Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
سپاه پاسداران انقلاب اسلامی
Trump needs a fall guy in Iran, and Hegseth has definitely earned it
As the fallout from the Iran war and the apparent cease-fire continues, Trump is probably wondering how to get the heat off his back.
It seems that the talking points aren’t sticking with voters and even worse, his own supporters.
Trump has made a whole career out of survival, even at the expense of those who have supported him the most. As he enters what might be the toughest test yet of his political reputation, he might have to throw another loyalist under the bus for the fiasco in Iran.
Whether this so-called "cease-fire" holds and leads to lasting peace or collapses, the U.S. needs to do a self-assessment of what went wrong with Iran and who got us to the point of being wrong.
Trump seemed to be sold on the idea that Iran would capitulate when their leader was killed.
We know that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sold him on this idea.
We also know that plenty of Trump Cabinet members and advisors pushed back on Netanyahu’s claims, the most vocal of which were Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
But one person was enthusiastic and pushed for Trump to act — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
His tenure has seen its fair share of lows and even-lower lows. All the while, he has been blustering to the press and more importantly to the president about how great things have been going. And it has worked.
Trump famously doesn’t like the details or the aftermath.
That is why, when Hegseth started blowing up boats in the Caribbean, it looked like an easy win for Trump, who chose to ignore the potential war crimes issue and the lack of public evidence that these boats were being used to smuggle drugs.
Trump wanted the Army to have a parade, and Hegseth threw one together. It wasn’t very good, but Trump got what he wanted.
Trump wanted a war, and Hegseth decided to fire, deny promotions to or sideline the most qualified senior military officers.
What Trump wants, Hegseth delivers while repeating the same buzzwords, catchphrases, and rhetoric as his boss.
There’s just one major problem with that: You still need to tell your boss the truth, even if he doesn’t like it.
Hegseth has made plenty of appearances where he and Gen. Dan Caine have extolled the work of the U.S. military while diminishing the capabilities of the Iranian military.
We have heard all the talk about how the U.S. has destroyed Iran’s navy, air force, air defenses, and missile and drone capabilities, yet America has still not won, and they seem wary of exposing their ships and aircraft to Iranian countermeasures/
Now, to be fair, the US military will always lie in this situation, as they did in Vietnam.
But sometimes, those lies can turn into something worse. Like Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire in Afghanistan, the tales told about the capture of Jessica Lynch, or the controversy over the book and movie, “Lone Survivor.”
Sometimes the military will go a step further by lying about our involvement with other countries, as with the bombing of Cambodia. And sometimes it will lie to justify a war, as in Iraq.
But Hegseth didn’t just sell the American public on success in Iran, and it seems that a lot of the dubious claims Trump has been trumpeting since the start of the war have come from Hegseth.
