(Alas in this forum it has become necessary to attest to one's faithfulness to the cause lest he finds himself rather than his reasoning assailed so, for the record, I have long maintained here that Iraq was the wrong war partly because it made a war against Iran impossible. Iran has always been the real threat, the possibility of Iran obtaining atomic weapon would be devastating for America's national interests and for the world because it would invert the balance of power in the Persian Gulf, because it would cause the Arab nations to disintegrate even more, further cause them to go nuclear themselves, Spike the price of oil, tie America's hands militarily, much as they are tied against North Korea, and certainly raise the risk of atomic devastation.)
Buchanan argues another side which is plausible and on first examination, factually accurate:
Iran has no nuclear weapons, has never had nuclear weapons, and has never even produced bomb-grade uranium. According to our own intelligence agencies in 2007 and 2011, Tehran did not even have a nuclear weapons program. Under the 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA, the only way Iran could have a nuclear weapons program would be in secret, outside its known nuclear facilities, all of which are under constant U.N. inspection.
Where is the evidence that any such secret program exists? As for the U.S. charge that Iran is "destabilizing" the Middle East, it was not Iran that invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, overthrew the Gadhafi regime in Libya, armed rebels to overthrow Assad in Syria, or aided and abetted the Saudis' intervention in Yemen's civil war.
Trump pulled out of and trashed Obama's nuclear deal. He imposed the sanctions that are now inflicting something close to unacceptable if not intolerable pain on Iran. He had the Islamic Revolutionary Guard declared a terrorist organization. He sent the Abraham Lincoln carrier task force and B-52s to the Gulf region.
Many of these points will be raised against the administration the minute the shooting starts. We have seen this dynamic played out before in Vietnam and in Iraq. The president is not just commander-in-chief he is in many ways the personification of the nation and, in war, he is the personification of the war effort. The Kaiser and the Czar fell when their armies with whom these leaders had been identified disintegrated.
You complain that "Buchanan never served five minutes in uniform - so any military assessments he makes are suspect." Yet one might say the exact same about Donald Trump's biography-unless you count military high school as time in uniform. Donald Trump did not enter the Oval Office like a five-star general who just defeated the Nazis.
My point is that the president as Chief Executive Officer, commander-in-chief, personification of the nation and ultimately responsible for the success or failures of war, must carry the country with him and keep the country, and Congress, with him. Those presidents who fail, fall. Witness Lyndon Johnson.
The groundwork for military operations has simply not been laid and the country is not behind this or any president waging war on this record. Churchill roused Britain to its finest hour and carried the nation through the darkest days of the war because his warnings had been so terrible and so vindicated that "none could now gainsay me." Roosevelt presented an image of isolationism promising no boys would go to war all the while turning the screws on Japan , much like Trump is now doing to Iran, until he got a Pearl Harbor which thoroughly unified the nation and carried us through the first dark months of World War II. But George W. Bush, despite diligent cultivation of support for the war, went into the Iraq war with a disunited nation and, predictably, suffered irreparable damage when the occupation went bad.
This President has a genius for feeling the pulse of the nation and whether wittingly or otherwise, he made precisely the right political move at this state of affairs.
Trump set forth his policy clearly and he deserves credit for it. Buchanan himself acknowledges it:
"No Nuclear Weapons and No Further Sponsoring of Terror!"
This is the principle that the president must take to the people while he continues to do what he is doing, tighten the screws with sanctions, launch cyber attacks, and await developments whether it be capitulation or Pearl Harbor. Above all, the people must understand this to be in the fundamental existential interest of the United States and something of a moral crusade.
He must be as sly as Franklin Roosevelt.
