Dan McCarthy: Iran War Gets US Out of Mideast by Resolving Decades-Long Problem
Heritage Foundation Fellow Dan McCarthy talks about the Iran War with RealClear Media publisher David DesRosiers, host of RAV’s “Get Real.”
DAN MCCARTHY, HERITAGE FOUNDATION: The president certainly understands better than anyone else the danger of forever wars and wars that are protracted. So that’s clearly not something that he wants to see happen with his own Iran conflict here. That said, just as he wanted to have an element of surprise going in, the president doesn’t want to give the Iranians the sense that, oh, if you just wait a few weeks, then you can, you know, outlast us and you’ll be perfectly fine after that. So there has to be a degree of uncertainty here. And unfortunately, that also means a degree of uncertainty in what’s being communicated to the American people. I would say that one of the themes I think the president should emphasize is that this war is actually something that gets us out of Middle East conflicts rather than draws us in. Iran has been a persistent source of terrorism. It’s been a persistent source of potential nuclear proliferation in the region. And this is something that, you know, a half dozen presidential administrations have not been able to resolve. And it was not getting any closer to a resolution before President Trump. So, you know, sooner or later, this was going to happen. There was going to have to be a conflict. There was going to have to be a settling of the case once and for all. Again, what that means in the end may be that, you know, you have a, you know, after levels and levels of the Iranian top leadership have been decimated, finally, you may get a, you know, someone who gets to power who says, we’ll accept whatever terms America wants to give us, which would be a wonderful conclusion. Now, maybe on the other hand, you’ll actually have a popular uprising that will overthrow the current regime and install something else. And we don’t know exactly what that would be, but that too would be a very good conclusion. But basically the president is trying to accelerate a conclusion to a saga that has been going on for almost half a century now. And with this resolution, it will resolve the problem and get America out of having to continually get back in to the Middle East and particularly deal in.
