In the famous Hollywood movie Trump vs Iran, the two sides are not struggling over the same prize. In a Joe Scarborough interview, David Ignatius demonstrates he gets it:
[President Trump’s] only real option becomes negotiating a way out. And the Iranians see that — that he needs an exit more than they do. For Iran, you don’t have to win this war, you just have to survive. And that’s what they’re doing. That’s why they have the leverage right now.
It’s an important point, perhaps the most important point to realize before Trump entered into this war. Given the perceived military advantages, he needed to have a quick, painless regime change in order to be the victorious leader; they only needed to survive, a principle laid down long ago by General Sun Tzu in The Art of War.
His failure to attain regime change has left him, despite copious bombast, looking like a loser, an amateur-hour loser. No glory, no victory, just a bum who should never have been elected. In his cancellation of the JCPOA, aka the Iran nuclear deal of the Obama era, his defeat really approaches ‘utter,’ doesn’t it? Only in the American Civil War have we seen such arrant incompetence.
In Roman times, failed generals often didn’t have to be executed, they died on the battlefield, sometimes purposefully.
In any case, I like the brevity of Mr Ignatius summary.
