Iran Watch

The United States has developed a 15-point proposal aimed at ending the war with Iran, according to people familiar with the plan.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations, several Middle Eastern officials said the plan offered extensive sanctions relief to Iran in return for the removal of all its enriched uranium material and abandonment of enrichment processing capabilities, limits to Tehran’s ballistic missile program, and the cessation of support to militant groups in the region including Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas.

President Trump voiced optimism on Tuesday that a peace deal will be reached with Iran, while insisting the war had already been won.

“This war has been won,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office. “The only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.”

“We killed all their leadership,” he said when CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe asked which Iranians the U.S. was now negotiating with. “And then they met to choose new leaders and we killed all of them. And now we have a new group, and we can easily do that, but let’s see how they turn out.”

“It’s — we have, really, regime change,” the president said. “You know, this is a change in the regime, because the leaders are all very different than the ones that we started off with that created all those problems. So this was, I think we can say, Jason, this is regime change, right?”

Iran’s new Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei is the son of the former supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the war. While the new leader has not been seen since he was tapped to succeed his father, and he’s believed to have been wounded in the same strike, there have been no signs of a disintegration of Islamic Republic’s well-defined power structure, with the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard still defiant, and seemingly in control of Iran’s war effort.

With special thanks to Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Timothy Grimmett.

If wars were won by bombastic press conferences, the White House should already be planning another military parade in our capital’s streets. In America’s latest war of choice, President Trump’s styled Secretary of “War” is emerging as the head cheerleader for our misadventure in Iran. Mr. Hegseth has already mistakenly defined what constitutes victory — the destruction of various portions of the Iranian Navy and military production facilities. Unfortunately, his definition is flawed. Despite possessing some military experience as a junior officer, he has shown that he is completely out of his depth. For most intents and purposes, the war with Iran might have been lost before the first missile was launched.

Some of the lessons that Mr. Hegseth should have learned by now:

Operational excellence is not a guarantee of strategic success — The best military on the planet cannot win a war if the national strategic objectives selected by the National Command Authority are faulty. This fact was proven in both Afghanistan and Iraq, which like Iran, were wars of choice and not necessity. Does Mr. Hegseth grasp the gap between his definition of victory and that of his boss?

Mr. Trump has demanded “unconditional surrender” of Iran — That choice could cost many lives. America demanded unconditional surrender of both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The word “unconditional” suggests that there will be no negotiated settlement. The only means of achieving that objective in Germany and Japan was first a land invasion of the “Father Land” followed by the deployment of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Is this where we are heading?