The Big Ben Show: Victor Davis Hanson on Iran and America at 250
Plus Christopher Kimball on cooking for the fourth
The latest episode of The Big Ben Show is here. Watch and listen below — and this time I’ve included a rush transcript of my conversation with Victor Davis Hanson on the Iran deal and more.
A Conversation With VDH
Ben: Victor, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you and we have plenty to talk about, but I think I have to lead off with this news of this potential closure of the deal with the Iranians that could bring about a pause or an end to this conflict. We still are light on details in terms of the things that have been reported. I tend not to trust them because a lot of them are being spun by the various figures involved. What’s your perception of what’s played out here? And do you believe that this is something that will ultimately be viewed as an achievement or as one that was a mistake?
VDH: I could just preface it. It all depends on the willingness or the degree to which the United States is willing to use force because this regime has no history of abiding by anything over the 47 years of its existence. So if you make an agreement and it’s very different than the Obama agreement from the simple reason that they’re dealing now in a position of weakness. They’ve been hit for 40 days approximately and they’re much weaker and then they’ve been strangulated economically. So that’s all good. But I think the administration, as I follow it, is betting on the idea that there’s various factions and that’s okay, that theocracy, the military, the revolutionary guard, and then the elected officials and they feel they’re dealing with people who want a new Iran. But I’m afraid that could be bad cop, good cop. In other words, they’re cynical. And the only thing that matters is if we negotiate this end of the deal, we have 60 days as sure as the sun rises every morning, there’s going to be a ship that is attacked on our part.
Somebody will attack one of our ships. They’ll send a missile into the Gulf or Israel. And at that point, if we just say that’s a tap tap or pat on the back, it’s not going to work. You’re going to have to be disproportionate. There’s a couple of things that I’m a little worried about and that’s this word proportionate. They’ve said that a couple of times. We responded in a proportionate man. They have to respond in a disproportionate manner or it won’t work. And then the other thing is this will usher in a new Middle East. It’ll only usher in a new Middle East if the Theocracy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard are ended, eliminated zilch. If they have any role, they’re murders and no so- called moderate government or transitional government or the Venezuela model will work as long as they’re involved. It’s just that simple.
Ben: I’m concerned about a couple of things related to this deal and I’ve made those concerns known. The thing that really I think sticks out to me though is what you’re saying, which is that the Iranians are just not trustworthy. They cannot be taken at their word on these things. And I’m concerned that the domestic politics of the moment are playing into the acceptance of a deal that doesn’t really live up to the standards that the president set when he decided to go into this conflict. When you look at that decision, do you think that from the get- go it should have been more modest in terms of the achievement that the president essentially set out there, that rather than sort of stretch and try to reach for something that would be more of an emphatic win, that it really should have been essentially what Marco Rubio said within the first three weeks of this conflict, that eliminating their ballistic missiles, preventing their ability to protect themselves in the case of a future assault was basically the more modest end.
Is that something that should have been clear from the get- go?
VDH: Well, we achieved all of that in 38 to 40 days and then we stopped and then we negotiated on the principle that they were beaten, humiliated and they would concede, but they had the ability we kept saying that their Navy was destroyed and their Air Force and 90% of their missiles, but they had, I don’t know, six or 7,000 missiles. So if they had 10%, they had 700 wood launchers that they could hit the vulnerable Gulf and that’s what they did. So each time they did something for the next 60 days, we occasionally responded, but not in a fashion that they felt was existential for them. So we just kept playing this tit for tat and they were saying to themselves, “We’re getting closer to the midterm. We’re getting closer to breaking the American spirit because of gas prices and we’re going to keep doing this.”
And at some point Donald Trump, he hit them very hard once and I think he could have done it for two weeks and gone home. I really do. I think he could have just done what Bill Clinton did. Bill Clinton was in a quandary in Serbia in 1999 over Kosovo and he was very meticulous for 60 days. And then people said to him, “It’s not working. You’ve got to hit all the bridges on the Danube. You’ve got to hit all of the power grid of Belgrade. You got to put them in darkness.” And he said, “Well, these are dual use, doesn’t matter.” And that’s what he did. And it ended in 72 days about two weeks later. And so I don’t understand why they didn’t do that. Barack Obama bragged that he wouldn’t do that. In Libya, he bombed in an unauthorized fashion by Congress for seven months, but he did take out the port facilities.
