Trump's Claims of Victory Clash With Iran War's Gritty Reality

Iran downed two American warplanes, contradicting President Trump's declarations that Tehran was militarily defeated. WASHINGTON -- Just 48 hours after President Trump had all but declared Tehran was militarily defeated and looking for a deal to end the war, Iran downed two American warplanes. Trump's repeated declarations that the war is nearly over are colliding with the gritty battlefield reality, some U.S. officials and analysts said. U.S. and Israeli strikes have killed much of Iran's leadership, sank its navy and degraded the country's missile program in more than a month of conflict. But Tehran on Friday rejected mediated efforts to negotiate an end to the war, saying U.S. demands are unacceptable. "Their back is to the water on a beach and they don't have an escape plan, and so, literally, it's fight or die," Alan Eyre, a former U.S. diplomat who served on the delegation that negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, said of the regime. "This is the hill they die on." On Saturday, Trump again threatened to escalate the war if Iran didn't fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the conflict's most crucial flashpoint. "Time is running out -- 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them," the president posted on Truth Social. Some of the president's top aides, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have shown the president short videos of airstrikes on Iranian targets, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. That has encouraged his view that the U.S. is on the cusp of a lopsided victory, the officials said. "They are toast and they know it," Hegseth said four days into the war, just one of a series of claims echoed by the commander in chief. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the U.S. was "ahead of schedule in accomplishing our mission." White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said the president had a full picture of the conflict and the military was prepared for contingencies. "The sheer dominance displayed is not hyperbole, it is the truth, and it will continue," Kelly said. Iran appears determined to carry out a war of attrition and demonstrate its control over Persian Gulf oil shipments, some Iran analysts say, to dissuade the U.S. and its allies from pondering future attacks and strengthening their leverage for any eventual talks. "Iran will not surrender the strait at this point," said Gregory Brew, an Iran analyst at the Eurasia Group consulting firm. If closing it was initially a tactic to pressure the U.S. and hold the global economy hostage, "it is now seen by the Iranians as a huge strategic gain and a source of economic and financial potential that they want to systematize and entrench." Trump has repeatedly turned to air power over the past year as a way to project force while avoiding entangling ground wars. "We're just going after targets and again, they have no antiaircraft. So we're just floating over the top looking for whatever we want and we're hitting it," Trump told a group of investors earlier this week. While Trump has said he is determined to avoid the mistakes of past conflicts, his recent remarks appear to overlook how different recent air wars have been from this one. The U.S. enjoyed the sort of uncontested dominance of the skies that Trump is now describing during the Pentagon's counterterrorism campaigns in the Middle East and Afghanistan in which the U.S. military faced off against militant groups with no air forces and little in the way of air defense. Military experts note that the air campaign the U.S. is now carrying out is far more challenging. The Trump administration got an early preview of the risks it might encounter when two American F-16s were nearly shot down last year over Yemen in the war with the Houthis, which Iran has equipped. The challenges in Iran are even greater due to Tehran's longstanding investment in air defenses and the duration of the conflict. Iran's military spokesman Col. Ebrahim Zolfaghari said Saturday that his country is rolling out new, domestically produced air-defense systems. Iran's already battered air defense is being tested amid an intense American bombing campaign in which the U.S. struck more than 12,300 targets and conducted more than 13,000 combat flights, but it is still resilient, especially at low altitudes. While the Pentagon has touted its prowess in air warfare, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been careful to describe the "increase in air superiority" as a gradual process in which pockets of air control have been established and then enlarged. It wasn't until Tuesday, more than four weeks into the war, that Caine said it was safe enough to send lumbering B-52 bombers over Iranian territory. Even so, military experts have long made a distinction between the sort of air superiority the U.S. has been working to achieve in Iran and what they call "air supremacy" -- the ability to move freely across an adversary's airspace without any interference. "This is the first war in decades when you have to once again fight to gain and maintain air superiority, and even then there is an air threat," said Kelly Grieco, an expert on air power at the Stimson Center. Trump has said the war would last between four to six weeks. It's now heading into the sixth week, with no signs of an imminent end. Trump on Wednesday said he expected the U.S. to strike remaining targets over a two to three week period. Yet Iran has embraced an asymmetric approach in which it has relied on drones, antiship missiles and other capabilities to exert control over the Strait of Hormuz, and to try to produce U.S. casualties in the hope that it will turn American opinion more strongly against the war.