When You Have A Skunk In Your House, You Need To Remove The Skunk As Well As The Smell

Iran declared war on America in 1979. We weren’t paying attention then, and we are not paying attention now. How many rockets or drones were fired at our troops in the Middle East before the recent death of three soldiers? Notice that there is a significant delay in America’s response. On February 2nd, The Conservative Treehouse posted an article that provides some insight into how the Biden administration is framing our response.

The article reports:

Obama and Biden like Iran.  Obama and Biden are facilitating a pro-Iran policy.  Obama and Biden don’t want to do anything against the interests of their pro-Iran position.  That’s the simple baseline.

Our intel agencies are essentially falling on the sword of ‘some people did something, but we can’t be sure.’ See how this works?

Politico posted an article on Thursday setting the stage to justify a feeble response.

Politico reports:

Intelligence officials have calculated that Tehran does not have full control over its proxy groups in the Middle East, including those responsible for attacking and killing U.S. troops in recent weeks, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The Quds Force — an elite branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps — is responsible for sending weapons and military advisers as well as intelligence to support militias in Iraq and Syria as well as the Houthis in Yemen. The groups have varying ambitions and agendas, which sometimes overlap, but Tehran does not appear to have complete authority over their operational decision-making, the officials said.

While the disclosure means it may be particularly hard to predict what actions these groups will take, it also could lower the chance of the U.S. getting pulled into a direct confrontation with Iran. Any indication that Tehran was directly involved in ordering or overseeing the attacks would make U.S. retaliation against Iran more likely.

Even if Iran did not order or oversee the attacks, who do you think supplied the money and weapons? Does anyone actually believe that Iran is not at the bottom of this attack?

One Disturbing Aspect Of The New Hampshire Democrat Debate

Yesterday Hot Air posted an article about the Democrat debate in New Hampshire last week. The article noted that none of the Democrat candidates would have killed terrorist Qassem Soleimani. That is really amazing. Soleimani was the head of the Quds Force, a division of the Revolutionary Guard Corps primarily responsible for extraterritorial military and clandestine operation from 1998 until his death. He was responsible for the killing and maiming of thousands of American soldiers in Afghanistan. It was also reported that he was planning terrorist attacks on numerous American Embassies in the Middle East.

The article reports:

Mayor Pete at least went so far as to say that Soleimani was “a bad guy.” But he then claimed that “taking out a bad guy is a bad idea if you do not know what you’re doing.” Oh, really? Seems to me that our military knew precisely what they were doing. They knew where Soleimani was, where he was heading and took him out with a single drone shot. And the collateral damage was minimal. He also referenced learning lessons from Iraq in that context. Was he implying that Saddam Hussein should still be alive? Is he aware that Hussein was executed by his own people, not the Americans?

…Biden simply says he wouldn’t have ordered the strike because “there’s no evidence yet of an imminent threat that was going to come from [Soleimani].” Two points about that response should have been obvious. First of all, Biden has been out of office for more than three years. He’s not getting the daily intelligence briefings anymore. Much of the intelligence about Soleimani couldn’t be released to the public because it could have exposed sources and methods. So Joe Biden has no way of knowing conclusively about any imminent threats.

And second, the President can and should make the argument that an imminent threat wasn’t even required. The amount of blood on the hands of Soleimani and the Quds Force could be used to paint a mural the size of Texas. At some point, you run out of second chances. We’d been trying to track Soleimani’s movements since the Bush 43 administration. The opportunity came to take him out and Trump took it. You’ll also recall that Joe Biden disagreed with Barack Obama about the raid to take out Osama bin Laden. Sounds like bad guys around the world should sleep well at night if Joe Biden is elected.

The article concludes:

Bernie believes you can’t “go around saying you’re a bad guy and we’re going to assassinate you.” That, he believes, would lead to “international anarchy.” He would also prefer that such matters be handled through stronger diplomacy at the State Department. Perhaps he’s pining for the good old days of the Obama administration and thinks Iran will behave better if we go back to sending them pallets of cash. We all saw how that worked out during the previous administration.

