By any conventional evaluation the United States clearly came out on top in the recent imbroglio with Iran.  Put simply, had a Democratic president been in power, the print media, airwaves and internet would have been awash with paeans to the chief executive and his advisors.  The series of incidents would be depicted as admirable, an example of balancing restraint and force to achieve national ends.  The only reason this is not the accepted narrative in the media, and especially among Democrats is that the impresario of this victory was Donald Trump.  

The current “crisis” with Iran began with the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal.  That was a false treaty, implemented by I-got-a-pen-and-a-phone Obama, through executive action that dodged the constitutional requirement of Senate consent, facilitated by a multi-billion dollar bribe to Iran (money that went directly to Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani’s Quds force.)   Having withdrawn from the deal, Trump reimposed American economic sanctions.

Iran responded by a series of provocations, designed to create a crisis atmosphere that it calculated would pressure Trump to back down.  In early May, Iranian operatives detonated small mines on four tankers operating in the Gulf off the UEA. Iran denied involvement.  U.S. Navy video released a few days later presented strong evidence otherwise.  Despite this, the administration did not respond other than warning Iran.  

A month later, having failed get anything more than an up-blip in oil prices from the tanker attack, Iran shot down an unarmed U.S. surveillance drone (June 19.)  The next day President Trump ordered and then called off a retaliatory U.S. airstrike.  He explained that the action would have killed a large number of Iranian troops, and been disproportionate, thus adopting a trendy and limiting law of war concept, especially popular on the left.  Instead, Trump ordered cyber-attacks and increased American sanctions. 

Foiled again in its attempt to create a crisis, on Sept. 14, Iran launched a relatively sophisticated attack on Saudi oil facilities using suicide drones and cruise missiles.  The attack did considerable damage and resulted in a brief spike in oil prices.  However, yet again the Trump administration responded with soft power sanctions, a step usually popular among Democrats and the left, unless of course implemented by a Republican named Trump.  Indeed, some on the left called Trump soft.

On Dec. 27 Iran struck again, rocketing a joint U.S.-Iraqi air base and killing an Iraqi-American contractor.  This attack finally got Iran what it theoretically wanted, a harsh U.S. response.   Two days later, President Trump ordered airstrikes on Iranian supported militias in Iraq, killing 24 and wounding 50. 

Iran didn’t care about the losses, and used the incident as a pretext to launch series of riots against the heavily fortified U.S. embassy in Baghdad.  Here Iran clearly hoped for one of two results.  Either a Benghazi-like breach of the embassy grounds resulting in U.S. losses, or an American over-reaction that resulted in a massacre of the rioters.  It got neither.  Strong reinforcements and an effective but limited response by Marine security teams stifled the rioters without causing fatalities.  Another restrained but successful response, which would usually win a president practically universal plaudits.

Frustrated again, Souleimani, the architect of Iran’s failed campaign of incitement, came to Baghdad on Jan. 3, evidently to plan another action.  Souleimani’s brazen arrival in the city was itself a provocation, practically daring Trump—who he’d previously disparaged as a paper tiger—to take him on.  That was a big mistake. 

Souleimani’s dispatch (along with a local militia leader) was carefully limited, proportional, within existing legislative authorization, and so entirely legal.  It was also strategically astute.  Ostensibly it gave the Iranians what they wanted, an American escalation of the “crisis” but did so by robbing the Islamic State of the stratagem’s architect.  It was like a team finally getting a turnover in a football game, only to see their quarterback go down permanently right after getting the ball. 

Down their chief strategist, with reinforced U.S. forces ready to pounce on any Iranian miscalculation, the mullahs fell back onto the same playbook used by their anti-Israel proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad when hit similarly by the Jewish state.  Fire a few rockets, declare themselves avenged, and call it a day.

That alone would have handed the U.S. a significant victory in the months’ long confrontation, but for Iran it continued to get worse. 

A staged funeral for Souleimani caused a stampede killing 56 Iranian “mourners” and injuring over 200. 

Then a few hours after Iran’s retaliatory rocket attack a nervous anti-aircraft missile crew, anticipating an American riposte, mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian commercial airliner over Tehran, killing 176 more people, including dozens of Iranian citizens.  Not finished stumbling, the Iranian regime denied responsibility for the shootdown over the following days, until effectively forced to concede responsibility.  This belated admission prompted a renewed rioting  in Tehran, not Baghdad, building upon an uprising earlier this year during which the Islamist regime killed hundreds.

In sum, it is hard to image a worse outcome for Iran, or a better one for the United States.  The hysterical predictions of cataclysm and doom by Democrat politicians, internet “experts” and media talking heads actually applied only to the Islamic State. 

The score by this accounting is U.S. 10 Iran 0. Had any other President but Trump managed it, especially a Democrat one, there’d practically be dancing in the streets.  But as it is, the Democrats and their media helpmates, who not very convincingly barely disguised their hope for a U.S. disaster, have to digest the fact that virtually all their complaints proved unfounded.  The U.S. came out of the confrontation the clear victor, while supposedly clever Iranian stratagems foundered completely.   

Image credit: Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of public domain sources