Forty Years in the Making- Trump Responds to Iran while Democrats Dither
It was November 1979, and we were in the first semester of our third year at university, just twenty-one years of age. After two attempts earlier that year, student followers of the Imam line, who supported the Iranian revolution overthrowing Shah Reza Pahlavi, stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran taking fifty-two American diplomats and citizens hostage, and keeping them captive for 444 days, only to release them on the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as the fortieth President of the United States in January, 1981.
What ultimately doomed the Carter presidency, under whose watch the takeover took place, proved to be the start of a forty-year long standoff with the newly formed Islamic Republic of Iran, ruled by a series of fanatic ayatollahs. Their hate-filled doctrine of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism spilled over into adjacent countries, where the Iranian Islamist regime spread their jihadist dogma in pursuit of a twelfth imam, who would bring on the apocalypse once the entire world submitted to Islam. That is what “Islam” literally means…submission.
In financing and provisioning terrorist attacks throughout the world, the Islamist regime was opposed by the United States, but in its opposition the United States mired itself in a trap of seeking international cooperation and approval in an effort to quarantine Iran from the world’s financial community. In doing so, our foreign policy essentially waited on our nominal allies in Europe to follow suit, but the lure of Iranian oil undercut our efforts to gain such cooperation, and establish international pressure against Iran. Because they would rather continue to purchase oil from Iran, our European partners were all too eager to sign onto a flawed treaty with Iran, where the United States, under Barack Obama, transferred $1.8 billion in unmarked bills to Iran, in exchange for an unverifiable promise on the part of Iran not to develop a deliverable nuclear weapon for ten years. Never mind the fact that ever since the transfer of the cash, the Iranian regime has violated the terms of the treaty by continuing to build and operate centrifuges which enable the regime to produce weapons-grade uranium en masse. As predicted by those who opposed Obama’s disastrous “treaty” with Iran, the money has been used to finance terrorism throughout the world and produce extremely effective IEDs, which have cost hundreds of Americans their very lives and many more their arms and legs. Amongst much scorn from the international community, as well as from the globalist/internationalist deep state apparatchiks in Washington, President Trump pulled out of Obama’s raw deal, insisting that a new agreement be drawn up that would forever ban Iran from possessing nuclear weapons, which they have vowed to use to destroy Israel and the United States.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force Commanding General Qassem Soleimani, a man only second in power to the ayatollah in Iran, has been coordinating the Iran-supported terrorist activities in adjoining Iraq and supplying these terrorists with deadly weapons used to maim and kill innocent civilians and U.S. troops, alike. Having pinpointed the general’s location at the Baghdad airport, President Trump ordered a drone strike on his position Thursday killing six, including the general and the man who coordinated the protests against the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, earlier this week.
While the mainstream media and Democrats, alike, have roundly scorned the President for both launching the attack, and the fact he wisely chose not to inform Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, prior to launching the attack (the Democrats would have surely botched the attack by blabbering to the press beforehand), Trump has now served notice to the Iranian regime that the time for playing the U.S. for a fool, as they did under Obama, has come to an end. In back-channel communications with the powers to be in Tehran, Trump has promised the regime that should they choose to further escalate hostilities with the United States, they will get the war they have been seeking for four decades, knowing all-too-well that they could face obliteration should such a war commence.
Critics insist that Trump is getting mired in yet another ground war in the region, which goes against the President’s oft-stated policy of avoiding endless entanglements with no clear objective or winning strategy. That would be true under Obama’s suicidal rules of engagement, hamstringing the military in how they conduct such operations. That would most certainly be true under the constraints of the Bush(s) and Clinton administrations, who insisted on limited engagements which avoided direct conflict with Iran.
In this maelstrom, Trump realizes that the time has come to end Iranian attempts to seek hegemony over the region, now that Iran is conducting military and naval exercises with both China and Russia. While he desperately seeks to avoid an all-out war with Iran (and China and Russia, by proxy) by showing them, at long last, the consequences of their actions- both in the region and wherever they spark terrorist activities around the world, Trump is effectively putting the regime on notice that this must all stop, or else…and isn’t it about time, after forty years?
And yet, while Trump is leveraging further sanctions and military operations against the regime, like Thursday’s attack on Soleimani, the Democrats in Congress dither about an absurd impeachment farce that will ultimately fail and the promise of ever more and more hearings…
…and these are the same stooges who think they know better!
-Drew Nickell, 3 January 2020
© 2020 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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