Notice how Sanders, along with many other Democrats, chooses to use the word “assassination” when referring to the death of Soleimani, as if he was some sort of public figure deserving of respect. The General wasn’t assassinated. He was a battlefield casualty in the war on terror and a very high-value target.

This crew has demonstrated that they’re basically carbon copies of each other on many key issues. As for the current topic of discussion, they are soft on crime domestically (with calls for criminal justice reform and emptying the prisons) and soft on terror both at home and abroad. And if voters want to pick one of them this November they will fully deserve the whirlwind we’ll reap from that decision.

Just for the record, killing Soleimani made the world safer for everyone. Soleimani had no problem killing innocent civilians if they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Obviously, he felt that the rules of war did not apply to him (as if everyone plays by the ‘rules of war’). It appears that the current field of Democrat candidates has no idea that they should be protecting America or any other nation from terrorism. That’s sad.

 

The Insanity Of The Mainstream Media

Yesterday The Washington Free Beacon reported the following:

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper compared Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps killed in an American airstrike on Thursday, to French president Charles de Gaulle, a leader of the French resistance against Nazi occupation during World War II.

“Soleimani is—it’s difficult to convey how revered he is in Iran. Imagine the French Foreign Legion, at the height of the French empire. This guy is regarded in Iran as a completely heroic figure, personally very brave,” CNN host Fareed Zakaria said.

“I was trying to think of somebody, and I was thinking of de Gaulle, although he became the leader of the country,” Cooper said.

Soleimani was a terrorist. He has a lot of American blood on his hands. He was planning further attacks on Americans around the world.

A friend on Facebook noted the following:

The UN Security Council banned Soleimani from leaving Iran because of his extensive use of surrogates in other countries to commit terrorist acts. His presence in Iraq was in and of itself an act of war. He was there organizing part of a group of about 20,000 IRANIAN soldiers planning to attack the US embassy in military fashion. The first attacks were just to evaluate our defenses before the real attack they were planning.

Not any more.

It is wonderful having a leader who stands up to our enemies instead of sending them planes loaded with millions of dollars in cash to fund their killing of Americans.

It is a shame that our media has become so biased that they complain when our President protects Americans.

How Soon We Forget

Most Americans are rejoicing at the killing of Qassim Soleimani, an Iranian terrorist with immense amounts of American blood on his hands. The political left and its media allies are anything but joyful–they want to know the justification for killing a man responsible for the killing and maiming of many American soldiers. Where were these outcries when President Obama was using drone strikes to kill American citizens without honoring their constitutional rights?

On May 30, 2012, The New Yorker posted an article that included the following:

The Obama Administration has sought and killed American citizens, notably Anwar al-Awlaki. As the Times noted, “The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.” In other words, it’s due process if the President thinks about it. One wonders how low the standard for “internal deliberations” are—if it might be enough if Obama mulled it over while walking his dog. And if an American whom the President decides is a threat can be assassinated in Yemen, where Awlaki was hit, why not in London, or Toronto, or Los Angeles? (Awlaki’s teen-age son, an American citizen who had not been accused of anything, died in a separate strike.)

The New Yorker was one of the few publications questioning what was going on.

The conservative media has a much more realistic view of the killing of Soleimani.

Frank Gaffney, Jr.,  posted the following at the Center for Security Policy today:

President Trump’s liquidation of Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian terrorist with immense amounts of American blood on his hands, has not only exacted a measure of revenge for Iran’s murderous jihadism. He has struck a direct blow at the regime in Tehran that brutally oppresses its own people and increasingly threatens ours. 

Soleimani’s assassination must now be followed up with an intensified campaign aimed at empowering Iranians to bring about, at last, the removal from power of the rest of the thugs who have, for forty years, called for “Death to America.”

As we take necessary steps to deter the mullahs’ retaliation in-theater, we must also act immediately to roll up Soleimani’s foreign legion, the terrorist group known as Hezbollah. It has units inside the United States who inevitably will be ordered, later if not sooner, to attack targets in this country.

The Washington Examiner reported yesterday:

The U.S. killing of Qassim Soleimani In Baghdad on Thursday ends an enduring threat. At least in the short term, however, it will unleash Iranian retaliation. The leader of the external action arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Soleimani long led that regime’s efforts to destroy its enemies and expand its revolution.

