Photo: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0
Ari Fleischer has a message for Vice President JD Vance: the mistake wasn’t going to war with Iran – it was stopping before the war was won.
Fleischer, the former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush and now a Fox News contributor, argued Wednesday that the political fallout from the Iran conflict came not from the decision to go to war but from the decision to halt military operations short of what he called a decisive victory. He was answering Vance, who had blamed President Trump’s war in Iran for the Republicans’ loss of both chambers of Congress in Tuesday’s midterms.
“Mr. Vice-President, please allow me to present a different perspective,” Fleischer wrote in a public response. “The problem was not the Iran War. It was the cease fire. If you start a war, you need to win it and finish it – otherwise don’t start it.”
Fleischer argued that Washington threw away a chance to topple Iran’s leadership and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. “Once the decision was made, we should not have stopped until the regime fell,” he wrote. “But instead, you negotiated a cease fire that didn’t last, didn’t work and left us in no man’s land, with higher prices and our troops still deployed.” He concluded: “No, Mr. Vice President. It’s not the war. It’s the so-called cease fire.”
He also defended Trump’s original decision to strike Iran in February. Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume joined the criticism, accusing Vance of being “hornswoggled” by Iran, Mediaite reported.
For households, the stakes in this argument inside the Republican Party are concrete: gas prices and American troops still deployed overseas – the two costs Fleischer says the ceasefire failed to end.
JBizNews Desk | Washington
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