State of Iran According to Conservative Commentator

The following is from Victor David Hanson, an author and political commentator. He offers insight that the mainstream media doesn't provide on the situation of the conflict in Iran

Victor Davis Hanson just did what no one in legacy media will do. He looked at the Iran war empirically.

The verdict isn't close.

Iran — the largest military power in the Middle East by every measure, feared by the Gulf monarchies and Europeans alike — has just suffered one of the most lopsided asymmetric defeats in modern history.

Hanson: It's very unusual that one side has been victorious in an asymmetric war, especially against the strongest power in the Middle East."

The scorecard:

Iran has lost hundreds of billions, possibly half a trillion, in a half-century of investment in missiles, drones, submarines, and capital ships. Gone.

Their command and control is Nobody, not theocracy, not the IRGC, not the political class, not the army — knows who's actually in charge. They're afraid of each other. They're afraid to look soft. And they're afraid that cutting a deal means "we're all going to be dead for what we've done." 

Meanwhile, the American left spent one day calling Trump a warmonger and a "Hitlerian figure". The next day, after he announced negotiations, they called him a "taco" — a Neville Chamberlain, a Jimmy Carter.

Hanson nailed the pathology. They don't analyze the war empirically. They analyze it politically. In his words, Tom Friedman and Bill Kristol "almost feel that happens negatively in Iran might be positive because it would hurt Donald Trump."

100,00 troops are in that theater right now. Risking their lives to make sure Iran never puts a nuclear-tipped missile on Tel Aviv, London, or eventually Chicago. And half the political class is rooting against the mission because of who's in the Oval Office.

Read that again.

And the losers don't stop at Tehran.

Russia: no more Venezuela. No more Latin America. No more Middle East. Assad is gone. The drone pipeline with Iran is severed. Bogged down in Ukraine, bleeding over a million and a half casualties.

China took 80 percent of all Iranian oil. That pipeline is now contingent on the United States. And Beijing just watched America broadcast to the world that it's about to mass-produce a half-million to a million drones. Any fantasy of crossing 110 nautical miles to take Taiwan just got a lot more expensive.

Europe, in Hanson's words, is "a big loser." We asked them for bases and airspace. That was it. Spain closed its embassy in Israel — "for all practical purposes, Spain is a belligerent." France wouldn't let us use its airpower or clean up H-z-b in Lebanon, its own post-colonial responsibility. Italy wouldn't let our bombers land in Sicily. The United Kingdom — the nation that built the Royal Navy — "can't send one destroyer" to protect its own base in Cyprus. 

Turkey, a NATO member, is openly siding with Iran and threatening a NATO partner, Israel.

Hanson's verdict: "You can see the problem with NATO, name only." Going forward, the United States will pick and choose which NATO members are actually worth the alliance. The rest are "neutral or hostile."

And the Strait of Hormuz? The left spent two weeks shrieking that closure would end the world. Reality: it carries 20% of the world's oil, not 80%. The Saudis are expanding their Red Sea pipeline. The Emirates are expanding theirs. A pipeline across the desert through Jordan to Haifa is on the table. Within a few years, the Gulf "might only serve Iran." Their leverage becomes their liability.

If the war ends in two or three weeks, Hanson estimates seven months to economic recovery. Then comes the realization.
Iran is not threatening the Middle East. Iran has no ballistic missile threat. Iran has no immediate path to a nuclear weapon. Iran has no military. Its command and control is wiped out. Its population is stewing.

"This could be like the fall of the Berlin Wall."

Not the next day. Not the next month. But within months — or within two years, like the Soviet Union — regime change.
This war was fought on Western American terms. No Fallujah. No house-to-house in Taji. No villages in Afghanistan where you can't tell friend from enemy. The asymmetry — by design — was total.

The 24-hour news cycle will keep shrieking. The Democrat-media borg will keep cycling through whichever narrative hurts Trump most that morning.
But the map has already been redrawn. Russia is contained. China is humbled. Europe is exposed. Iran is hollow.

The adults took the country back. The results speak for themselves