Iran

Trump has elevated the Middle East wars as a major issue in 2020, not his strong suit. For, as the military says, “The enemy gets a vote!” as to how much blood, including American blood, will be shed in 2020. With the killing of the general and the possibility of a U.S.-Iran war rising, Bernie is the Democratic candidate whose anti-war credentials are the longest and strongest and whose position of avoiding war with Iran is most in sync with the majority of the party he seeks to lead. Sanders could ride anti-war sentiment to victory in Iowa and New Hampshire and have the wind behind him going into South Carolina and Super Tuesday. He could occupy in 2020 the space Trump occupied in 2016.

That jetliner wasn’t quite the disaster Chernobyl was, but neither is the Iranian mullahocracy the Soviet Union. It’s a sleazy, illegitimate Third World thugocracy engaged in terrorism, international organized crime, and assorted dirty tricks designed to intimidate and destabilize its neighbors and others around the world, and it has been running a con game on the entire planet for the last 40 years. The mullahs have never delivered on any of their promises to the people of that country, and they’re hated by the Iranian people. It’s only a matter of time before the bell tolls for them. Now we’ll see how long the incompetence and lies can be carried by a failed regime.

Among the Democrat voters, there are patriots, including those who have served our country with honor and who continue serving today. Those Dem voters are disgusted with you and, if I was cynical, and I am totally cynical, I would issue them a heartfelt invitation to join the GOP, where people who love America are welcome. Walk away, Democrat patriots. Welcome to the GOP. Regardless, you don’t take our disagreements outside of the country. You don’t fight in front of foreigners. And you don’t ever take the enemy’s side. These are just basic, threshold requirements to call yourself a “patriot.” Unless you don’t want to be a patriot. Admit you are too weak to stand up for it.

Demonstrators have taken to the streets calling for Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to step down and for those responsible for shooting down the Ukrainian jetliner killing all 176 aboard prosecuted. The weakness of Iran’s system of Wilayat al-Faqih has never been more obvious and the opportunity to undermine it from within rarely greater.

Trump never promised anyone he’d refuse to respond to threats to Americans, or honor the unspoken rules protecting a bloodstained high official of a hostile foreign regime. If Trump had said any of these things, it would have been out of character. The killing of Soleimani is likelier to add to the legend of Donald Trump for his most loyal backers instead of give them pause. In their view, here is President Trump once again doing what no other president would do, taking an inordinate amount of criticism for it, often from a perpetually hysterical press corps, and having it work out (so far). Killing of Soleimani was an unmistakable expression of Trump’s distinctive worldview.

Pelosi still believes in the fiction otherwise known as the Iranian nuke deal. They bought Barack Obama’s risible claim that the deal — not a treaty — would lure Iran back into the community of nations. Obama even sweetened the pot with billions of dollars, and skirted banking rules to deliver pallets of cash to Tehran. In fact, it was quickly clear that Soleimani used much of that money to fund armed proxy groups throughout the Mideast. As Trump said Wednesday, “Iran went on a terror spree funded by the money from the deal and created hell in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq.” That blood money is part of what Pelosi wants to protect with her war powers resolution on Iran.

Speaker Pelosi is terrifying when she gets down to business. Mrs. Pelosi’s legislation was aimed at Mr. Trump. In all of the gravity and terror of the past week, Mrs. Pelosi’s only urgent response is to constrain the American president against Iran and the terrorists who chant, “Death to America!” “The administration conducted a provocative, disproportionate airstrike against Iran, which endangered Americans and did so without informing Congress,” she sniffed. What, precisely, would have been a more proportionate response for a terrorist plotting to kill American troops and diplomats Mrs. Pelosi did not say. She was off to celebrate the wedding of Barbara Lee.

Iran’s theocratic leadership believes war is the path to revealing the “12th Imam,” their version of the Christian second coming. The mullahs of Iran are true believers who it appears are willing, even eager, to die for their cause, or more accurately have others die in their place. Iran and its proxies kill U.S. troops, along with Iranian and foreign civilians and we are supposed to take it. If America responds to Iran, as President Trump has done (unlike Obama and Clinton), we are the enemy of peace and guilty of “escalating” the conflict. War is never a one-way street, unless one side pre-emptively surrenders. Victory must be our goal and should be defined.

Constant provocation is a not a good alternative, but it’s probably seen as preferable to the other poor choices. The strategic aim in such endless tit-for-tat would be to wear down the patience of the U.S. public in an election year. Iran’s goal might be something like re-creating the melodrama of the 1979–81 hostage crisis, Saddam Hussein’s rope-a-dope strategy, or Bill Clinton’s three-month bombing campaign in Yugoslavia. Tehran hopes for American strategic ossification that could prove politically toxic. But that scenario, too, is unlikely. As long as Trump replies with air power disproportionate to any Iranian attacks, he, not Tehran, governs the tempo of the confrontation.

