Trump’s deal a lot better than Obama’s

www.americanthinker.com

You can tell how successful Mr. Trump’s war and subsequent peace with Iran has gone, by how desperately Barack Obama is spinning his failure from a decade ago. Obama allowed Iran to build a massive uranium enrichment program (uranium weapons are much easier to make than plutonium) over 10–15 years, after which they would be free to build any weapons they liked. Missile programs and terror proxies were not limited in any way and in return, the UN lifted sanctions and Iran got billions of dollars.

Still, the ink was hardly dry before the Iranians began massive cheating, even under these liberal concessions.

It would be interesting to hear from the Supreme Leader of Iran at the time, to compare the two deals. Oh, wait. Trump killed him, along with all his top leadership and destroyed much of the cohesion left in Tehran.

In truth, Iran is very much weaker militarily than just a while ago. It is unlikely their regular military or IRGC can now even stand up in a ground fight. Our Navy and Air Force go wherever they please, and when a pilot was shot down, ordinary Iranians worked to protect him until the rescuers got there. It’s possible factions in the regime may now turn on each other.

Unfortunately, our Gulf allies also had a lot of their weaknesses exposed, too. That’s something that Mr. Trump has had to worry about all along.

Iran’s limited drone and missile force was able to hit key infrastructure targets in many places. Oil terminals and desalination plants now need to be hardened and a lot more interceptor technology must be deployed. Ukraine, the world’s leader in defeating Russian and Iranian drones, is helping.

Most troubling on our side though, is the lack of Muslim “boots on the ground.” There is no armed opposition group worthy of the name in Iran. Some sort of plan seems to have been attempted earlier this year to arm the Kurds, but it ended in failure and a lot of finger-pointing.

The same condition prevails in Lebanon. Israel cannot keep bombing the south of the country indefinitely, while the government there is too weak to carry out its promises to disarm Hezbollah. Mr. Trump is even talking about having the Sunni Syrian forces enter Lebanon to defeat Hezbollah. That certainly seems possible, it was the current Syrian forces that beat mostly Hezbollah soldiers in the Syrian Civil War.

But a better idea is to arm a pro-Western Shia peacekeeping force there. There are over a million members of the Iranian diaspora such a force could draw from. It could be led by Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. He is far and away the most popular Iranian at home and abroad. It was after his call for nationwide resistance that the January 2026 protests took place. Sadly, this resulted in something like 30,000 people killed with nothing to show for it. Rather than just wishing and hoping and talking, the Pahlavi movement needs to move past the jet-set cocktail circuit and do some fighting.

If things went well in South Lebanon, such a peace-keeping force might move on to parts of Iran and carve out some opposition territory there, like a Middle East version of Ronald Reagan’s contras.

But even if no real opposition force ever emerges in Iran, we are way ahead in this game. Under the terms of the MOU, the only thing Iran gets up front is the right to ship oil once again through the Strait of Hormuz. Just as everyone else does.

If they won’t ultimately negotiate all of Mr. Trump’s demands these next several months, he promises to resume bombing. Now, under Mr. Obama or the pathetic Joe Biden, such a threat would be empty and the Iranian leaders are hoping the same applies somehow to Mr. Trump. If that’s the plan, they are badly mistaken. They ought to consider the fate of Qasem Soleimani, and all the other IRGC commanders who crossed Mr. Trump. Unlike our DC chattering classes, he is immune to the liberal guilt-complex; and understands, like most Americans, who the bad guys really are- and what must be done with them.

Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, KY.

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