{"id":11808,"date":"2026-04-05T21:25:36","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T09:25:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/?p=11808"},"modified":"2026-04-05T21:25:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T09:25:37","slug":"finish-the-job-mr-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/?p=11808","title":{"rendered":"Finish the job, Mr. President!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Melanie Phillips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the clock ticks away toward U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s latest \u201cnegotiate or I unleash hell\u201d deadline, the Iranian regime thinks that it\u2019s winning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the West, the serried ranks of \u201cexperts\u201d also think that America and Israel are heading either for a deepening quagmire or a humiliating retreat. It\u2019s not possible to predict how the war against Iran will end\u2014or even what the next day will bring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But on the face of it, Tehran\u2019s claim that it has the upper hand\u2014echoed by Western commentators who said before the war even started that it would be a disaster, have kept saying that it is a disaster and predict that it will undoubtedly end in disaster\u2014is demonstrably absurd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On every available metric of war, the regime is clearly losing. Its air defenses are all but obliterated, its navy is largely sunk, its stocks of missiles and launchers have been decimated, its senior ranks are being progressively eliminated, and its nuclear program has been further damaged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In these respects, the United States and Israel have had so far a spectacularly successful war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet despite all this, not only is the regime not yet defeated, but it still presents fearsome challenges. It has turned the Strait of Hormuz into a lethal weapon by choking off most of its normal shipping channels. And Israel and the United Arab Emirates are still being bombarded by missiles every day, causing damage, injury and death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Washington is reportedly chewing over the likely costs to its own forces if it tries to seize Kharg Island to gain control over Iran\u2019s oil production or free the Straits of Hormuz. Trump is likely weighing up the damage to his own political future from a domestically unpopular war that may start drawing American blood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stakes are enormous. If the Iranian regime isn\u2019t totally defanged but survives to recover and rearm, it will not only continue to menace the region. Such an outcome will also advertise that the leader of the free world is a paper tiger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That will hugely embolden China, Russia and North Korea. Israeli defense expert professor Dan Schueftan<\/a> says that if America doesn\u2019t prevail in this war, it will be the beginning of the end for the West.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThese processes don\u2019t happen overnight,\u201d he told the Israeli commentator Haviv Rettig Gur. \u201cBut if the United States is incapable of dealing with the Iranian challenge, the ability of the Chinese to change the world order will be much stronger than before.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So why can\u2019t the West see this? Why do so many Americans and Brits view Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as their greatest threat rather than Iran, the world\u2019s No. 1 terrorist state, exporter of violence and cultural destabilization to the West, and crucial hinge of the world\u2019s axis of evil powers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Partly, this is because the Trump administration has never properly made the case for war to the American public, while governments in Britain and Europe are actively hostile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Partly it\u2019s because of the belief that whenever the West ventures into the Middle East cauldron, the outcome is disastrous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ended in a debacle, the obdurate refusal by the West to take commensurate action against Iran has resulted in a conflict that is now infinitely more difficult and damaging than it would otherwise have been had the threat from Tehran been countered earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Richard Williams, a former commander of Britain\u2019s SAS commando force in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote<\/a> in Britain\u2019s Mail<\/em> that he witnessed Iran\u2019s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps up close as they and Iranian proxies killed hundreds of British and American soldiers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saying that this gave him an understanding of the \u201cutter evil that is the Iranian regime,\u201d he wrote: \u201cWe have let the regime fester and grow since the revolution in 1979 as a result of the cowardice and indecision of our political leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By doing everything it could to avoid war with Iran, the West made this terrifying and now desperate war inevitable. The catastrophic 2015 nuclear deal brokered by former President Barack Obama allowed Iran to cheat and make steady progress over the years towards building nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some 440 kilograms of enriched uranium\u2014enough to make 11 nuclear bombs in two weeks\u2014is reportedly still in Tehran\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sanctions were also nearly useless because the regime simply bypassed them and sold its oil to China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It did not use this revenue to look after the basic needs of the Iranian people. It used it instead to construct missile cities below ground\u2014some buried deep inside mountains, apparently out of reach even of America\u2019s most powerful bombs, and from where the regime continues to fire missiles at Israel and its neighbors in the Gulf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The death and destruction being inflicted as a result\u2014not least upon the oppressed Iranian people\u2014is the real disaster. This should be laid at the door of a West that has sung the siren song of appeasement for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s done so largely because it subscribes to the dogma that war is pointless, and all conflicts can and should be settled by negotiation and compromise. No longer valuing its own historic identity, which it has dismembered through multiculturalism and victim culture, it has become suicidally defeatist, believing there is nothing to fight or die for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason Israel survives and thrives as it does is because it is never defeatist and believes there is everything to fight or die for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saudi Arabia and the UAE also understand the mortal threat posed to them by the Tehran regime. That\u2019s why they are urgently pressing Trump to finish it off rather than declare a totally false victory and walk away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump is incredulous that the regime won\u2019t accept that it has lost the war. This may be merely Trumpian rhetoric designed to humiliate Tehran. More ominously, it may be that he\u2019s trying to reshape reality to what he wants it to be, but isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But on another level, he\u2019s applying the wrong metric. It may well be that in terms of conventional warfare, the regime can\u2019t possibly win. But fanatical Islamists like this think in completely different terms. To them, mere survival is victory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Iran\u2019s foreign minister, Abbas Aragchi, gloated this week: \u201cNo nation in history has stood for nearly a month against the greatest nuclear-armed power on earth and stopped them from achieving a single goal. This is a point of pride for all of humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The West simply doesn\u2019t understand religious fanaticism. It doesn\u2019t understand that for the Islamists of Tehran, who believe that causing an apocalypse will bring the Shia messiah to earth, \u201cmartyrdom\u201d\u2014their mass deaths\u2014is accordingly to be embraced with ecstasy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The West also fails to grasp something Israel has been forced to accept for decades. The Iranian regime may be outgunned by America\u2019s superior military might, but it can outfox it through its use of \u201casymmetric warfare,\u201d which refuses to recognize the conventions of war laid down by the international community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This means that while the West takes care not to target civilians or hit the essential civilian infrastructure of electricity or water supplies, the Iranians will not only target all such enemy lifelines but will unhesitatingly sacrifice all their own people, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Accordingly, they think that the more missiles they continue to fire, the more they\u2019ll demonstrate defiantly that they hold all the cards, and so America must \u201cnegotiate\u201d on the terms they have laid down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The only acceptable response to that is to redouble the effort to defeat them utterly and completely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s hope Trump has come to the same conclusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Melanie Phillips. As the clock ticks away toward U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s latest \u201cnegotiate or I unleash hell\u201d deadline, the Iranian regime thinks that it\u2019s winning. In the West, the serried ranks of \u201cexperts\u201d also think that America and Israel are heading either for a deepening quagmire or a humiliating retreat. It\u2019s not possible<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11809,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[178,255,179],"coauthors":[893],"class_list":{"0":"post-11808","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-opinion","8":"tag-iran","9":"tag-opinion","10":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11808"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11810,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11808\/revisions\/11810"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11808"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cvnznews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=11808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}