Posted on 06/22/2025 8:39:40 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Trump’s Iran policy confounds critics because it’s not about war or appeasement—it’s about weakening Iran without revealing the playbook.
Note: I wrote this column a few hours before the United States bombed and (according to President Trump) “completely and totally obliterated” the hardened Iranian nuclear sites of Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. Were those bombings, as some think, destabilizing actions? Or were they, as others believe, righteous and effective steps towards peace?
Righteous they certainly were. Whether they were also effective in luring Iran back into the community of nations is a matter that only time will tell. In order for that to happen, as I argue below, Iran’s commitment to murderous, intolerant Islamism must be “completely and totally obliterated” along with its ability to export terror. That is a matter that the Iranian people must decide. For myself, I am in favor of making Iran Persia, i.e., a modern, secular state, again.
Donald Trump has betrayed his base by joining hands with the neo-cons in their belligerent support of war with Iran!
Donald Trump has betrayed Israel by trying to engage Iran in negotiations instead of bombing them now!
Which is it?
Neither.
For one thing, with every day that passes, Israel takes more chess pieces off the board of Iran’s military power, both in matériel and personnel. As of a couple of days ago, it was estimated that Israel had destroyed about 1000 of Iran’s 3500 to 4000 missiles. Add the 400-plus that Iran has lobbed at Israel’s cities, and you can see where this game of attrition is heading.
If one major goal is to extirpate Iran’s nuclear capability, then every day Israeli F-15s take flight is another milestone on the path to that goal. A weaker Iran is also a more pliant Iran.
It has been amusing to watch the chattering class suddenly become experts on the GBU-57 “bunker buster” bomb. Only the United States has them, and only the United States has bombers capable of delivering the 30,000-pound “Massive Ordnance Penetrators.” If you flip through the news, you will see scores, if not hundreds, of stories that repeat the same talking points.
At first, it was said that only the GBU-57 could destroy hardened sites such as the Fordow atomic bomb-making—officially, the “fuel enrichment”—site, buried hundreds of feet into a mountain.
Then some “experts” told us that it was by no means clear that even this behemoth could do the job. Trump, it was confidently speculated, would order that a tactical nuke be used instead.
In fact, all this is hooey. Steven Bannon goes to the White House. Oh no! That means that Trump is not going to attack Iran. But it means nothing of the sort. As Trump himself said with respect to some Wall Street Journal story about his plans concerning the war, the Journal “Has No Idea What My Thoughts Are Concerning Iran.”
The point can be generalized. One major source of the fog of war is the rhetorical incontinence of journalists. Someone makes a claim; it gets picked up, repeated, and amplified. Suddenly, what began as merely speculation is touted confidently as fact.
We know what Donald Trump wants: peace. He has said it over and over. But no one outside Trump’s inner circle—a circle that must occasionally contract to the dimensions of a single individual—really knows what he will do to achieve that goal.
For the last 46 years, Iran has been murdering its own people and exporting terrorism either directly or through proxies in Lebanon, Syria, among Palestinians, and elsewhere. Ridding that backward, theocratic regime of its nuclear apparatus is one goal. Pace some naïve commentators, there can be no doubt that if Iran possessed the bomb, it would use it. How many times have its spokesmen observed that Israel is a “one-bomb country?”
But in my view, that is merely one piece of the puzzle that Israel and Trump are trying to solve. Obliterating Iran’s nuclear program would be to shatter one sword of its militancy. By itself, though, it would do nothing to tame or neuter that militancy.
Many in Trump’s base shudder at the phrase “regime change” because they believe it is redolent of the Bush-Romney, Clinton-Obama agenda of “exporting democracy.” Sure, those presidents employed different bureaucrats to pursue their globalist agenda, but that agenda, despite different cadences and ideological colorations, was essentially the same.
Iran, however, presents us with a different sort of problem. The name of that problem is “radical Islam” or—to be perfectly frank—“Islam” unadorned by any face-saving adjective.
I know, I know: we are not supposed to say that. Remember when President Obama told us that terrorist groups like ISIS were not really Islamic because “no religion condones the killing of innocents.”
Really? Was the Ayatollah Khomeini “Islamic?” He, like his successor, ordered the torture and execution of countless innocents. How about Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Erdogan: is he “Islamic?” A few years ago, Erdogan told the world that the phrase “moderate Islam” is “ugly” because “Islam is Islam.” Democracy, he said, is just an express stop on the train whose destination is Islam.
Who, in fact, speaks for Islam? Who gets to say what it is and isn’t?
We are assured that it’s not the group that calls itself an Islamic State because our political leaders and our media have told us so. It’s the same with Boko Haram. They regularly slaughter Christians, women and children included. Spokesmen for Boko Haram say that they represent Islamic teaching, but no: our leaders have assured us that that is not the case. “No religion,” said Obama, “condones the killing of innocents.”
Has the former president contemplated the glorious history of Islam and the glittering deeds of Mohammed? We have it on the highest—and for Muslims, the only—authority that the Prophet regularly slaughtered innocents. Consider, to take just one example, the siege of Medina in the year 627, then home to a Jewish tribe. After a couple of weeks, the inhabitants surrendered unconditionally. Mohammad then had the 600-800 men butchered and sold the women and children into slavery.
