Photo: AFP
As military action continues in Iran, many are thinking back to previous forever wars in the Middle East—namely Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s a lot that President Trump can learn from them.
One of the biggest lessons from these conflicts is that we shouldn’t get bogged down in these types of wars for decades on end—something former JAG attorney Sean Timmons warned against.
He explained how that happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying: “Money kept flowing, and the mission never got accomplished because contractors kept making donations to the political establishment to keep the process going indefinitely.”
Timmons says a good way to prevent that from happening again with our attacks in Iran is to set clear military goals and accomplish them quickly—something the Trump administration appears to be doing.
President Trump yesterday praised the progress the military has already made when it comes to eliminating their targets, saying: “They no longer have air protection, they no longer have any detection facilities at all left… They’re going to be in for a lot of hurt. These are bad people.”
Timmons says there’s a lot of potential benefit to the United States and our interests if we can continue fulfilling our goals in Iran quickly. “Taking out the production factories of Iranian drones limits Putin’s war machine, and it limits the Chinese geopolitical rise by wiping out their cheap oil supply,” he explained.
He did go on to say that we shouldn’t spend extra time there trying to nation-build, because according to him, the Iranian people have a long and proud Persian history that they can draw on to build their own government. Our only goal should be to ensure the government they build isn’t a hostile one.