President Trump’s strikes on Iran have been wildly successful. In just the first eight days, we managed to achieve complete air superiority over Iran and we are taking out their missile launchers one by one with help from the Israelis.
The stated goal of the operation, repeated frequently by the President, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is protecting us, our kids and grandkids from a nuclear Iran. But if we’ve learned anything about this President, it’s how deeply intertwined his domestic agenda is with his foreign policy. And that is true of the strikes in Iran as well.
Trump is restoring America as the world’s only superpower, kneecapping China with its aspirations to replace us.
On my show this week, “BATYA!” on NewsNation, I laid out the argument, and have the privilege of discussing the war in Iran with two veterans intimately aware of the cost of war, as well as with Retired Army Brigadier General Mark Kimmett.
I asked General Kimmett to analyze the difference between the Trump administration’s version of regime change and the Bush administration’s failed endeavors in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
He said there is a significant difference:
“I was part of that post-regime change military operation inside of Iraq. And there we took a fairly straightforward mission of what I would call regime decapitation with Saddam Hussein, and we turned it into a nation building exercise. We had Americans on the ground, State Department and civilians that were setting up stock exchanges that were advising them on monetary policy. We had gotten rid of the Iraqi military and tried to reconstitute it to look like us. Fundamentally, nation building became a mission creep inside of Iraq. What I’m hoping is that same nation building mission creep does not creep, so to speak, into the mission set for operations in Iran. In my mind, the best thing that could happen is regime decapitation and like in Syria and like in Venezuela. We work to have a government that can work with the United States to our benefit rather than try to completely reorder the Iranian society.”
Dan and Brandon gave me their analysis of the war, as well as their grade of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and how the Trump administration is restoring masculinity as a virtue to American society.