“We are not at war with Islam,” our leaders tell us. “We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”
The impolitic question is, where are all those unperverted Muslims? In the common rooms of American universities? Maybe. In our cities and suburbs? Perhaps. But I think we can agree that it is not (to make an arbitrary and woefully incomplete list) the people behind such actions as
The 9/11 terrorist attacks
The Bali nightclub bombing
The Ft. Hood “workplace violence” event
The London tube and bus bombings
The Madrid train bombing
The Boston Marathon carnage
The Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket slaughters in France (“folks shot in a deli” was how Obama described the latter)
The Danish shootings by another “Allahu Akbar”-shouting chap.
Islam, or a perversion of Islam? At some point, as Hillary Clinton might put it, what difference does it make? As we contemplate the future of Iran, I would suggest pondering the possibility that, even if “we are not at war with Islam,” Islam may well be at war with us.
Oh, another smartass who thinks he/she's contributing to the debate
As to the conclusion that you can "bomb someone back into the community of nations"
Its clear the author was aiming at people like you.
Author omits the Shia 12ers who are the most fanatical and the worst of the lot. They believe it is their religious duty to bring all of humanity to Paradise. Hence, the desire to get and use nuclear weapons in the hope of triggering an all out nuclear war.
“As to the conclusion that you can “bomb someone back into the community of nations”
Its clear the author was aiming at people like you.”
Wow! I was only being sarcastic when I said you can’t read [comprehension] but you can’t.
The author does not conclude it can; he asks “whether” it can.
And he certainly must not have been aiming at people like you.
I've posted many times, Islam is a terrorist organization. A 1400+ year history of murder, torture and enslavements and daily headlines showing Muslim autocracies prove the point. Why Western/Christian nations don't outlaw this demonic terroristic practice is beyond me. Ignorance, stupidity and leaders/politicians being paid off by Islamists will be the death of us. All who practice Islam are either terrorist or supporters of a terrorist system. The Crusades had the right idea.
I respectfully disagree. It's only when there are no clear objectives for war in the ME that they last forever. Afghanistan and Iraq had Congress declare war (good) before we went in, but Bush defined the objectives as unwinnable like trying to capture fog (win over hearts and minds, we'll be fighting the war on terror all our lives, etc).
Those should not be confused with last night's strike on Iran, or TRUMP 45's strikes on ISIS in Syria, or Obama's drone strikes in Pakistan, Yeman, and Somalia. None of those resulted in a years long war. To be honest, I'm against those strikes (except for last night's, which IMHO is a clear use of the 1973 War Powers Act's elimination of an imminent threat to the U.S.), but I'd be lying if my argument against those strikes is that they put is in another years long war.
What Trump’s Critics Still Don’t Understand About Iran.
Indeed it isn’t only their hate for America why they want such a weapon on target would be western Europe Canada and a few others.
If they did fires one off many paranoid countries would fire off too.
That islam is NOT a religion is what most westerners fail to understand. It is a complete ideology, with military and political components, as well as a religious component. The "religion" is a beard that hides the other two, until it is too late for the unbeliever to do anything.
Oh, another smartass who thinks he/she’s contributing to the debate
\
projection on your part.
better go grab a narrative control cubicle doughnut before they are all gone.
;-)
Moderate muslims (if that's not a paradox) fear radical muslims more than we do. Any muslim who comes out as moderate makes themselves a target of the radicals.
It defines peoples sexuality, dress, education, the law, food, and language.
Worse yet, liberal (in a classical meaning) Western society is a threat to the Islamic power structures. Where is an Islamic based judge (Mufti) in a secular society? Where is a madrasa, an Ayatollah, an Imam? Western society organized around a democratic process, ideas of human rights and a free market, threatens those in positions of power in that society.
In the Islamic world you never had some of the Western philosophical movements. These people were exposed to these ideas once they began mingling with Westerners or through the arts and media.
Where was an “enlightenment” era in the Islamic world? No such thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
Worse yet, and now I am becoming highly speculative:
Islam is based on the teachings of one man in reality, Mohamed. This man was a violent, pedophile, polygamist, murderer, liar, thief, slave trading, adulterating illiterate.
What sort of religion do you think such a man invents?
Of course, one that allows, slavery, polygamy, pedophilia, lying... If you doubt, I can show in the Quran the verses which allow for each of these.
What is Islam really? Islam is no more than had David Koresh and the Branch Divinians grown to 1.3 billion members and spread across the planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Koresh
David Koresh and Mohamed are basically the same thing. You have a guy that declares himself a prophet, copies parts of Christianity and Judaism, adds his own ideas, all benefiting him of course.
The only difference is, because Islam is followed by 1.3 billion people, you have entire nations declare themselves “Islamic Republics,” we give this group a lot of respect: Iran, Pakistan, Mauritania (declared and in name, but basically ALL nations with a majority Muslim population are such): https://www.welt-atlas.de/map_of_islamic_countries_10-1046
If I started a religion (The Holy Red6) and taught the same sort of things Islam instructs and merely change the words around a little bit, most Western nations would use their law enforcement and intel service to come after me, some would outright make my religion illegal (declare it a criminal organization). The ONLY reason why Islam is tolerated is because of it's mass in people, expanse of land, resources controlled, votes even in Western nations, ability to cause civil unrest or even resort to violence, nuclear capability (Pakistan).
Of course we need to judge people individually (many Muslims are good people), but as a religion, Islam deserves no respect because it's basically no more than a plagiarized version of Christianity and Judaism which has been perverted by a self declared prophet.
There's the rub, my good man. Those "good people" are just one fiery Friday evening sermon at the local mosque from deciding that they need to live by the tenants of their "religion" and going full jihad on their unbelieving neighbors.
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