MORNING GLORY: President Trump, Iran and Napoleon’s still-relevant maxim

The future of the West and President Donald Trump’s reputation within it through the centuries will depend on the outcome of the ongoing battle with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

America is decisively winning that battle, but it has not yet won it. In fact, the U.S. could lose the battle. If President Trump perseveres, that will not happen. If he abandons the battle, it could very well be the worst foreign policy debacle for the U.S. since the end of the Vietnam War, rivaling even that of the catastrophe of President Joe Biden’s command to American forces to quickly depart Afghanistan in 2021.

Because of those two competing futures, it is highly likely that President Trump will persevere. And he should.

IRAN IS NOT A NORMAL NATION YOU CAN MAKE DEALS WITH; IT’S A NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT

Iran is run by religious fanatics. That is the overarching reality about the defining threat Iran poses to the region and indeed the world. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps ("IRGC") cannot be "deterred" in the way other evil tyrannies can be deterred.

Xi Jinping can be deterred. Vladimir Putin can be deterred. Both have no evident desire to die, or for history to end.

Iran cannot be deterred from its mission to destroy Israel and the United States, because destruction and even defeat in this battle is not what ultimately matters the most to the theocrats atop the Islamic Republic. "Martyrdom" is itself the best result for any individual caught up in Khomeinism. "Regime survival" is a secondary goal to its leadership’s personal worldview, an extreme version of a minority branch of Islam often called "Twelver" theology.

IRAN TO EXECUTE FIRST FEMALE PROTESTER TIED TO ANTI-REGIME UNREST

The defining belief of Twelver Shi’ism is that the Twelfth Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, did not die, entered occultation (a state of concealment) in the 9th century, remains alive by God’s will and will return at the end of time as the Mahdi to establish justice and peace. A group within "Twelver" believers assert that turmoil may help usher in the Mahdi’s return.

When Iran’s first tyrant, Ayatollah Khomeini, drank the infamous "poisoned chalice" and accepted a 1988 ceasefire with Iraq in the brutal 1980-1988 war, that "Supreme Leader" did not remotely fear a popular uprising by his own people. Khomeini believed that he had time on his side for the instrument of worldwide salvation that he believed the Islamic Republic to be.

Today’s dictator, Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp Commander-in-Chief Ahmed Vahidi, knows the regime is already on borrowed time. Shattered and facing a ruined economy experiencing hyperinflation that will only grow worse, the economy cannot support the 90+ million who depend on it. That means inevitable rebellion by the people followed by revolution against the IRGC.

Vahidi’s predecessor in the role of top tyrant, the now dead Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, took the "Tiananmen Square" option when hundreds of thousands if not millions of protesters took to the Iranian streets in January of this year. Like Chinese dictator Deng Xiaoping in 1989, Khamenei ordered the murder of as many citizens as it took in January to suppress the sort of uprising that threatened the regime.

That wicked choice worked — once — in China in 1989. It worked again in January in Iran. Popular uprisings in both countries were brutally repressed.

But as countless dictators have found out, from Assad in Syria and Gadhafi in Libya to Ceausescu in Romania and Jaruzelski in Poland and Honecker in East Germany, among dozens of other toppled tyrants, a regime that survives because of tens of thousands of secret police and their auxiliaries cannot stand against a people of millions, much less tens of millions, absent the sort of surveillance state China has built and brutally enforced.

Iran does not have that surveillance state. Vahidi knows his already badly weakened regime cannot survive years into the future. That fact means the religious mission — the prime directive of "Twelver theology" — cannot again be made subservient to "regime survival" as it was in 1988. If the regime isn’t going to survive and its leaders know that, they must act with increasing violence to serve the mission of destroying the "Little Satan" of Israel and preparing the way for the Hidden Imam.

So Vahidi and his minions will never ever agree to anything other than ruses that allow them to seek the WMD with which to destroy Israel and perhaps trigger the return of the "occulted Hidden Imam." Study what Pickaxe Mountain is and what end it must serve. It’s the last best chance for Iran to "break out" and obtain a nuclear weapon. Our heaviest and most destructive ordinance, the "bunker busters" President Trump used to obliterate Iran’s second most deeply-buried nuclear weapons facility at Fordow, may not work against Pickaxe. Bombing around the site may set back construction, but it cannot destroy the caverns and everything the Islamic Republic is building within it.

That’s the set of facts that sits before President Trump: A regime run by religious fanatics, one rich in oil revenues if allowed to resume the export of oil, and one executing its back-up plan to build nukes in a cavern so deep it cannot be destroyed by conventional weaponry.

Both the First Gulf War and the second war with Iraq were "perfectly executed half maneuvers," the sort of strategic hesitation in the middle of a grand plan that leads to military defeat. So too, it is often argued, was the invasion of Afghanistan.

Of many famous maxims about war from this millennium, perhaps the most famous is the one attributed to Napoleon that is featured in the subtitle: "If you start to take Vienna, take Vienna."

That maxim has never been verified as having been said by France’s military genius but is often cited because in that sentence is contained worlds of strategic thinking refined into eight words. The sharp point is to pursue a military campaign in pursuit of a grand strategic goal to its successful conclusion. Tactical victories or defeats do not matter. Once begun, pursue the battle to its successful conclusion. Half measures or abandoned plans are lethal to a nation’s victory and survival.

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Many in legacy media are quick to note that President Donald Trump is loathe to be labeled in any way as "like" President Barack Obama. (There is no danger of comparison of the always energetic, always "on" President Trump with the infirm President Joe Biden.)

Now President Trump is assailed by almost every Democrat and some Republicans — including, no doubt, some in the West Wing — for initiating this battle with Iran. The critics argue that President Obama would never have taken the action President Trump has. The president should ignore them and resolve to "take Vienna." Nothing else will secure the country, the region and the world.

"These people are crazy," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said about the religious fanatics running Iran. "They are scum," President Trump has added.

Whatever you think those tyrants are, some of them are deeply convicted believers in an "end times" theology that would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons to destroy Israel and possibly bring the Twelfth Imam out of his "occultation." Most of the West doesn’t want to deal with the implications of a theocracy bound up in medieval theology and run by fanatics in possession of WMD. President Trump is willing to do so and has acted on it. Now he must finish the job.

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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