I&I Editorial
In the immediate aftermath of Iranian missile attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq – apparently designed to save face rather than kill Americans – is it an overstatement to apply Orwell’s ultra-totalitarian slogans to the left in the free country of the United States of America today? “War is peace,” The Party in “1984” assured its servile proles, “freedom is slavery,” and “ignorance is strength.”
After all, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi assured us that the people’s elected representatives could cast their votes for Obamacare while being entirely ignorant of the contents of the law. And the “Medicare for All” being pushed hard by top-tier Democrats running for president, such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, obviously means freedom of choice of health plan for no one. To have such liberty, they tell us, would make us slaves of the rich health insurers.
But national security is where the Orwellian really comes through. The reality of war is defeating the enemy, and oftentimes that necessarily means killing your adversary’s military strategists. For instance, over the course of seven months, exiled Czechoslovakian soldiers planned and successfully executed Operation Anthropoid, the 1942 killing of Reinhard Heydrich, a powerful Nazi security chief and one of the formulators of Hitler’s genocide of the Jews. A well-reviewed film of the operation was released several years ago.
To today’s Democrats, however, the war on terror apparently doesn’t mean killing terrorists – even when the terrorist mastermind taken out was actively planning mass killings of Americans and already had the blood of hundreds of Americans on his hands at the time of his demise, as with Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Quds Force.
Somehow, during World War II we never heard members of Congress say what a grinning Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Maryland Democrat, said on Fox News Sunday about killing a top enemy military commander: “You have to look at what the consequences are” of killing Soleimani. “We don’t go around killing all the very bad people in the world.”
We never heard President Franklin Roosevelt’s political opponents complain as Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrat Chris Murphy of Connecticut did on CBS on Sunday. He condemned the policy of executing “high-level political figures of sovereign nations” such as Soleimani, arguing that it risks U.S. officials being assassinated. Murphy’s preference would have been “more targeted strikes against other Iranian or Iranian proxy assets in the region.”
Contrary to Murphy’s characterization, “political figure” Soleimani, like Heydrich, wasn’t elected to the command of his killing force, or to anything else. But then the Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s “supreme leader,” isn’t elected either. Moreover, Iranian elections are themselves highly suspect.
To Murphy and plenty of other Democrats in Congress, killing terrorist commanders is the work of a disturbed mind. “The moment we all feared is likely upon us,” Murphy tweeted over the weekend. “An unstable president in way over his head, panicking, with all his experienced advisers having quit, and only the sycophantic amateurs remaining. Assassinating foreign leaders, announcing plans to bomb civilians. A nightmare.”
Kind of like the nightmare of Churchill bucking his experienced advisers in supporting Operation Foxley, the British special ops initiative designed to assassinate Hitler, which proved unnecessary.
To the U.S. left, bombs and bullets don’t stop terrorists; pieces of paper do. Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes, in a beatitude appearing in The Atlantic this week, assures us that the genius of Obama’s Iran nuclear deal was preventing all-out war with the Islamofascist state.
“It is likely, of course, that Trump couldn’t even describe the Iran deal’s terms,” Rhodes couldn’t help sneering, evoking unpleasant memories of how Jimmy Carter seemed to know every appendix of most government programs while Ronald Reagan was an amiable dunce. Yet Carter insisted on micromanaging the disastrous Desert One rescue attempt in Iran in 1980, and Reagan struck out Gorbachev and walked off the mound with the lead, leaving George H.W. Bush to close out the game and bring down the Soviet Union – something for decades considered an impossibility.
The real paper in Obama’s Iran deal isn’t anything anyone signed, though; Rhodes never gets around to mentioning the tens of billions of dollars in hard cash the deal made available for Tehran, much of which was utilized by Soleimani for terrorism. Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, in other words, was essentially a multi-billion-dollar bribe.
A War On Terror That Kills Terrorists
“To take a terrorist off the battlefield does not increase the risk of terror,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CBS on Sunday, and most Americans have enough common sense to agree with him. “The risk of terror is increased by appeasement. That’s what the Obama-Biden administration did; it’s what President Trump will never do.”
