News Vérité

The ghost of William Westmoreland, the U.S. general in charge of operations in the Vietnam War, lives on in Pete Hegseth, current U.S. Secretary of Defense/War. Every time I watch Hegseth give a press conference updating us on how things are going in our attack on Iran, I hear statistics that don’t seem to be borne out by coverage on the evening news. Specifically, Hegseth continuously maintains that Iran’s missile and drone attacks on U.S. assets and our allies are down 87 percent, oops, or was it 93 percent? Westmoreland, if you were around in those days, was famous for his “body counts” of dead Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army soldiers. The underlying assumption was that North Vietnam would eventually reach a point where it could no longer mount a large enough offensive because it would run out of men, women, and children (ugly, but true) to fight its war. Problem was, these body counts were either completely inflated or totally fabricated, take your pick. The North’s massive Tet Offensive of 1968, though its forces lost, put the lie to U.S. assertions that the North’s forces had been decimated, and public opinion shifted totally against the war, bringing about

The Israeli-U.S. bombardment of Iran and its military and naval assets is now stuck in the Strait of Hormuz. One-fifth of the world’s energy supplies flow through this narrow passageway, whose waters are territorially controlled by various countries, but whose ability to function is controlled by Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). I’ve argued here before that the first objective of the campaign should have been the neutralization, if not downright elimination, of the IRGC. If you want the country to “surrender,” the only hope is the castration of the IRGC and its power. Taking out mullahs and government officials is important, but the IRGC won’t give up without a fight — which probably means ground troops. Otherwise, a diplomatic solution that basically leaves Iran in the hands of its current leadership is the only solution. Everything is now contingent upon opening the Strait of Hormuz. Of course, matters were further complicated yesterday when Israel struck Iran’s largest natural gas facility. Now, missiles and drones from Iran are being aimed at neighboring energy centers. The IRGC is also making sure that oil-laden vessels are too risk-averse to traverse the Strait of Hormuz, where drones, missiles, and mines can

Defanging Iran and its global terror network is a noble goal. That being said, what’s happening now is something else. If he wanted regime change, the time for President Trump to strike Iran was when protestors were dying by the tens of thousands. Instead, Trump followed Bibi Netanyahu’s lead into a forever war. Granted, the strike at the beginning that took out the Ayatollah Khamenei and other top leaders was a brilliant stroke. At the time, even Trump’s public comments seemed to indicate a two- to four-day foray. It’s now entering three weeks, and Trump is suddenly calling for an unconditional surrender, which will never come unless you obliterate every last Revolutionary Guardsman. I honestly believe that Trump thought the people would rise up as soon as the U.S. and Israel struck — that is, within two to four days. When that didn’t happen, Trump — as is his wont — dug in his heels and committed to a Bibi devastation-of-Iran plan. To save face, in other words. This is now smacking too much of previous U.S. ventures overseas to topple hostile regimes, going all the way back to Vietnam and Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), who kept pouring in the