Jim Geraghty writes for National Review Online about major events in the military campaign against Iran.
One: Sunday night, Iran fired “nearly 30 ballistic missiles” at Israel. Now, in the fog of war, no one knows precisely how big Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal is, or how many it has remaining, or how quickly the regime can build new ones. …
… No doubt, the U.S. and Israel have greatly reduced Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles. But as of Sunday, Iran had “nearly 30 of them,” and launched them at Israel. …
… If some of the American objectives of this war were to eliminate the threat from Iran’s ballistic missile and drone programs, those objectives have not been achieved yet. And while those threats are no doubt reduced . . . the question is, how reduced? And how reduced does that arsenal need to be for us to feel like we’ve done what we needed to do? …
… Two, on Monday, an Iraniran Shahed drone took down a U.S. Army Apache helicopter gunship patrolling the Strait of Hormuz, off the coast of Oman. Thankfully, the two pilots* were rescued, and we’ll talk more about the rescue in a moment.
When communicating to the American public during a war, it does not help to have a president with a propensity for sweeping, hyperbolic statements. In the Meet the Press interview, Trump said, “We have totally destroyed their military.” …
… No doubt, one of the reasons the American public feels so negatively about the war against Iran is because the president is regularly giving them assurances that turn out to be false.
Three: U.S. used an unmanned drone to rescue the two pilots, a first in wartime. …
… Four: Tuesday morning, President Trump told a Wall Street Journal reporter that the Iranian downing of the Apache “wasn’t a big deal.” …
… By Tuesday evening, the downing of the Apache was a big enough deal for the U.S. to launch retaliatory airstrikes at Iranian targets.
