CEASEFIRE: The Dizzying Story Of The On-Again Off-Again Iranian Cease-Fire Saga

It’s still too early to know whether Trump’s wild gambit paid off, but since he’s a friend of The Great One, it seems only right to quote Gretzky — ‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take’.

And it was one helluva shot that he took. And for all the talk about how Trump is a ‘narcissist’, he was trying to make peace with a hostile leader who literally put a bounty on his head not so long ago. That might have met every justification for including their supreme leader in the list of authorized targets. But instead of opting for outright killing him — or even the regime change he had hinted at — he offered an olive branch of peace, and convinced Israel to do the same.

Let’s take a step back to look at the big picture here.

There was an announcement about Iran’s nuclear ambitions being on the brink of readiness, with the UN watchdog agency censuring Iran for violations, and Iran responding by boasting about new nuclear projects they planned to build.

Israel, with some justification, sees a nuclearized Iran as an existential threat to their nation. Especially since it seems the most direct way to accomplish the ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ slogans they are so fond of chanting.

Israel and Iran traded volleys of armaments over the following few days, with Americans more or less standing back and letting them duke it out — apart from a few defensive systems that took down Iran’s ballistic missiles. The fighting escalated, with Israel targeting military sites, nuclear scientists, and mobile launchers.

Iran, meanwhile has been hitting apartment buildings, hospitals, and a cancer research center.

The game changed when Trump hit Iran’s nuclear sites.

The President’s own words give a sense of the timeline from the time the bombs hit their mark until the time the ceasefire deal was to take place.

It included a not-so-subltle reminder of some other options that remain on the table:

But he preferred the peace option and has made that preference abundantly clear:

He allowed Iran an ineffective ‘counter-attack’ to save face without escalating further. as the peace option was considered.

The announcement that the relevant parties had agreed to terms for a cease-fire:

As of about 2am, there was nothing left for him to do but let the relevant parties decide how they would conduct themselves:

Iran, for its part, openly bragged about firing munitions until the very last possible minute. But it is worth noting that (at the time of this writing) Americans did not seem to be among the targets they were hitting.

There were several waves of intense missile volleys and drone strikes including an apartment complex that was hit by a ballistic missile, resulting in an uncertain number of civilian fatalities.

It seemed as if Israel was going to exercise restraint, in case these were a last burst of aggression before a legitimate ceasefire. But eventually, their patience ran thin, as evidenced by back-to-back headlines from Times of Israel:

• 4 killed in Beersheba as Iran fires multiple missile salvos just before agreed-upon ceasefire
• Iran breaks ceasefire with missile attack on Israel; Katz instructs IDF to ‘respond forcefully in heart of Tehran’

There are several ways this can resolve.

The best-case scenario (from Trump’s perspective) is that they reset the ceasefire and try again.

But there are other outcomes. One of them was made very clear by Trump himself, when he said that he knew exactly where Iran’s leader was holed up, but he wasn’t looking to kill him. (At least, not yet.)

On the other hand, regime change is still a possible outcome.

It won’t even have to take American boots on the ground to make it happen if the locals decide they’re ready to revolt. Especially since we’re looking at a people who have tried more than once to rise up against their police state tyrants since the Dubya years.

As for Iran’s leader himself?

Before he looks to extend this conflict, he might want to think long and hard about how many of his senior military officials have experienced an ‘unexpected rapid disassembly’ at the hands of the IDF, Mossad, or Persian sympathizers, and what that might mean for his own expiration date.

It’s a lot easier to make bold ‘martyr’ declarations when it’s someone else’s life you are playing with.