Victor Davis Hanson: Trump Won the Battle, But Will He Take Iran?
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As before, I'll break out excerpts into "bite size posts" ...
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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.
We’re concluding the third week of the
Israeli-United States effort to emasculate Iran, and we’re, sort of, in a standoff period. I think people have compared Iran to the black knight in the old Monty Python movie. The more that he loses a leg and arm, the more he thinks that it’s just a scratch.
By all traditional methodology and criteria, Iran is now inert. This is what President Donald Trump keeps saying. The navy is nonexistent. There is no air force. There are no missile defenses that can interrupt allied planes going over the country. The army is useless because nobody is fighting on the ground.
We keep hearing that, and I think accurately, that missiles and drones have been attrited, either by bombing or by being intercepted or being expended, to about 10%.
So, what is the remaining obstacle? Target-wise, it’s just two or three. There seems to be caches or secret locations where you have three or four ballistic missiles or three or four drone sites with maybe 20 or 30 drones, and those are very hard to find.
So, you’re going to be able to stop almost all of the incoming, but not all of them. And because they’re aimed at residential areas. Remember, the United States and Israel are trying to
hit military targets and command and control, and any civilian damage is collateral.
But in the case of Iran, it’s deliberately targeting hotels in Dubai or hotels and airports in Qatar or cluster bomb attacks on civilian high-rises in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. That’s what they want to do.
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Three weeks into the conflict with Iran, what are the remaining obstacles? What is Iran's strategy? In part, waiting out Donald Trump.
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