'Telling' evidence shows Trump’s defeat 'only a matter of time’: foreign policy expert

Foreign policy expert Trita Parsi flagged an “anecdotal piece of evidence” Sunday as evidence that President Donald Trump’s total “defeat” in his deeply unpopular war against Iran was no longer a question of if, but rather of when.

That evidence was a photograph he shared last week that quickly went viral on social media, a photograph of what appears to be the wing flap of a U.S. military KC-130 tactical transport aircraft with dust-scrawled messages viciously mocking President Donald Trump and his war against Iran. Parsi’s post has been viewed more than 18 million times as of Sunday.

While Parsi initially said the photo was sent to him “from the field,” he expanded on its source in an analysis published Sunday on his Substack.

“One anecdotal piece of evidence is quite telling. A US service member based in the Persian Gulf sent me a picture of what soldiers had written in the dust covering the flaps of an aircraft. I tweeted it a few days ago. It quickly went viral,” Parsi wrote.

“The common theme running through the scribbles is a belief that the war does not serve US interests, coupled with the assertion that it was started on behalf of Israel.”

While Parsi admitted the photo to be an entirely anecdotal piece of evidence of low troop morale, the Iran war’s unprecedented unpopularity among Americans from the outset, coupled with other discussions Parsi said he’s had with “men and women in uniform,” led him to believe the United States’ defeat in the conflict was simply a “matter of time.”

“This is precisely why you don’t start wars of choice – wars that do not serve the national interest. Because the first people to recognize their unjustness will be the servicemen and women on the frontlines,” Parsi wrote.

“And when their morale collapses, defeat is only a matter of time. Put differently: When a war has no morale behind it, winning simply means ending it. There is no other form of ‘winning’ in such an unjust war.”