Trump Responds to Iran's Act of War

Townhall.com ^ | January 10, 2020 | Michael Barone

[Kaslin]

In all the reportage and commentary on the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, I haven't seen much mention of an interesting parallel between the Iranian mullah regime's attacks on America this past week and its attacks when it first came to power 40 years ago.

The similarity is that both times, the Iranian regime violated diplomatic immunity. In 1979, it seized 52 American diplomats and held them hostage for 444 days, releasing them only on the day former President Ronald Reagan took office. Last week they attacked the U.S. embassy in Baghdad after launching multiple attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq.

Diplomatic immunity is perhaps the oldest and most basic principle of international law. It's been sanctioned by international agreements and observed -- even by Hitler and Stalin -- for at least three centuries. Violation of diplomatic immunity is an act of war.

Iran's attacks on diplomats reveal it as an outlaw regime.

That's why it promulgated the fiction that "students" seized and controlled the hostages beyond the government's control. In the past week, leading American media have echoed the mullah regime's latest fictions, calling those who attacked the U.S. Embassy "mourners" (The New York Times) or "protesters" (The Washington Post). That's in line with The Post's headlines describing Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as "an austere religious scholar" and calling Soleimani "Iran's most revered military leader."

American media giants' ready endorsement of a tyrannical regime's propaganda labels shouldn't fool anyone. "The whole 'protest' against the United States Embassy compound in Baghdad last week was almost certainly a Soleimani-staged operation," The Times' Thomas Friedman wrote last week. It was not a spontaneous attack by "mourners" or "protesters," just as the hostage taking in 1979 was the work not of "students" but of the regime.

Much media commentary following Soleimani's death dwelled on the possibility -- clearly relished by some commentators -- that Iran would retaliate violently against the United States. Few bothered to note that the embassy attack followed weeks of violent attacks -- oil tankers seized, a drone downed, bombs lobbed at a Saudi oil refinery and rockets at U.S. troops.

Iran's retaliation so far seems perfunctory. It's possible Iran will attack the "great Satan" more aggressively later -- or that it will halt its attacks, as it did after Reagan ordered sorties that sank some of its ships in 1988.

In the meantime, former President Barack Obama and his administration hoped for the permanence of its Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement with Iran -- which never had majority support in Congress. Those hopes were shattered by Trump's withdrawal in May 2018. And there's little or no evidence that Iran ever became the cooperative partner in the Middle East that Obama expected.

Distaste for this president is obviously warping many critics' judgment. Without losing a beat, Democrats like Sen. Chris Murphy moved from criticizing Trump's inaction to criticizing Trump's action. News stories depicting Trump's decision as impulsive and not based on serious military planning were, without acknowledgement, contradicted by news stories the next day.

Actually, it's possible for a knowledgeable observer not afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome to discern a coherent foreign policy strategy, "a bold agenda internationally and a deeply controversial one at home," as Walter Russell Mead wrote this week in the Wall Street Journal. "Confrontation with Iran, competition with China, outreach to Russia."

Does "confrontation" mean, as the New Yorker's military correspondent Dexter Filkins argues, regime change in Iran? Critics treat that as unthinkable, yet it would be welcomed by millions of Iranians. Those who care about human rights should not mourn the end of a thug-ocracy that throws gay men off high-rises and beats up women whose headscarves slip down.

[DIRTYSECRET]

A war does not start until someone fights back. They’ve been fighting us for 40 years.

[nuconvert]

All that the Liberals got out of Trumps excellent speech, was that he stumbled over a few words. That was the main take away for them & source of ridicule.

[BobL]

“A war does not start until someone fights back.”

Also: It is said that oil and water don’t mix.

[HighSierra5]

The Iranians through their Hezbollah proxy deals in drugs and money laundering that is an attack on U.S.. That in itself is a reason to stomp the chit out of them.

[cuban leaf]

Does “confrontation” mean, as the New Yorker’s military correspondent Dexter Filkins argues, regime change in Iran? Critics treat that as unthinkable, yet it would be welcomed by millions of Iranians.

---

I’mm 66. For my generation, the tearing down of the Berlin wall was unthinkable. But here we are.

Sometimes it seems things have always been a certain way and always will be. They haven’t been and they won’t be. The sun now sets on the British empire everyday. That used to be unthinkable. The US was not always the unbelieveable manufacturing, farming and military power it is today, and it won’t always be. Things change. They always do.

[Robert DeLong]

Thomas Friedman wrote last week. It was not a spontaneous attack by "mourners" or "protesters," just as the hostage taking in 1979 was the work not of "students" but of the regime.

That's the first right thing I have heard Tom Friedman utter in decades. However, his batting average is still worse than a broken clock.

[Zhang Fei]

[The US was not always the unbelieveable manufacturing, farming and military power it is today, and it won’t always be.]

---

But it has been so for almost 150 years. Not many people seem to realize that the locomotive, the submarine, the sewing machine and any number of innovations were either pioneered or first implemented on a large scale stateside. American power long pre-dates WWII. The US economy was already the largest in the world around 1900.

[Karma_Sherab]

All that the Liberals got out of Trumps excellent speech, was that he stumbled over a few words.

And they never mention anything mumbled by Biden

[bigbob]

I worry far less about the US losing its position in the world fair and square than I do because it was undermined from within.

[silverleaf]

“ confrontation with Iran’ means we preempt another embassy massacre by openly taking out the Iranian planning team that included a Kuwaiti convicted US/French embassy bomber known as “ the engineer” for his bomb design, and the IRGC commander who directed Benghazi

We then absorb an attack in Iraq from Iranian missiles luckily with no US deaths

The President offers in an address to the nation to sit down with Iran with no preconditions.

Democrats slam him for not consulting on the war he chose to not take us into.

‘Nonconfrontation with Russia’ means we increase the US defense budget, send lethal aid to Ukraine, kill a hundred Russian mercs in Syria, kill the top general of their Iranian ally, and ratchet up sanctions even higher

Ok

[PsyCon]

Good Strategy.