We are inclined to agree that raising the war powers issue at this time gives aid and comfort to the enemy – but the enemy in question is not Iran, it is the Democrats who want only to make points with their Trump-hating base and render President Trump impotent in the face of Iranian threats and aggression.

There's nothing wrong with skeptical questions of our government. But why is it impossible to celebrate blowing up the man responsible for the deaths of untold thousands? And why do the media so often fail to muster that same sort of skeptical questioning for the tyrants and thugs opposing American interests? Theirs is a long, sordid history of offering unchallenged platforms, and even buttery sympathy, to our enemies. If our press were truly patriotic, they would question our tyrannical enemies at least as skeptically as they question our own elected leaders. Instead, they're so hungry for access, for a big "get," that they sound like butlers and maids of the world's worst thugs.

The Iran deal was not disastrous merely because Obama accepted a ludicrously weak inspections protocol, although he did. It was awful because it still enabled the regime to become a more powerful conventional threat by providing the mullahs with the money to pursue terrorism and the freedom to develop ballistic missiles. Furthermore, restrictions imposed by the deal would have started to sunset after 10 years, meaning the terror state still maintained its long-term ability to develop nuclear weapons. The Obama administration and its allies are attempting to blame Trump for bad Iranian behavior to distract people from recognizing the failed legacy of the deal.

Despite what the Democrats and their media allies want Americans to believe about President Trump and his foreign policy, Trump has been remarkably consistent in his approach to rogue states, such as North Korea and Iran. And the Trump doctrine makes a lot more sense than sending them pallets of cash or refusing to engage with them and pretending they are not there.

We are deeply entangled in Iraq, a place Mr. Trump and many Americans would dearly like to depart. Along comes Iran, which launches an attack on our embassy compound in Baghdad, ordered by this thug Soleimani. What on God’s green Earth is Mr. Trump supposed to do in response to such an attack? Write a check for more than $1 billion and give it to the mullahs? Send a plane under the cover of darkness carrying pallets of $400 million in unmarked cash for the ayatollah? Wipe out effective sanctions so that Soleimani might sow even more terrorism around the world? Well, that is precisely what the previous administration did. But not Mr. Trump. Instead, he killed the thug.

The most important thing to come out in the post-Soleimani statements from the White House was this comment from National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien: "I think the President made it very clear that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon and I think we have got a lot of friends and allies both in the region and in Europe who are committed to that outcome.”

As we have explained on numerous occasions Iran has declared war on America and the West, so whether we wish it, or not, we are in a war with the Islamic Republic, and whether we wish it, or not, one of the principle battlefields in that war is Iraq, where, until President Trump took him out, Qasem Soleimani was directing operations against us with impunity.

As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates once said, Joe Biden has been "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." Now Biden is lying and trying to rewrite history to cover up those miscalculations and failures in judgement. Here are six recent lies about foreign policy from Joe Biden.

A weaker Iran foolishly positioned itself into the role of aggressor, at a time of a shot economy, eroding military strength, waning terrorist appendages abroad, and little political leverage or wider support. China and Russia are confined to hoping the U.S. is somehow, somewhere bogged down. Europe will still lecture on the fallout from canceling the Iran Deal, but quietly welcomes the fact that Iran is weaker than in 2015 and weaker for them is far better. The current Iranian crisis is complex and dangerous. And by all means retaliation must be designed to prevent more Iranian violence and aggression rather than aimed at a grandiose agenda of regime change or national liberation. But so far the Iranians, not the U.S., are making all the blunders.

Rather than ask how to whip Iran, we should be wondering if our blood and treasure is better served in defending against the real threats to our homeland. Unending American war in the Middle East drains our coffers, military strength, and political will, all to the glory of Moscow and our true enemies in Beijing. Meanwhile, foreign policy hawks in Washington are terrified Russia might follow our lead, as they have in Syria. Since his inauguration, President Donald Trump has killed the leader of ISIS, and now the Iranian general responsible for hundreds of American dead. He’s done a great deal to clean up the mess his predecessors left him in Iraq and Syria. Now it is time to disengage.

France, Britain and Germany, co-signers of the nuclear deal who have sought to maintain the agreement, now appear to believe the Iranians are violating the spirit if not the letter of the deal by testing nuclear-capable ballistic missiles. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif calls the allegation "a desperate falsehood." The Europeans are "bowing to US bullying," and covering up their own "miserable incompetence," he said. Two U.S. Defense Secretaries, Leon Panetta and James Mattis, called this weekend for U.S.-Iranian negotiations. And Trump's tweet on the prisoner exchange indicates a receptivity to the idea. For all involved, jaw-jaw would seem a better option than war-war.