As Gen. David Petraeus, architect of George W. Bush’s successful 2007 Iraq surge and later tapped to be Obama’s CIA director, said on CBS of the elimination of Soleimani:
“This is bigger than bin Laden. It’s bigger than [deceased ISIS ruler] Baghdadi. This is the equivalent in U.S. terms of the CIA director, CENTCOM commander, JSOC [Joint Special Operations] commander, and presidential envoy for the region for Iran, the most powerful figure in Iran for the solidification of the Shia crescent, and also the operational commander of the actions that they were pursuing.”
There was a time when Democrats insisted that striking down terror strategists was what mattered. “Five years after 9/11, we have still failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden,” current House Majority Whip James Clyburn declared on the House floor in September 2006, for example. “The war in Iraq has distracted us from finding Osama bin Laden, dismantling al-Qaida and fighting the war on terrorism.”
Now, however, Democrat after Democrat hails talk and condemns military action against terrorism. Obama in June 2015 even issued “a new presidential policy directive” regarding “terrorist groups” in which “we are clarifying that our policy does not prevent communication with” such groups. The directive focused on terrorists holding American hostages, but it reversed the long-standing strong policy preference against negotiating with terrorists.
The death at American hands of Iran’s chief terrorist operative is “reckless” says Joe Biden, an “assassination” and “dangerous escalation,” in Sanders’ words, and “has taken us to the brink of war,” according to Pete Buttigieg. Warren also called it an “assassination.”
The truth is that Iran has been at war with America for more than 40 years, though much of Washington has been in denial about that reality. What Democrats offer as defense is “diplomacy” with little for Iran to fear buttressing it, and thus better described as pre-emptive surrender. It’s a principle that produces pacts such as Obama’s with Iran, which Tehran has shown in recent months amounts to kicking the nuclear terrorism can down the road – by maybe a year.
— Written by Thomas McArdle
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Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
War was declared by Iran’s actions a few days ago when they INVADED our Embassy. The Embassy is US Soil and is the VERY SAME as invading CONUS. So that is when the WAR commenced.
That was over 40 years ago in 1979.
Yes, and the war is still going on!
No Flip the brilliant. The attack on the U.S. Embassy in IRAQ snake is probably referring to happened just last week on New Years Eve!
He means the recent attack on the USA embassy in Baghdad
I really like your aspect on the Iranian conflict. It’s a great idea that those missiles were designed to save Iranian face in an upcoming potential. Two things bother me with this though. One, that Iran leadership doesn’t have the respect of its people, and I feel it’s handled differently than, say, China in saving face negotiating with Trump’s America.
The other thing that bothers me, and greatly, is that we just learned about a Ukranian 737 airline that crashed in Iran, with no chance of survivors, and worse, it strikes me, no pun intended, that Iran may not let true investigations happen.
Throw in their refusal to secure our Southern border and it becomes clear they are also unwilling to protect America
It is not that they are incapable–it is that anyone who really looks at them and their activities, knows they seek always and only to destroy America, that they may rebuild it in their own image in order to control all persons things.
President Donald J. Trump did the right thing in taking out Soiledman(sp intentional). While he was not the head of the snake, it sent a message to the head that we are capable of precise strikes against the leaders of Iran.
The response of the leftists(dims, commies, rinos, et al) is no surprise. They are so completely disconnected from reality in their quest for a return to power, they will do or say anything to harm this POTUS and the American people.
Wouldn”t surprise me to find out that some of them received kickbacks from the pallets of cash sent to Iran by obammy.
Just sayin’.
Self-sacrifice is incompatible with self-defense. Choose one.
Democrats are NOW incapable of protecting America!? I&I is WAY behind the curve…
It’ll be “alright on the night”, several news sources are reporting that Pelosi, Schumer et al are praying.
Who does an Atheist pray to?
The corrupt Socialist Democrat Establishment Elite are Anti-God and want to “fundamentally” destroy America.
