Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026, will be commemorated as the date the ghosts of Jimmy Carter’s debacle at Desert One in 1980 – the worst military humiliation in U.S. history – were finally exorcised.

It took more than four and a half decades for a president of the United States to be willing to conduct the unfinished business of overthrowing the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamist regime in Iran, which began its long reign of terror by seizing 53 American hostages and keeping them in harsh conditions for 444 days from 1979 to 1981.

The feckless President Carter, who had already suffered the Soviet Union’s Christmas Eve invasion of Afghanistan a few months after a summit meeting with premier Leonid Brezhnev,  appeared before the press a few days after the Operation Eagle Claw rescue mission’s bloody failure during a refueling stop in a remote location hundreds of miles southeast of Tehran, killing five U.S. Air Force and three Marines. He remarked that “the ghoulish action of the terrorists and some of the government officials in Iran,” which included displaying the charred body parts of the U.S. personnel killed, “indicates quite clearly the kinds of people with whom we have been dealing in a peaceful effort to secure a resolution of this crisis.”

Yet until last weekend, America has continued to deal with and refused to remove these ghouls, playing them off Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, in which we hoped that somehow, as Henry Kissinger quipped, both sides could lose; letting pass the golden opportunity in 2009 to help liberate the brave Iranians who were shot and imprisoned for taking to the streets by the tens of thousands to overthrow Khomeini’s successor, the Ayatollah Khamenei (dispatched to his reward on Saturday courtesy of Israeli explosives and exquisite U.S. intelligence); making a lopsided nuclear weapons deal in 2015, bypassing U.S. Senate treaty ratification, with these same monsters, an agreement that included tens of billions of dollars for the Ayatollah to finance terrorism in the Middle East and beyond, all so President Barack Obama could play the genius peacemaker.

Experts on Islamic law, like the dean of the University of Cincinnati’s College of Law, Haider Ala Hamoudi, point out that “beheading certainly was the common way to carry out criminal prosecutions throughout Islamic history.” In the 21st century, it has been practiced by ISIS and Saudi Arabia, and, some years back, by Islamist Iran. But now President Donald Trump has taken the axe to the heads of those running Iran, decapitating the power structure of the regime itself.

The Hitleresque “Axis of Evil” label that was claimed to have been concocted by one of MSNBC’s Never Trumper Neocon talking heads, Canadian David Frum (it was actually coined by deceased George W. Bush wordsmith Michael Gerson), prepared the public in 2002 for a preemptive war in 2003 against an Iraq seeking nuclear weapons. Trump’s Operation Epic Fury is no less preemptive, and unlike with Saddam Hussein in Iraq, there are no doubts of Iran’s concrete nuclear weapon objectives.

Nation Building?

Still, Trump and hawkish allies of the president such as South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham vehemently oppose Wilsonian social engineering projects like the notion touted by another Never Trump neoconservative now dedicated to promoting himself by attacking the conservative movement. Max Boot pushed emphatically to establish a nation-building agency in the executive branch of the federal government.

Graham grew irritated on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday when asked if the U.S. has a plan to bring about a new government in Iran. “How many times do I have to tell you? Our job is to make sure Iran is no longer the largest state sponsor of terrorism, to help the people reconstruct a new government, no boots on the ground … once the people decide what they want next, I don’t mind helping them. But I know what they’re not gonna be allowed to do next: regenerate the largest state sponsor of terrorism.”

This is the kind of principled realpolitik that always made more sense than the outlandishly expensive, risky, globalist neocon enterprise of imagining that – managed by expert bureaucrats, of course – some Jeffersonian ideal of democracy could be transplanted to an alien soil bereft of Western sensibilities. In sync with Trump’s gruff persona, we use the unrivaled military power of the United States, joined by our allies if appropriate, to neutralize a regime that undeniably seeks to do the free world harm. In Iran’s case, the nightmarish nuclear future that Trump and our forces have averted comes after Tehran and its proxies killed or injured thousands of Americans since taking power in 1979, including more than 600 U.S. troops killed in Iraq by IEDs and other methods, and over 240 killed in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut by the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah.

This Trump Doctrine, a subject much speculated on over year one of his second term but now fully manifest, warns that the U.S., rather than deploying tens of thousands of ground troops for years and finding them to be far more vulnerable than had been imagined, will follow up an onslaught like Epic Fury with attacks on any new regime that constitutes a threat to America, its interests, and its allies.

