By W. James ANTLE III
Lindsey Graham and company say toppling Iran is worth a political bloodbath. Is it?
President Donald Trump clearly wants the Iran War to be over, if the Iranians will give him a face-saving way out. He is not yet ready to give any kind of face-saving way out to the Iranians.
Should that basic dynamic change, allowing Trump to declare victory and come home, he will quickly learn that the people who cheerled him into this war will turn on him once he wants to end it.
Their goals are maximalist. They seek regime change or as close to it as they can get. Trump wants something closer to Venezuela, decapitating the regime but doing business with its remnants.
Those remnants are not yet so pliable as Nicolas Maduro's deputies. Should they become so, or if Trump finds another way out of the conflict, his new friends-many of them late adopters of MAGA at best and Never Trumpers circa 2015-2016 at worst-will abandon him as if it were the morning of January 7, 2021. The laptop bombardiers and their Washington allies will make Bill Cassidy look like Stephen Miller.
Consider Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who still needs Trump heading into November and hailed the Louisiana senator's third-place showing in the Republican primary as an example of the president's power.
"Those who try to destroy Trump politically [and] stand in the way of his agenda are gonna lose," Graham told NBC's Meet the Press. "Bill made a decision. What would LBJ do?"
Graham concluded, "This is the party of Donald Trump."
Yet listen to Graham on Iran. "According to my analysis, there's nothing to suggest that the people in charge now are any different in terms of the regime's goal to terrorize the world, destroy Israel, [and] come after us," he said.
Graham didn't reject the concept of a deal with Iran out of hand, and said, "What President Trump has done has been amazing militarily." But it's not enough for the war to end anytime soon.
Reza Pahlavi told POLITICO's Dasha Burns that Trump's talks to end the war amounted to confusing mixed signals.
"You cannot send mixed signals, on the one hand say, 'People need to rise,' and at the same time say, 'Wait, we are negotiating,'" said the exiled former crown prince. "It's confusing the hell out of everyone."
Pahlavi also noted the inconsistency of claiming to help Iranians while threatening to attack civilian infrastructure or even wipe out their civilization. He said Iranians will wonder, "Are you here to liberate us or further hurt us?"
But for people actually living in Iran, the war itself makes that a difficult distinction. The regime and the people do not live in hermetically sealed containers, and attacks on the energy infrastructure are central to the Iran hawks' strategy for further weakening or toppling the regime.
There would be no effective domestic political constituency for regime change in Iran without Americans who wanted to pay the ayatollahs back for sins beginning with the taking of U.S. hostages in 1979, and this group's sentiments are a lot closer to "wipe out the civilization" than "liberate the Iranian people."
Voices closer to home are counseling Trump to go further down the path to an Iraq-style war, with similar electoral consequences.
"President Trump has 2 choices," longtime City Journal editor Myron Magnet wrote on X. "He can either make his goal winning the midterms for the GOP and making whatever compromises with Iran necessary to get the war out of the way, or he can decide to be a great president & bring about regime change in Iran & remake the Middle East."
"It's worth losing my job," Graham said of Iran and the midterms.
The last time we sought regime change and remaking the Middle East, Iran wound up a bigger power in the region and we also got ISIS for our troubles. This plus two decades in Afghanistan that ended with the Taliban returning to power ought to warn us that perhaps we are not very good at remaking the Middle East.
Not many people share these ambitions, but it is perhaps fitting that a disproportionate number of those who do are Republicans who will lose their seats in Congress if Trump follows this advice.
Someone should ask George W. Bush how the GOP became the party of Donald Trump in the first place.
The answer, whether he knows it or not, is that more than 20 years ago when it mattered, Bush listened to too many people like Lindsey Graham.
Original article: www.theamericanconservative.com