What Trump’s Critics Still Don’t Understand About Iran

American Greatness ^ | 22 Jun, 2025 | Roger Kimball

[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.

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TOPICS: Military/Veterans; Society
KEYWORDS:

[MtnClimber]

“Convert or die” is not a religion of peace.

[Freeleesy]

The critics of Trump ignore reality of Islamic fascism

[PGR88]

The author is telling us that it’s all a clean, professional, surgical operation, where Iran will immediately be pounded into submission. Anyone who mentions negative 2nd/3rd order effects is a simp

When the history of US military intervention, particularly in the M.E., over the last 60 years tells us the exact opposite.

Who you gonna believe? Me? Or your lying eyes?

[Red6]

That is a fact.

This ROP crap is something our Western politicians and media perpetuate.

Islam is unlike other religions in that it is inherently violent, oppressive, and exclusive.

Sure, you can find some nice people that are Muslims. I do not doubt that and know some myself.

But the religion, the doctrinal teachings, are NOT about peace, love, forgiveness, and fairness.

While Islam borrows heavily from Judaism and Christianity, it is not the same.

[Eli Kopter]

The US DID NOT ATTACK Iran. They did attack the IRGC, and its bosses, which are, and have always been, terrorist organizations. We attacked the organization that has been directly responsible for hundreds of American deaths.

[Leaning Right]

> I would suggest pondering the possibility that, even if “we are not at war with Islam,” Islam may well be at war with us. <

Islam is definitely at war with us. And unfortunately, this latest strike on Iran did next to nothing to help us win that war. At heart, Islam is about ideas, not about access to weapons.

Does the West have the stomach to really fight those ideas? I fear not. We are all on Bush’s “Islam is peace” train. Only a horrific attack much worse than 9/11 could possibly derail it.

☹️

[Carry_Okie]

Islam is unlike other religions in that it is inherently violent, oppressive, and exclusive.

You missed the key point: Islam is unlike other religions in that its adherents pray five times a day begging their god of darkness for conquest over the infidel with the promise of paradise. Islam is total conditioning, effectively self-induced brainwashing. My guess is that the best way to beat it is the power of distraction. That is why they so fear Western mass media.

[KrisKrinkle]

‘...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?”’

I wonder what the target of that “one-bomb” would be.

[Freeleesy]

Thanks. And yes “ ביחד ננצח “

[KrisKrinkle]

‘Remember when President Obama told us that terrorist groups like ISIS were not really Islamic because “no religion condones the killing of innocents.” ‘

Yeah, but who decides who is an innocent and who is not?

[Leaning Right]

You are on to something. This latest attack on Iran did something good. It evidently reduced (or eliminated) their nuclear program.

But as you noted, there will probably be 2nd/3rd order effects. On of which will be that the attack will motive Islamists everywhere to take revenge (death to the infidels, and all that). I hate to make the analogy, but it could be something like our Pearl Harbor moment.

I am NOT saying there shouldn’t have been a strike. I am saying that we had better be ready for blowback.

[arthurus]

Islam has been at war with the infidel world since the latter 600s AD. There are periods of quiescence usually when islam has been beeten so thoroughly that Mohammedans everywhere conclude that Allah does not wish Islam to prevail in “this” generation. Malta and Vieenna were such defeats. World War I destroyed the Ottoman Empire and much Mohammedan territory was occupied by infidel armies. With the rise to power of the Left in Europe and America Islam has risen up in the weakness and delusional thinking of Liberal regimes throughout the West. It is on the verge of subsuming Western Europe and making nasty inroads in America, all of it, North and South. We are looking at the likely advent of a three power world i.e. America (if Trump understanding and resolve are not an abeerration), China, and Islam. Unfortunately America and China are both empires in economic and moral collapse. Islam is strong and resurgent. Who will stop the advance at Tours this time?

[logi_cal869]

In contrast to his predecessors, I can side with DJT’s strategy, despite my skepticism that this attack achieved anything but demonstrating POTUS’ will to act.

That stated, he must also engage an operation to frame the correct history of prior US policy and actions on Iran, as I see future coordinated WMD attacks by Iran as inevitable and, regardless the specifics, the results - i.e., ‘deaths’ - must lie at the feet of his predecessors and burn as though they were tied to stakes.

[one guy in new jersey]

“The US DID NOT ATTACK Iran. They did attack the IRGC, and its bosses, which are, and have always been, terrorist organizations. We attacked the organization that has been directly responsible for hundreds of American deaths.”

Really excellently put EK.

The thugocracy in Tehran since the late ‘70s has always been a brutal criminal enterprise, blatantly, crassly, cynically, wearing state sovereignty as a “skin suit”.

[cuz1961]

When the history of US military intervention, particularly in the M.E., over the last 60 years tells us the exact opposite.

\

we have had infiltrated cloward priven commies in our gov and military and white house most of those years

now we have a president and CIC who isnt a commie or grifter, a man who loves America and us citizens more than himself.

i dont worship the man, but he has , so far, shown to be trustworthy . he has risked all he has , fortune, freedom and life , to fight for the benefit of our citizens. most of us recognize and appreciate that more than the likes of you can seem to comprehend. you...at the best.. are the simp.

[katana]

When Christians and Jews (and Buddhists, Sikhs, etc.) commit murder it is in contravention to the teachings of their religions. When Muslims commit murder it is in compliance with fundamental teachings of theirs. They are following the example of their “perfect man” and final prophet of God. This includes “honor” killings within families, parents murdering their own children. When western politicians, so called intellectuals, and religious “leaders” ignore and deny this they become accessories to murder.

[Leaning Right]

> Islam is strong and resurgent. <

Yes. Very good post, yours.

I would add that Islam today is also clever. They’ve switched strategies from military conquest to patient and steady infiltration.

Such a strategy can be countered by waging an all-out war of ideas. But the pathetically weak West doesn’t have the stomach for that.

[Bookshelf]

Roger Kimball is truly America’s intellectual.

[odawg]

You say:

“The author is telling us that it’s all a clean, professional, surgical operation, where Iran will immediately be pounded into submission. Anyone who mentions negative 2nd/3rd order effects is a simp.

The author says:

“Whether they [bombing] were also effective in luring Iran back into the community of nations is a matter that only time will tell.”

Conclusion: you can’t read.