The Patriot Post® · Trump Acts While Dems Posture

We’ve come a long way since 1979, since the Jimmy Carter years, since Iranian students stormed our embassy in Tehran and kept 66 American hostages imprisoned there for 444 humiliating days as “guests of the Ayatollah.”

No, Donald Trump isn’t Jimmy Carter. Nor, as our Mark Alexander noted yesterday, is he like any U.S. president since Carter.

If the reasons for our weekend decapitation of the Iranian regime seem somewhat murky, you’re not alone. Was it because Iran’s nuclear program posed an imminent threat? That seems unlikely, given that, as The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson pointed out just hours before we joined with Israel in a precision strike on Iran, Trump has repeatedly said that we’ve “obliterated” that nation’s nuclear weapons program.

Since then, however, a new threat had arisen: that of Iran’s ballistic missile program. As Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton put it this morning, the Iranians “have a vast missile arsenal that far exceeds [U.S. and Israeli] combined missile defenses, and it gets worse every single month. That is an unacceptable threat to the United States.”

I can believe that. And, as President Trump said in his eight-minute address over the weekend, “We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be, again, totally obliterated.”

The president called it “a noble mission,” and it is, even if we only consider all the American blood that’s been drying on the hands of this Islamist regime since it came to power in 1979.

Last night, Vice President JD Vance put it this way: “I think the president just wants to make it clear to the Iranians and to the world that he is not going to rest until he accomplishes that all-important objective of ensuring that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon — not just for the next few years, not just because we obliterated Fordow or some other enrichment facility, but because the Iranians themselves commit long-term to not building a nuclear weapon.”

Donald Trump isn’t a nation-builder, though, and he doesn’t do endless wars. In fact, he got elected in part by rightly denouncing those endeavors. And former Deputy National Security Advisor Victoria Coates suggested this weekend that this conflict has “some built-in off ramps.” She’s not alone in thinking that the military aspect of it won’t last beyond “a couple of weeks, maybe a month at most.”

Still, Trump yesterday said he wouldn’t rule out American ground troops in Iran, although this might merely have been a wartime president’s message that nothing is off the table. “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it.”

Trump noted that operations are “way ahead of schedule,” and War Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has experienced our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq firsthand, added, “President Trump ensures our enemies understand we’ll go as far as we need to go to advance American interests. But we’re not dumb about it. You don’t have to roll 200,000 people in there and stay for 20 years.”

Hegseth continued: “This is not Iraq. This is not endless. I was there for both — our generation knows better, and so does this president. He called the last 20 years of nation-building wars dumb and he’s right. This is the opposite. This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission: Destroy the missile threat, destroy the navy, no nukes.”

There it is, buttoned up tightly: “Destroy the missile threat, destroy the navy, no nukes.”

But Hegseth also mentioned a word yesterday that Trump didn’t mention in his address: blackmail. As he put it, Iran “was building powerful missiles and drones to create a conventional shield for their nuclear blackmail ambitions.”

Think about it: If we’re concerned about a bad actor acquiring nuclear weapons, we have a limited opportunity for action. And that window would’ve closed once Iran acquired nukes. We need only look to the Korean Peninsula to see what happens when a rogue nation gets nukes and threatens its neighbors with annihilation.

Congress will get its briefings today on our objectives, as well as information about casualties. At this point, six Americans have died and 18 others have been injured from an Iranian retaliatory strike on an American operations center on Sunday.

As for congressional Democrats and all their talk about the War Powers Act of 1973, it’s all rubbish. The Trump administration briefed the Gang of Eight committee heads in advance of the Iran mission, and that was their duty. All this phony talk about war powers is pure posturing, purely symbolic. The United States has one commander-in-chief, not 535. And while the Constitution gives Congress Article I authority to declare war, it’s the president who retains Article II authority to make war.

In the meantime, our forces need to keep searching for missiles and drones. Last night, two drones hit the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. No one was there, so the extent of the damage was a small fire.

This reminds us that while we’re hitting the Iranian missiles and their launchers, we should also be paying attention to Iran’s drone capability. Why? Because a typical Iranian drone costs around $25,000, and it causes us to use multimillion-dollar missiles to shoot them out of the air. You do the math.

This also points to the dangers that Americans located in the Middle East now face, and there are approximately 300,000 Americans there at any given time. As Fox News’s Jennifer Griffin reported this morning, the State Department is ordering the departure of all Americans from the Middle East.

Those dangers aren’t just limited to the Middle East, either. In Austin, Texas, early Sunday morning, a 53-year-old naturalized citizen from Senegal opened fire outside a downtown night spot, killing two and wounding 14 before Austin Police shot and killed him. Authorities are exploring the possibility that this was a terrorist attack, and they just might be onto something: The killer’s sweatshirt said “Property of Allah,” his T-shirt had an Iranian flag on it, and he had a copy of the Quran in his car. How many potential Islamist terrorists poured across our wide-open southern border during the Biden years? We might soon get a sense.

Finally, this Riyadh drone strike also tells us something about the sort of threat we’re going to face from Iran going forward — a necessarily decentralized retaliation. Since we’ve decapitated the government, we have Iranian Republican Guard commanders and their missile units located all around the country, making individual decisions about what to do and what American and allied targets to fire at.

As constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley put it: “When you decapitate the government, most of these units are apparently operating on prior orders. So the United States government has to find these units, find these threats, and take them out. … Once we’re in a full-fledged conflict like this, everything is imminent and all attacks are pre-emptive.”

In the meantime, then, our forces will continue to wage war. And the Democrats will continue to focus-group their best talking points about “imminent threats” and “war powers,” and they’ll continue to gnash their teeth about the inconvenient truth that Donald Trump is the most forceful, most consequential American president of their lifetimes.