I don’t think it’s a matter of capability but rather a desire to protect America. The Lefties have been huge proponents of the One World Order since FDR and their behavior has always been transparent. We’ve effectively been at war with Iran since Nov 1979 when they took 52 Americans hostage and held them for 444 days. The issues with Iran have always been tenuous but prior foreign policy has been to appease them and excuse their behavior. New sheriff in town and he believes in leading from the front from a position of power, not submission. A direct response to the architect of the attempt to overrun our Embassy was necessary. BTW… Why was an Iranian General freely roaming in Iraq and leading operations? Seems to me that THAT would be an act of war…
Are Democrats in capable or do they simply refuse to defend the USA?
Democrats ARE incapable of dealing or handling Iran, at least in regards to the welfare of this country and the American People. I would think that their attitudes, in the case of the events of the last few days, makes this very clear. Also there were some top democrats who actually saw funds come their way from Iran after backing the Obama pay out (of the Shah of Iran’s money which we had been holding) to our 40 year enemy the Ayatollah of Iran. All of this money has gone into war, terrorism, and missiles. In other words it all has gone for war against the west. Against US!!
Not just incapable, unwilling.
There is a lot of wordplay going on in the criticism of Trump for taking out Soleimani which is typical of propaganda. First of all, the terrorist chief was not an elected leader but a General, a soldier in uniform who would be fair game on any battle field. If a British soldier had killed German General Rommel while the Brits were fighting the Germans in Egypt during WWII what would be the problem with that? Secondly, call it an assassination if you will, what’s wrong with that? In Israel’s war with Iran and it’s other mortal enemies assassination has been a modus operandi on both sides for decades, see Rise Up and Kill, Ronen Bergman’s book on the subject. It may be risky but often the risks are worth it. In any case all of the prognosticators are dumber than a bag of hammers, they have no idea what is really going to happen next but are engaging in fear mongering in order to score political points. According to them President Trump was supposed to have blown up the world a long time ago, this about one of the most peace loving Presidents of our time.
Question: I have heard that the Iran “Defense” budget increased 90% to nearly $100,000,000.00 after we signed the JCPOA. So, did we essentially finance the ICBM’s that Iran launched clumsily towards are bases in Iraq?
Incapable? Or unwilling?
That’s the difference between dereliction and treason.
Of course they can’t defend us anymore. The emasculation of America was the globalist’s goal from day one. You can not serve two masters. You are either a global citizen…or an American. You can not be both.
Um. Democrats aren’t even remotely interested in protecting America. They are literally the greatest threat to this country that we have ever faced. Their desire to overthrow our Constitutional Republic far exceeds that of China, Russia, or the islamic world.
Just saw your site for the first time and was impressed. Added it to my Pocket so I can come back.
We’re most grateful. Please keep coming back!
With friends like the Democrats, who needs enemies. this quote sums them up.
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The authors criticism of Democrat duplicity is warranted, but it could easily be applied to the Republicans, and that is the real point. Trump was not elected because he was a Republican, on the contrary, he was elected because the Republicans are servants of the elites, as are the Dems. Trump was elected as a populist and he should be cognizant of this fact or the next president could be Bernie Sanders.
Even Petraeus was impressed; the most accomplished strategist of his generation. Ground commanders see taking out a leader who moved to the front to regroup and rally his forces for another go at you as a normal tactical decision, uncomplicated by TDS fever dreams. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/03/petraeus-on-qassem-suleimani-killing-says-trump-helped-reestablish-deterrence/
As one who lived in Iran for 2 years in my youth. 72-74 I lived in the Kerman Province. My father worked for a overseas contractor on a copper mining project in the providence.
I could write a book about that experience but let me sum it up.
The frwnch are a pozin, they are the ones who kept and supported the Ayatollah in those days. Without the frwnch interference in Iran there would be no Islamic State. Never forget the yuros cannot especially the frwnch be trusted.
We as a people alway over estimate our rivals. Take Russia for example south east of Moscow is the largest and most important Air base. You can google eather it and while you will find many exotic craft there from their space shuttle to 100’s of other aircraft the fact is the place is an utter dump. So dilapidated as to beg the question if it would be worth a single missle in the event of war.
The Russians are an intelligent people no doubt , but culturally they are lazy and disinterested.