From an explosive campaign that killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, to supporting Bashar Assad’s regime with legions of Shiite fighters and IRGC operatives, to conducting a campaign of bombings and assassinations and intimidation across the world, Soleimani was a master of his very dark arts. He was a serious and continuing threat to U.S. lives and interests. Indeed, Soleimani masterminded a failed 2011 plot to blow up the then-Saudi ambassador and dozens of diners in a Washington, D.C., restaurant.

Still, Soleimani’s killing, apparently alongside Abu Mahdi al Muhandis, the Kataib Hezbollah leader responsible for recent rocket attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, is striking. Trump might call it justice for this week’s attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, or the recent killing of a U.S. contractor in Iraq, or an act to disrupt Soleimani’s plotting against America. Regardless, it illustrates a major strategic escalation in President Trump’s Iran policy. Soleimani’s standing in Iran and the IRGC in particular makes President George W. Bush’s 2008 killing of top Lebanese Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyeh seem irrelevant in comparison. This is a very big deal.

Trump’s shift here is hard to overestimate. Until now, Trump had been keen to keep avenues of diplomatic intercourse open toward Iran. Trump had avoided direct military retaliation against Iran even after it downed a U.S. drone last summer. But this killing slams the door on diplomacy in a most public way. Soleimani was a hero of the revolution and will now be regarded as an heir to Husayn ibn Ali, the martyr of Shiite martyrs. Revenge will now rise to the very top of Iran’s agenda. A global terrorist campaign of uncertain duration is likely. In the context of Iranian domestic political instability and deep economic pressures on the regime, Iran might also use this killing as an excuse to destabilize oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz. Each of those developments would require immediate American deterrent response.

We have killed an important terrorist. There will be a response. However, the response will no longer be under the leadership and direction of that terrorist. I am not sure how much we have impacted the worldwide terrorist network that Soleimani led, but we have impacted it. The killing of Soleimani is important for the future of Iran and the future of terrorism worldwide. Hopefully it is a step toward freedom in Iran.

Foreign Policy Wisdom

The Center For Security Policy posted the following Secure Freedom Minute on July 26:

In recent days, fast-boats of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have seized oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.  This action has followed a series of other direct and indirect Iranian provocations, including attacks on shipping, Saudi oil infrastructure and U.S. assets in Iraq.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a pair of Chinese long-range bombers joined two of their Russian counterparts and one of the Kremlin’s command-and-control aircraft in conducting a deliberate provocation in the airspace over islands claimed by South Korea and Japan. An extraordinary three hundred warning shots were fired in two separate instances before the intruders departed the area.

Make no mistake: These are probing actions designed to test the readiness and resolve of the United States and its allies. As with any bully, a failure to demonstrate both will result in more aggression worldwide.

This is a lesson we should have learned a long time ago.

The Handshake That Was Never Going To Happen

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal posted an editorial entitled, “He’ s Just Not That Into You.” The editorial dealt with the fact that Hassan Rouhani, Iran‘s current president, was not interested in a photo-op handshake with President Obama. The editorial points out that President Clinton was met with a similar refusal in 2000.

The editorial reports:

Back then, the explanation for Mr. Khatami’s refusal was that internal Iranian politics would not have allowed it. On Tuesday, a senior Obama Administration official peddled a similar line after the Rouhani snub, telling reporters that Iranians “have an internal dynamic that they have to manage.”

That’s one way of putting it. Another way is that Iran’s ruling clerics and Revolutionary Guard Corps remain ideologically incapable of reconciling themselves to the Great Satan. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who reviews the 34-year-history of Iranian rebuffs to American diplomatic overtures, which makes the U.S. embarrassment on Tuesday all the more acute.

The thing to keep in mind here is that the president of Iran has no power–the clerics rule the country. The president is chosen by the clerics and controlled by the clerics. Just for the record, they are not a moderate group.

The editorial concludes:

Politics in the normal sense doesn’t exist in Tehran, where the rules are set and the players chosen by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who is accountable to nobody. What Iran’s leaders do understand is how to humiliate adversaries they consider to be weak. We hope Mr. Obama appreciates how he has been schooled.

 

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