In the four months and three weeks since combat began with Iran, the United States has lost 17 or 18 of its warriors (with three or four killed over last weekend), with more than 420 others wounded.
Sixty Israelis have been killed. More than 100 Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict. Our allies in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have all suffered civilian deaths and every country in the region has taken significant damage to its infrastructure.
Iran has suffered military deaths in the thousands with many hundreds of civilians killed as well. The toll on the country’s infrastructure is massive — exponentially larger than that which it has inflicted on its neighbors in the region — with the highest estimates in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Iran’s conventional military has been shattered. Its missile and drone forces have been significantly damaged or expended. It is far, however, from being out of ordnance with which to threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz or its neighbors.
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Iran has avoided striking Israel during the most recent 10 days of combat as it fears the response of the Israeli Defense Forces. That is deterrence restored. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard is afraid to strike the Jewish State. Now it must be made afraid to shoot at Americans or at its Arab neighbors or international shipping.
The rump regime that remains appears to be a military dictatorship led by the 68-year-old commander-in-chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Ahmad Vahidi, who came out of retirement to lead the military dictatorship after the opening strike on Iranian leaders killed scores of leading officials in the country.
The “official” successor to the killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is his son Mostafa Khomeini, who has not been seen in public since the conflict began. Khamenei 2.0 is widely believed to have been seriously wounded in the opening strikes of the battle and has recently been reported to have been moved out of the country.
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The economy of Iran is in a shambles with the exchange rate of Iranian rials for U.S. dollars approaching 2 million to one. The United States Navy’s blockade of Iranian shipping is completely effective as to shipping, so Iran is again denied the most basic and essential revenue stream from the sale of oil via the oceans. Its imports must come from land or air.
The conflict could extend for months or even years as America’s blockade drives the Iranian economy deeper into the hole out of which it will take decades to climb once combat ends. The country’s nuclear program is indeed obliterated, and while the deep tunnels and caverns of Pickaxe Mountain remain a mystery to the U.S. the IRGC’s ability to “break out” to a nuclear weapon has been crushed. (The U.S. has not yet targeted Pickaxe, and may not be able to damage its deepest reaches.)
Once measured in weeks, Iran is now years and years away from a nuclear weapon, even if oil exports resumed in the future and the rump regime dedicated all of that revenue from the sale of oil to again pursue nuclear weapons.
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The cost of oil hovers above $80 a barrel across the world, 30% higher than when the battle began but significantly lower than the $126 a barrel cost reached in April. Workarounds via pipelines and the use of the southern shipping route through the Strait near Oman have kept the cost of oil from skyrocketing, and production worldwide has also stepped up in response to the off-and-on closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Whether President Donald Trump decides to escalate the strikes on Iran to include destruction of power plants and bridges that serve dual uses that include the Iranian military and the IRGC (legitimate targets under the laws of war) will be revealed in the days ahead.
Every lethal attack on Americans elicits from the United States extraordinary punishment on Iran. The cost to the American families bearing those losses of family is immeasurable and the U.S. is extracting a price after every deadly blow delivered by the Iranians in the ongoing effort to deter the fanatics.
That may be an unrealistic goal given the martyrdom ideology of the theocracy, but the original dictator of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini, drank “from the cup of poison” in 1988 and accepted what was essentially a defeat in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988.
Vahidi is a veteran of that war. Perhaps the dictator will follow the original supreme leader’s example, and the advice of his civilian advisers, and the public faces of Iran who are believed by some to have grasped the scale of the defeat inflicted on Iran. The President of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, and its Foreign Minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, have almost no power over the dictator and his legions with the guns who murdered tens of thousands of Iranian citizens in January. But the civilians have hinted at the reality of a shattered country, and the crushed proxy armies in Gaza and Lebanon should also weigh on Vahidi. Does he want the IRGC to go the way of Hamas and Hezbollah?
Iran can have a ceasefire in hours if it stops firing on shipping and agrees to minimal steps like comprehensive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency of its known nuclear weapons development sites plus Pickaxe Mountain.
It is irrational for the regime to continue to take the pounding it is receiving, and the fact that Israel has not been targeted in these past 10 days suggests that Vahidi has grasped the reality of his situation. He has been deterred from ordering strikes on Israel. The nightly pummeling by the United States presents Vahidi with only terrible choices aimed at deterring him from his current course.
Whatever he calculated about the cost to the world in oil prices or to Trump in political damage in November, he was not just wrong, but very wrong. Does he have the ability to see that as clearly as Khomeini did in 1988?
About 7.5 million Americans saw Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” this weekend. The monumental cinematic reflection on the cost of war — the retelling of a story that has resonated down more than 2,700 years — still has the power to remind every viewer of the infinite price of battle for those who lose loved ones in the conflict.
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No American should want this combat to continue a day longer than it must. Trump certainly does not. The destruction of Iran’s military capabilities and its military-industrial complex is near complete. Its nuclear program is in ruins. The Iranian people will face a much weaker regime when next they rise up to demand freedom from the fanatics.
But as every member of the military will tell you, the enemy gets a say in when the fighting ends. The decisive victory of the American military won’t be concluded until Iran stops its aggression on international shipping. It may not do so for a long while yet. The “cup of poison” isn’t anything Vahidi wants to accept or the regime mouthpieces want to acknowledge. But President Trump is pursuing the right strategy to make its sipping inevitable.
America must honor its fallen and care for their families as well as the wounded and their families. But we pray for this spring and summer of war to end before the fall arrives. It was a necessary battle, and further devastation of Iran is not something the president or any American should want, but that choice is with Vahidi.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show” heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
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