The idea of declaring victory and going home is attributed to the late Vermont Senator George Aiken with respect to the Vietnam War in 1966. He didn’t exactly say it or propose it, but the idea lives on. A declaration of victory wouldn’t have been true in 1966 and it wouldn’t be true now. However, might it be close enough for political comfort? Just a few thoughts.
Let’s call the option of declaring victory and going home the Aiken gambit. President Trump complicated the political efficacy of the Aiken gambit with his own frank comment yesterday. “We hit them hard yesterday and we’re gonna hit them again hard today,” Trump said. “We’ll see what happens with the deal. We were really close to a deal. But they keep tapping us along. They keep playing us for suckers.” By the way, I am quoting the comment as posted here by the Pentagon.
Trump has been saying that we are “close to a deal” for weeks now, all throughout the purported ceasefire that Iran has never observed. The ceasefire deal looks like another arrangement in which the regime’s thugs have been “playing us for suckers” as they played successfully for time.
Trump’s statement is a confession that the thugs have played him for a sucker. That hurts. The truth hurts.
Trump wants a deal. Declaring victory without a deal would obviate the problem posed by the shadow of Obama’s JCPOA. The thugs running the Iranian regime are not inclined to give him the fig leaf of a deal, at least not without cash on the barrelhead. Their word is worth nothing. They are inclined to play Trump for a sucker while they play for time.
Among the goals left unachieved by the Aiken gambit would be Iran’s retention of enriched nuclear material. Maybe it would be sufficient to keep our eye on it, wherever it is. Given the primacy of that particular goal, however, a declaration of victory without it would lack a certain oomph. Also left unachieved by the Aikent gambit would be Iran’s continuing support for terrorist proxies.
President Trump publicly counseled Israel to lay off Iran after this past weekend’s missile attack. He characterized Israel’s retaliation as “fun” over the weekend. “I am going to call Bibi right now and tell him not to retaliate. Each of them had their fun. Israel had its strike, and Iran had its strike.”
“The Iranian strikes didn’t hurt anybody,” Trump told Axios. “Hopefully Israel is not going to retaliate. If Bibi strikes them back, it’s just gonna keep going like the last 47 years — or the last 3,000 years.”
President Trump hasn’t applied quite the same logic to Iran’s firing on the Apache helicopter whose pilots miraculously survived Iran’s attack. When it came to our response, once was not enough. Even over the weekend the “fun” stuff and twisted history sounded stupid. Now it should be interred under a mountain somewhere along with the “nuclear dust.”
The confession that “they keep playing us for suckers” makes it difficult to declare victory and go home. By the president’s own words, it would look like a victory for the con artists.
