President Donal Trump (R) has correctly rejected Iran’s offer of a 7-day cease fire, during which the IRGC, the true power in the Iranian government, would pretend to negotiate a permanent end to the conflict, to do chit-chat regarding the IRGC’s nuclear weapons program, and to codify the fiction that the Hormuz Strait is an Iranian waterway. Even without the nonsense regarding the Strait, the offer was entirely disingenuous, since the IRGC uses all such cease fires and talks solely as periods within which to rest, refit, rearm, and resume fighting.
Trump’s responding plan, though, maintaining the current state of the conflict, is a serious error. He says he won’t resume bombing, if he does at all (he says he hasn’t decided), until after the November mid-terms. His abhorrence of the killing and destruction that war, or any shooting conflict, causes is laudable; however, he’s letting his abhorrence go too far; it’s seriously clouding his judgment in the present conflict. He’s fallen into a never do today what can be put off to tomorrow counterproductive loop.
As the conflict wears on, the destruction and deaths the IRGC inflicts on our Middle East allies and friends steadily increases. The privation the IRGC inflicts on the Iranian people steadily worsens as the IRGC diverts ever mote resources from the people toward its attacks on shipping and the infrastructure of the other nations of the Middle East. The costs to our military and its ability to respond to crises elsewhere in the world—viz., Russia’s growing threat to eastern Europe and the People’s Republic of China’s increasing threat to the Republic of China and the Philippines—greatly increase and is increasingly eroded, respectively. The costs to our military increases in the near term, especially. The repeated delays in serious bombing, the fits and starts, only requires far too many targets to be struck a second time, a third time, a fourth time,…. That just wastes our ammunition.
Domestically, as the conflict wears on, inflation will remain elevated, even if it is vastly reduced by Trump and Republican action so far from the Biden years, and in particular, the cost of gasoline to individual Americans remains high, the cost of diesel to shippers and farmers remains high and is increasing, and from those, the cost of food and cooling homes (and soon of heating them) remains high and is increasing.
Beyond that, Trump’s constant threats to Iran, ranging from harsh consequences to annihilation, are rapidly losing impact and costing credibility from his constant decisions to not act on those threats.
For all of those reasons, delay is strongly counterproductive.
Trump must resume heavy bombing and add heavy cyber attacks on Iran, and do them now, not tomorrow. The IRGC will never negotiate in any serious fashion. The only way to end the conflict and ease the Iranian people’s suffering with any hope of durability is to destroy the IRGC’s ability to fight at all and to eliminate the IRGC’s members altogether.