Me: Not really. All that matters to these tiresome crazies is that President Trump is doing it, so it must be bad. That was a 6:48 AM post. The Axis only got worse, as the Left threw a tantrum over its failed ideology being exposed once again as the weak, foolish sham it is…
Me: Not soon enough. Carter allowed Iran to commit an act of war by kidnapping the U.S. Embassy personnel and holding them for ransom. For all these years, the Democratic Party has been the weenie party, making the world a more dangerous place. Now it is furious because the U.S. is finally using its power as it should have all along. There has to be “a big kid on the block,” or the world goes to Hell, and the Big Kid had better be the one nation that aspires to seek freedom and ethics.
Ethics Alarms 
Soooooo, how will Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei‘s legacy be appropriately immortalized by Lefty?
Note to Lefty: “Austere Religious Scholar” (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) and “Respected Military Leader” (Qassem Soliemani) are taken…
PWS
Came here from Fox News, reading up on the latest developments. My knee-jerk reaction when I first read about the strikes was concern that we’d have another Afghanistan or Iraq, but given the success we’ve had so far, with most of the Arab world seemingly taking our side, and the Iranian people celebrating, looks like this could be another Venezuela instead.
We can hope, but I worry about the idea of Iranian citizens being urged to overthrow their government. How? They are unarmed. I fear the military and the Basji (sp?) may slaughter civilians by the hundreds of thousands. The guys in charge aren’t going to give up. They would lose their livelihoods. I’m sure the military owns the entire economy like in Pakistand and Cuba. It had to be done, but Jeeze, it’s going to be super dicey.
But much, much more consequential than Venezuela.
I will start with two questions:
In 2003 I was all in with my enthusiasm for the war in Iraq. After 9/11 we thought we had a strong moral case for ending the regime of Saddam Hussain. Iraq, Iran, and North Korea were referred to by President G.W. Bush as the Axis of Evil. Based on some intelligence Saddam Hussain possessed weapons of mass destruction. There was a strong belief that regime change would make the Middle East ripe for a different, more Western style of government as all people long for freedom. Changing hearts and minds became the mantra.
The first weeks of the ground war in Iraq all went swimmingly. There were of course the detractors who called the war a “quagmire” after two days; the optimists pundits predicted a cakewalk instead. The Iraqi army was no match, and soon the regime fell, and Saddam Hussain went into hiding. President Bush held a victory speech at May 1st, 2003 at the USS Lincoln under a banner stating “Mission Accomplished”.
After this the occupation began, and lasted for years. It did not go well. The shameful behavior of undisciplined soldiers at Abu Ghraib was a major PR disaster, and may have lost the support of the American public for the Iraq war. A main event was the one that did not happen: finding evidence of weapons of mass destruction, as the intelligence on the basis of which the Iraq invasion was justified was faulty. The mantra became “Bush lied, people died”. The war was about to be lost at the home front.
It went downhill from there. Iraq became a failed state, civil war erupted, ISIS became powerful in North-Iraq and Syria, and the operation was wound down leaving behind a chaos. Under Joe Biden the USA made a shameful retreat in Afghanistan, leaving power to the Taliban.
So what have we learned?
At Friday, before the war in Iran started, John D Davidson at the Federalist asked some very critical questions about the justification offered by Trump for a potential war in Iraq. Is it the nuclear weapons program? Was this problem not already fixed in June? Is it the massacre of the protesters? Is it perhaps the desire for regime change?
https://thefederalist.com/2026/02/27/trump-said-we-obliterated-irans-nuclear-program-last-june-so-why-are-we-about-to-go-war/
I hope the Trump administration is right, and this war is indeed over in three weeks. But the critical questions asked by the solidly conservative Federalist give me a lot of pause. Because was there not an election promise to stay out of endless (elective) wars in the Middle East?
No doubt. All I can say is Iran is what we were told Iraq was. I think.
Which ethics lessons have we drawn from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan? Every war is different, and it is a mistake to try to re-fight an earlier one to win a new one.
How do these lessons apply to the war we just started with Iran? They don’t.
I may be dreaming or hoping too much, or simply exhausted by the left’s endless antics, but I really think we may be reaching a tipping point, I’ll call it maximum left. Isn’t that what people were calling the point where the world had found all the oil there is in the world and it was beginning to decline? Lately, I think the left has shown itself to be so bat shit crazy that people are no longer ignoring the man behind the curtain. But I may be delusional.
Our ultra-strange sometimes friend John Fetterman has once again bucked his party and come out in support of Trump on this Iran action.