I know it’s not fashionable among some on the right, but we have a moral and strategic obligation to attack Iran right now. Not later. Not down the road, after more bogus negotiations with these glorified bazaar merchants who specialize in stringing along credulous Westerners until they get what they want. Today. We have the forces in place, and if we don’t do it, they’re going to end up with the bomb.
They cannot end up with the bomb. They’ll use it. It’s hard to mutually assure destruction with a psychotic death cult.
But that’s not all America, in conjunction with Israel and supported by a bunch of Arab nations, who would be cheering from the sidelines, needs to do. Yes, we must comprehensively take out its nuclear capacity – it looks like these guys are weeks from enriching enough uranium to make a nuclear weapon. We also need to obliterate their ballistic and drone capabilities. We also need to wipe out their external terrorism capacity and internal security apparatus, and we need to kill the key mullahs.
No more aspirin factory strikes after midnight. No more playing footsie. They started it, we need to finish it. I’m not suggesting an invasion of Iran – if the Iranian people want to overthrow these seventh-century scumbags and retake their heritage as a great nation, that’s on them. We’ve done enough nation-building. But the mullahs can’t remain a danger to us, and right now they are.
Nuclear weapons mounted on ballistic missiles are a direct threat to the United States of America, as well as our friends and allies around the world. That’s indisputable. Those hand-waving away the mullahs' sordid track record of murder and atrocity committed in the name of that bizarre dictatorship are simply not facing reality.
And I like a lot of the people doing that hand-waving. I respect them, and their opinions should be considered. Maybe I'm wrong. I'm willing to be talked out of this. I would prefer not to go to war. But I'd also prefer not to be obliterated by a bunch of lunatics trying to resuscitate the 53rd missing ayatollah or whatever the hell they're on about. These guys hate us and want us dead. Pretending that America doesn’t have enemies around the world who want to butcher us is both crazy and wrong, and we dare not be guided by that childlike and sophomoric fantasy.
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Nor do I want to hear any crap about how "America started it." It’s objectively false – we did not start this, except in the sense we refuse to embrace their brand of primitive fanaticism – but I don’t care if we did. You don’t ever get to threaten or kill Americans, two things these savages have been doing for nearly half a century. They took our people hostage in 1979, and eight of our men were killed trying to rescue them. They were behind the Beirut bombings that killed hundreds of American diplomats and Marines. They backed terrorists who slaughtered Americans around the world. They armed and led the Shia thugs who maimed or killed thousands of our troops in Iraq. Payback is in order.
We talk a lot about a Jacksonian foreign policy, where America doesn’t go looking for trouble. But there’s another side to that coin. And that side depicts us wiping out anybody who dares kill Americans. The fact that we’ve allowed these barbarians to murder our people without retaliation is not only a moral disgrace but an invitation for every psychopath with a religious vision and an IED to make some Americans dead.
This is intolerable. The proper state of the world is one in which the mere thought of harming an American never arises because of the certainty that to do so will bring death to the terrorists, to everybody around the terrorists, and to everybody who helped the terrorists.
Andrew Jackson wasn’t just a big talker. If you messed with him, you died. This is actually the peaceful way – you come down hard once, and you don’t have to do it again. To be weak is to invite more conflicts; we’ve had plenty because of our weakness. Many of America’s foreign policy disasters since World War II, when Harry Truman had the stones to nuke Japan until it begged to surrender, have been a direct result of our refusal to make attacking America or Americans something less than an automatic apocalypse.
True Jacksonian foreign policy is tough but fair. It’s tough because if you screw with us, you die. It’s fair because if you don’t screw with us, we leave you alone.
Which brings us back to Iran. Iran is a threat to the United States. It has maimed and murdered our people. It has, directly and through proxies, threatened to kill our President, though, in that way it’s basically channeling much of the Democrat party. It must be made an example of.
And now is the time to do it. We have the forces in place. The Israelis are chomping at the bit to help, which is very useful. According to open-source information, at least six B-2 bombers are on-station and can attack dug-in facilities. Two carrier battle groups and cruise missile subs are also in the region, as well as other forces. They can’t stay on-station forever. The Iranians know this. That’s why they’re dragging out these bogus negotiations. Eventually, those forces will have to come home. We can’t be poised to do this forever, or even for very long.
Now, there may be good reasons not to do it, should facts we do not know support holding off. We don’t know the classified information about Iranian targets and whether they are actually vulnerable to our weapon systems. From open sources, it appears they are, but that might not be true. Second, we may lack the capacity to do what’s necessary. We have a pretty heavy force forward-deployed there now, but that might not be enough. Further, we might have used up too many weapons supplying Ukraine and that endless meat grinder of a war, as well as bombing whatever the Houthis are further back into the Stone Age. There may be other factors that we are unaware of that make an attack a bad idea.
But I kind of doubt it.
There’s disagreement within the administration, as there should be. The last thing we want is the kind of certainty and unanimity that got us into Iraq and kept us in Afghanistan long after we should’ve left with our enemies dead and their lands in ruins. The sorry legacy of the disaster that was the global war on terrorism has made conservatives justifiably cynical about the use of American power. But the lesson should not be that America must sit by while people threaten and kill us. The lesson is that we must use our power wisely to win. This means leveraging our advantage to brutally defeat the enemy so comprehensively and quickly it cannot respond. We knew how to do that once. I was there at the VII Corps main headquarters in Desert Storm when our forces annihilated an entire national army in 100 hours in a victory that was on par with the victories of Alexander, Hannibal, and Julius Caesar. Defeat is a choice, but so is victory.
Being wise about using power is not the same as never using power. Nor should we be bound by guilt over largely imagined wrongs allegedly committed by America. Let’s be really clear about something. Nothing America has done to Iran justifies Iran killing hundreds or thousands of Americans. It doesn’t justify them killing one American. But the mullahs did kill Americans, and they must pay.
Now is the time. We’re not going to have this opportunity again. We can’t let the mullahs slither out of justice once more. The second they have an advantage, they will use it, and more Americans will die. We can’t be nice enough to them so that they stop thinking of us as the Great Satan. They want us dead. We should take them seriously and act seriously.
Hopefully, this negotiation nonsense is just for show to mollify the weak hearts of the West, of which there are far too many. The mullahs are never going to give up their nuke program. They know it, and we know it, and anybody who doesn’t know it is either a liar or a halfwit. Pull off the damn Band-Aid and get this done.
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