He took out the TV stations, the communication and we haven’t done that. And if you’re not going to do that, it’s going to take a long, long time to play cat and mouse with missile launchers and mosquito boats or whatever they are. It’s not going to work. So I wish we had have done that. And right now if we’re going to negotiate, I think we’ve got to get over the idea that there is a moderate faction that has control of the government. There may be a moderate faction that wants to save its own hide and feels there’s going to be a revolution imminent when everything’s calmed down, they’re broke and they start diverting scarce funds to re-arm or to their error proxies, that would get people very angry. But the idea that that moderate group is going to take power or has power I think is erroneous.
It’s not proven. So it’s very important if they want to negotiate that the first sign that the Iranians break any agreement or start to use force, we have to really pound them and then we should just do it for two weeks and eliminate all of the dual use targets and then see, then either go home or leave a carrier group in the Gulf to keep the straight open. And then we can just say, “Well, it was tragic we lost 13 people. We didn’t use ground troops that the accident rate in the US military every two weeks is 15 people lost.” So in terms of history, it was a successful mission. They won’t have a bomb or a capable military for 10 or 15 years mission accomplished. I would rather see that, but it would take, I think, a week or two of hitting the dual use targets very hard.
Ben: Rewinding to the beginning of this, there is talk in Washington about what the president was being told by his military advisors about what was achievable, particularly when it came to dealing with the inevitable mining of the straight something that the Iranians are very good at and which everyone assumed was a card that they would play. Do you look back on that as being a situation where the president was operating with full understanding of what our military capability was to deal with those problems and do you think that a big part of why this maybe didn’t play out the way that some people would have hoped is because the president has a contentious relationship with the Europeans right now and that one of the handful of things that they still do well is deal with mind sweeping and things of that nature and they clearly did not want to be participants in this conflict.
VDH: Yeah, I think that’s largely true, but I think it was in a larger context. They kept talking about the numerator, that is how many things they destroyed, missiles, boats, launchers, but they didn’t talk about the denominator. That is how many did they have, and they didn’t know that accurately apparently. So when they said 90% of the launchers or the missiles that are gone or 95% of the Navy, they didn’t tell us 90% of what 5,000, 2,000, 3,000. So I think it would have been better to say we have a rough estimate and overestimate that there are 500 of these boats that can mine the harbor or intercept traffic 500 of them and we’re going to get all 500 of them or whatever that is. But they just kept saying, “We got 90% or 80%. We did all this. We took out 4,000 missiles, but we never knew how many there were to begin with.
And that was the problem I think because they held us hostage. It’s kind of ironic. Everybody said, “Well, the Israelis don’t want to be hit. They’re holding us hostage.” The Israelis didn’t really care if they attacked the Israelis, the Israelis were going to hit them twice as hard. It was the Gulf States that had all of this infrastructure and they kept being schizophrenic. They said, “You got to deal with Iran.” So then we dealt with Iran and they said, “You got to stay and take them out. “ And then they would say, “Well, they want to negotiate now. Just stop for a while. It’s getting too rough for us.” They had 600 combat aircraft. They had twice the number of Israel. So you would think that when we put in six or 700 or 800 and Israel put in three, they would have been flying every day with 600 combat and they could have taken a whole section and were told that many of their pilots were retired, European and US military.
So they had good pilots, they had great planes and they didn’t do much at all. But then they came back and said, “One missile will take out our desalinization. One missile will take out a pipeline.” And that was all true.
That leverage that Iran had, that was really the leverage that and the straight and that didn’t take very much military capability at all. So if you got 90% of it, but they were able to interrupt the straight or to terrify the Gulf and so then that was enough. And yes, so two things could be true at once. When Trump said they’re militarily devastated, they’re economically wrecked, that was all true, but even a wrecked country, if they can send three missiles into a desalinization plant and knock out the water supply of Saudi Arabia, that’s something to worry about and that’s what happened.
Ben: The book that you have that’s forthcoming is The Counter Revolution. I haven’t had the chance to read it yet during the course of this conversation, but I did notice that your title regarding the second Trump presidency’s foreign policy invoked the word Colossus and that to me was rather striking. Do you still think that after this experience with the Iranian conflict that this is a foreign policy that has sort of reestablished American strength or is that now a question?
