Jim Hughes

🚨Governor DeSantis says fighting a regime-change war in Iran on behalf of Israel was an absolute MISTAKE. Says Iran is now more emboldened than ever. Calls out Rubio, Vance and Hegseth for sending conflicting messages about the actual objective. “Israel went and took out the Ayatollah. They took out clerics. There were U.S. strikes, obvious. And I think the goal was that the regime's going to collapse, and then something new would take its place. Now, the problem with that is that all the people that had been protesting in January were all dead by the time they did it in late February. And so that was done. That was a decapitation strike. That's like the point of no return, right? I mean, once you do that, it's like, how do you bring it to a successful conclusion? You just have a site you need to take care of. You did that in 2025. So then it kind of was like, okay, what's the thing? Did we win? Did we not? And then they responded, and they responded in ways that have caused problems economically. So what's the definition of victory at this point with that? January or June of 2025, you say, hey, we have these two problematic sites. We're going to take them out. We did that, and that was successful. This time, I think the goal, certainly from Israel, was that you'd have a regime change in Iran. Now, that's not something that we're going to be able to impose. That would require massive amounts of boots on the ground, massive amounts of treasure that the American people are not interested in providing. And so that's why I think the second time has caused more problems in terms of public acceptance and all these other things. I would love for Iran to have a pro-Western constitutional republic as their government, because the Persian culture has been very rich for centuries. The Islamic revolution really just snuffed that out, and it's been a terror state since then. I would love for that to happen. I don't think that us imposing it is something that would ultimately be successful. But once the Ayatollah is taken out, once these clerics, I think their goal was to have the government collapse, and that didn't happen. So now the people that are there probably are more powerful than they were prior to this. And what incentive do they have to do some type of deal? I hear like, oh, just negotiate a deal. Wait a minute. You took out the supreme leader. They view us as the great Satan. So my fear is that it's going to kind of drag on and kind of continue to be a sore spot given the trajectory it's gone. And I think that the midnight hammer in 25 was effective. I think this time has been, you got to know, what are you trying to accomplish? What's the concrete objective? Are you going to do it? And then you should be able to say, we accomplished the objective. There was never really a concrete, Hegseth said one thing, Secretary of State said another, Vice President, they all said a little bit different when this was launched. And that's, I think, been part of the problem.”