Iran is a arse backwards nation with a life experience wholly different from anything an average American could comprehend. When we returned early and as time passed and things started to go sideways in Iran. Something I would learn about long before it ever made the news. Folks who we had gotten to know who were still their in 75,76 and 77. Would keep us up to date on the on goings. Back then when in country we didn’t call the trouble makers and there were a lot of them terrorists, we called them guerillas and radicals.
I had plent of run ins with the crazys even as a child . Most of us believed we were same and had no real understanding of the danger we lived in.
In 1977 those guerillas finally did something radical in blowing up the damn that was high on the mountain. Sending the flood water sweeping down the mountains killing thousands of Iranians and a hand full of Westerners living in Rafsanjan the village of 80,000 we had lived in.
When my mother got the call from her friend still living there I waited for the news of this to break here .. nothing not a single article in a paper not a single news story. Such is life in the third world.
As things continued to go sideway in Iran and finally the attack on the US embassy a place i had once visited. I couldn’t believe the cowardess the Carter administration exhibited. I like said could write a book about my experiences in Iran but understand once a month we traveled to Tehran, and many other places. Flying in to these airports you would see all the military equipment lining the run ways. In thenold airport in downtown Iran half thenaircraft there was US Air force planes. B-52’s Tankers .
About a year in my father learn a man he grew up with was stationed in Tehran in the air force and while he and his family were in country we would meet up with them in Terhan. Going to the water park and othe such things.
Carter blew it with Iran and the frwnch stuck it to is even to this day. Carter failings were cowardess , the frwnch did it for the money!
So where are we now well we have been in the mud and it can only go 3 ways from here.
1. Peace chances of that i put at 1% oh people will say the Mullahs are not suicidal, some maybe not but enough of their people that peace has little to no chance unless of course you want to join them in their quest to kill all Sunni and Jews.
2. Continue down the same path we have been on that will allow Iran to continue to strengthen their grip on the people and the region to the point to become to strong to dislodge.
3. Dirrect military conflict with a strong supported insurgency whos goal is for the Iranian people to topple the Mullahs.
Peace is not in the lexicon of Mullahs nor their follwers. Do not believe for a moment that it is.
Central to their faith is that they are to bring about armageddon. This not a fringed sec or anything but a centeral tenant to their belief system.
When I lived in Iran There were people who practiced Buddhism, Zerostarism, Christianity, Hebrew and even Hinu openly today those folks are locked in closets treat as less than citizens and severely restricted in all things public.
Living in a providence in Kerman second only to Qom as the center of the Islamic revolution. I witnessed daily the continued erosion of the secular efforts put forth by the Shaw. I also meet and knew many Shiites who believed and supported the advancements to the Shaws efforts to bring Iran into a Western style nation. No doubt many of then did not survive the revolution as I also witnessed efforts to intimidate and suppress them who supported such works.
I believe for many the people of Iran today after 40 years of the Mullahs terrors have many of their own reasons to see this government toppled not just reason we may have. The solution I believe we should be working towards is the one we are currently on the path for and that just maybe in the next year or so the Mullahs with take that step to far and bring on an concerted effort by the west to topple the Mullahs while suporting factions in side Iran to do the grunt work.
This should be our plan and to date un Trunp other then the obama hack and then left msm everything is moving along in order for this to happen.
With each Iranian agression Trump has shown deference to taking immediate tit for tat action. Allowing Iran to play the bad guy while showing restraint.
Saudi oil field attacks, forces the Sauds to step in their own defense, while giving excuse to America fortify and move additional forces into the region.
Same goes for the restraint in the downing of drones.
The attack on the embassy in Iraq is the turning point. Trump has played this event to maximum advantage add in the shot down of the Ukrainian Airliner its a two fer.
Iran will be quite for the coming months as they know they are staring down the barrel of a gun.
Meanwhile we should take it to the qud forces all over the region and start supporting with arm and cash inside insurgents in Iran. While prepairing for the next event which if all things are ready should be the finally.
Their are two types Mullahs those that are in it for power and wealth and those who believe in the armageddon prophecy of shiite faith. When it comes to who has control the purest or the greedy its the former not the latter, so we should prepare for war on our terms not theirs.
“The risk of terror is increased by appeasement. That’s what the Obama-Biden administration did; it’s what President Trump will never do.”