highly sophisticated missiles and drones where you can actually take something through a window and dispatch somebody at a meeting. We’ve never quite seen that before.
So you don’t really need a sniper to take out a toxic Hitlerian type of leader.
The other thing is that Donald Trump pretty much knows there’s three alternatives that we’ve talked about before. And none of them really require ground troops.
The most desirable obviously would be to get an interim government, maybe former dissidents, get expatriates back, depose the mullahs so that there are—or people in the army, depose them, and then you have elections. That would be wonderful, with the problem solved.
Or you could find somebody within the apparatus, the theocracy that was a dissident and felt that he had military backing, and he would, you know, pick the Venezuela solution. Sort of what we see in Venezuela. We’re not going to nation-build.
The worst scenario is not all that bad. We say stew in your own juice. You know, we mow the lawn and we can do it anytime we want.
We can come back in and destroy your new navy, your new missiles as long as we have a president, post-Trump, who’s willing to do that and ensure that they don’t become nuclear again, or they don’t build another missile fleet. And that’s reflected, getting back to my …
Transparency shouldn't be controversial.
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.
There’s a lot of talk about a Make America Great split among Trump supporters, and this originated here in context with the Iranian war. I’m speaking on a Monday, the 10th day of the war. And there’s talk in the air that the MAGA base may desert Donald Trump because, after all, MAGA’s credo was no optional wars in the Middle East.
That came out of a disgust with the 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan and the skedaddle from Kabul that left billions of dollars of weapons, and, of course, the 8,000-plus dead and more casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan war. But this is different.
This war is only conducted by air, and there’s certain characteristics of it that we haven’t seen before. It’s a top-down war.
We are targeting the leaders, not the military rank and file. We have been taking out, along with the Israelis, 50, 60, a hundred scientists, generals, mullahs, political leaders to decapitate, not try to organically destroy the entire Iranian military.
Second, they were all part of negotiations. We were negotiating with Iran and gave them a lot of options. Just don’t fund your terrorist proxies. Don’t create a bomb, knock it off. And they didn’t want to do it. It’s just like the prior Iran strike last year where we gave them another option.
It’s very different. You can’t really change a regime, we’re told, if you don’t have ground troops. But maybe there’s something different about the modern age with the sophisticated satellite imagery and reconnaissance, that you know where individual people are by their GPS footprint, by their cell phone communications.
And then you couple that with these highly sophisticated missiles and drones where you can actually take something through a window and dispatch somebody at a meeting. We’ve never quite seen that before.
So you don’t really need a sniper to take out a toxic Hitlerian type of leader.
The other thing is that Donald Trump pretty much knows there’s three alternatives that we’ve talked about before. And none of them really require ground troops.
The most desirable obviously would be to get an interim government, maybe former dissidents, get expatriates back, depose the mullahs so that there are—or people in the army, depose them, and then you have elections. That would be wonderful, with the problem solved.
Or you could find somebody within the apparatus, the theocracy that was a dissident and felt that he had military backing, and he would, you know, pick the Venezuela solution. Sort of what we see in Venezuela. We’re not going to nation-build.
The worst scenario is not all that bad. We say stew in your own juice. You know, we mow the lawn and we can do it anytime we want.
We can come back in and destroy your new navy, your new missiles as long as we have a president, post-Trump, who’s willing to do that and ensure that they don’t become nuclear again, or they don’t build another missile fleet. And that’s reflected, getting back to my …
A MAGA Split Over Iran? What MAGA Split?
Transparency shouldn't be controversial.
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.
There’s a lot of talk about a Make America Great split among Trump supporters, and this originated here in context with the Iranian war. I’m speaking on a Monday, the 10th day of the war. And there’s talk in the air that the MAGA base may desert Donald Trump because, after all, MAGA’s credo was no optional wars in the Middle East.
That came out of a disgust with the 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan and the skedaddle from Kabul that left billions of dollars of weapons, and, of course, the 8,000-plus dead and more casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan war. But this is different.
This war is only conducted by air, and there’s certain characteristics of it that we haven’t seen before. It’s a top-down war.
We are targeting the leaders, not the military rank and file. We have been taking out, along with the Israelis, 50, 60, a hundred scientists, generals, mullahs, political leaders to decapitate, not try to organically destroy the entire Iranian military.
Second, they were all part of negotiations. We were negotiating with Iran and gave them a lot of options. Just don’t fund your terrorist proxies. Don’t create a bomb, knock it off. And they didn’t want to do it. It’s just like the prior Iran strike last year where we gave them another option.
It’s very different. You can’t really change a regime, we’re told, if you don’t have ground troops. But maybe there’s something different about the modern age with the sophisticated satellite imagery and reconnaissance, that you know where individual people are by their GPS footprint, by their cell phone communications.
And then you couple that with these highly sophisticated missiles and drones where you can actually take something through a window and dispatch somebody at a meeting. We’ve never quite seen that before.
So you don’t really need a sniper to take out a toxic Hitlerian type of leader.
The other thing is that Donald Trump pretty much knows there’s three alternatives that we’ve talked about before. And none of them really require ground troops.
The most desirable obviously would be to get an interim government, maybe former dissidents, get expatriates back, depose the mullahs so that there are—or people in the army, depose them, and then you have elections. That would be wonderful, with the problem solved.
Or you could find somebody within the apparatus, the theocracy that was a dissident and felt that he had military backing, and he would, you know, pick the Venezuela solution. Sort of what we see in Venezuela. We’re not going to nation-build.
The worst scenario is not all that bad. We say stew in your own juice. You know, we mow the lawn and we can do it anytime we want.
We can come back in and destroy your new navy, your new missiles as long as we have a president, post-Trump, who’s willing to do that and ensure that they don’t become nuclear again, or they don’t build another missile fleet. And that’s reflected, getting back to my …