“To the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump said in announcing the attacks in the wee hours of Saturday. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations … America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny, and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”

Flame of Freedom

This is similar, and yet so different, from President George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, which he told chief speechwriter Gerson he wanted to be “the freedom speech.” The 43rd president said, “because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom. And as hope kindles hope, millions more will find it. By our efforts, we have lit … a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power. It burns those who fight its progress. And one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.”

As disparaging, indeed insulting, as Trump has been to his immediate Republican predecessor in the White House, especially regarding President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, it is no stretch at all to view Epic Fury as a flame of that same fire of freedom from America that has, at long last, reached Iran, which has indeed been a dark corner for the tens of millions who call it home.

Moreover, the question screams to be asked regarding all the supposed neocon GOP presidential hopefuls of the past, the old guard presumably smothered in the ash heap of history: Would a President Nikki Haley have been bold enough to have launched an Operation Epic Fury? A President Jeb Bush? How about a President John McCain, who got himself into some hot water by singing “bomb, bomb, bomb – bomb bomb Iran,” then lost the presidential election to Obama in 2008? It was the non-professional politician who espoused America First, not these preferred candidates of the neo-Wilsonians, who, hand-in-hand with the most militarily aggressive of Israeli prime ministers, Benjamin Netanyahu, gave the green light to the most ambitious preemptive war the United States has ever undertaken.

And if this operation succeeds over the coming weeks, and Iranians, who were perhaps the most culturally Westernized people in the Islamic Middle East before Khomeini, do seize control of their destiny, and in the years ahead the wider Middle East is reshaped for the better, where does this leave the isolationists of the Make America Great Again movement, who had rejoiced that their leader, Donald Trump, was withdrawing the U.S. from the world?

Trump notably began comparing 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and, later, Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to Alfred E. Newman, the gap-toothed smiling mascot of Mad Magazine. It won’t be surprising if he starts lampooning the Mad MAGA contingent who think America can bury its head in the sand and cease fulfilling its role as the world’s lone superpower amidst threats from China, Russia, and North Korea, not to mention various groups of jihadists.

MAGA Crackup?

There is no pretending that in the contest of ideas in the Trump universe, the Mark Levins and the Lindsey Grahams have not won, and the Tucker Carlsons and Marjorie Taylor Greenes have not lost. The “Let Reagan Be Reagan” routine, the notion that the president’s “evil advisers” are always conning him into betraying his true principles, won’t go far when it comes to Trump. Nobody believes Donald Trump is not his own man and can be bamboozled by those he has hired. Trump never stops being Trump.

A Carlson podcast several months ago, garnering 1 million views on YouTube, is entitled “It’s Time to Decide: America First or Lindsey Graham’s Psychosexual Death Cult.” In it, Carlson claimed that Graham has been talking about “killing Americans on behalf of another country, a foreign power,” meaning Israel. It’s actually nothing new for Carlson, to whom Graham has been a bane for years. According to Carlson, Graham’s positions on national security are explained by his lack of a wife and children, the cause of an absence of concern for the future.

This weekend, Carlson called Trump’s attack on Iran “absolutely disgusting and evil” and claimed that, as regards MAGA, it will “shuffle the deck in a profound way.” It is hard not to see Trump returning that fire, even though his vice president, J.D. Vance, is Carlson’s close friend, a fact that may have led to Trump putting the Ohioan on the ticket in 2024.

Will the MAGA movement crack up, parts of it turning against the two-time president for betraying their isolationism? It’s difficult to see it happening over their leader vanquishing the preeminent terrorist enabler in the world, a regime that has murdered thousands of Americans, in what is, as Trump called it, “a noble mission.” Losers lie, and Carlson’s attacks on a hawk like Graham consist of dubiously contending that he takes pleasure in bloodshed because he advocates sticking the U.S. military on fanatical killers. More likely his and like voices will soon become less relevant – especially if Trump targets him for ridicule as a kook, even if the insults are subtler than his lambasting of “Marjorie Traitor Greene.”

It is said that Donald Trump is obsessed with securing his place in history, and that it has influenced some of his decisions for the worse. But giving the 92 million people of Iran a chance at liberation is likely to push far aside President Trump’s moral shortcomings and erratic style. As regrettable as they may be, they will be of as much pertinence in the eyes of history as George Washington’s wooden teeth.

Thomas McArdle was a longtime member of the Investor’s Business Daily editorial board and one of the founding members of Issues & Insights.