https://www.newsweek.com/iran-sticks-to-its-guns-as-trumps-threats-begin-to-lose-power-11967826
Almost three months into the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran and nearly five weeks since President Donald Trump announced a blockade of the Islamic Republic, a defiant Tehran shows little sign of budging in the face of the White House's fiery threats.
Rather, the conflict appears thus far to be emboldening Iranian leadership. Despite the loss of their supreme leader, the killing of other key commanders and decision-makers and the destruction of considerable firepower, Iranian officials have largely put domestic divisions aside and closed ranks to maintain a hefty set of demands to end the war on their own terms.
It's a costly bet. Yet the price for the White House, the region and the world is adding up as well.
"I think that the Trump administration has led itself into a very tight corner," Saikal said. "It has kept changing its goalposts and doesn’t really know how to end the war. President Trump has pathologically never been able to accept defeat. He has now narrowed his objective to ‘no nuclear weapons’, despite the fact that Tehran has always said that it won’t produce nuclear weapons."
There were two miscalculations Trump made
ReplyDelete1) He thought that when the bombing began, the surviving Iranian leaders would flee to Moscow and there would be regime change
2) He thought his allies would support him
Instead the remaining leaders dug in and announced that Iran could burn but they wouldn't leave or surrender. And his allies said, in effect, "We won't help you and frankly, we want to support Iran."
Here's what people forget - Trump could end the war tomorrow. He could order the army to reduce the 10 biggest cities in Iran to rubble. He could order an offensive inside Iran to grab the uranium and get it out. And both would be successful but at the cost of 1000's of American soldiers' lives and 100 000's if not millions of Iranian civilians dead. None of the America's supposedly allies would stand up for it. America would be labelled the real criminal here and even the American people would act as if they had lost the war.