The United States and Israel are winning this battle with the Islamic Republic of Iran — decisively. Our Gulf allies are standing strong. The cost has already been high with seven U.S. service members dead and many wounded, some seriously.
Soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces have been killed and civilians in Israel and among the Gulf states murdered by the lashing out at every country in the region by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
But of course, some hard-left partisans hate the prospect of either President Donald Trump or the United States winning an important, indeed crucial battle. That includes, shockingly, Catholic Cardinals in the U.S. These cardinals are putting politics ahead of faith and demonstrating deep ignorance of national security affairs combined with indifference to the patriotism of their parishioners — many of whom with family on the front lines — who can be expected to at least stop giving to an anti-American church if not leave it.
For anyone who, out of ignorance, real or feigned, does not understand the nature of the regime atop the 91 million innocent people of Iran: These fanatics murdered 35,000 of their own people in two days and nights of terror in January in Tehran and across other cities in the vast country. 35,000!
Corps numbers between 150,000 and 200,000 and their street thugs, the Basij, between four and five times that. So a million of Iran’s people cruelly repress the other 91.
The left in America refuses to come to grips with how evil the Iranian regime is and for how long it has been so. They seem to have forgotten the original hostage crisis, the murder of our Marines in Beirut in 1983, the destruction of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 and countless other acts of assassination and mass terrorism since the regime seized power in 1979. They do not know that we know for a certainty that Iran murdered and maimed thousands of our troops in Iraq in the war that began there in 2003. Our political left is defeatist and in the grip of their appeasers and anti-Israel caucus. That left now includes at least three high-profile Catholic cardinals.
The Senate and House GOP should stand proudly behind President Trump and proclaim the Islamic Republic of Iran as the evil and malignant terrorist regime run by theocratic fanatics that it has been for 47 years; that the cause of destroying the regime’s ability to threaten the region and the world is just; and that President Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Caine are conducting the war in remarkable fashion because the American military has no peer.
I hope House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune persuade the caucuses they lead to agree to bring forward a second reconciliation process to quickly resupply the military with the funds to replenish the ordinance expended and, indeed, to go further: To fully fund the next three years of spending necessary to the rapid build-out of the “Golden Dome” and the “Golden Fleet,” while also making sure the equal of any of our allies — Israel — has the funding and hardware we can provide to assist them on all of their fronts. The righteous battle with Iran and its proxies needs to be proclaimed and explained and cannot be done too often or too loudly.
And, as a Roman Catholic, I hope some of our braver and certainly better informed cardinals stand up and address the brothers in red who have flown off the rails of national security reality.
Democrats who are defeatist, appeasers, anti-Semitic or simply deranged by their hatred of President Trump: You keep speaking up too. History will record your positions.
The region and the whole world is far better off already because of the crushing of Iran’s striking capability and will be immeasurably blessed by the collapse of this insidious regime.
What we have witnessed by the “Yosemite Sam” response of Iran to the attacks by the U.S. and Israel should have awakened even the least observant consumer of news to the nature of the regime. The mullahs ordered everything in their arsenal fired at all of their neighbors, none of whom other than the U.S. and Israel were involved in the conflict. In this respect, Iran acted as Hitler’s Germany did after Imperial Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941: Germany unilaterally declared war on the United States four days after the “day that will live in infamy.”
While Iran has been in conflict with Israel and the United States since the Islamic Revolution culminated in the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran on February 1, 1979, Iran was not at war with the Gulf States. That Iran attacked everyone it could hit should tell you why the regime was so dangerous. It is an unhinged and revolutionary power. It does not abide by anything remotely like the rules of civilized nation states. Its “threat” was not merely imminent, but ongoing and never ceasing. Its hideousness appeared unveiled on 10/7/23 in Israel when its puppet Hamas invaded Israel to kill, kidnap and maim. Iran could never be trusted with nuclear weaponry or the sort of forest of missiles it was aiming to assemble in order to blackmail the world into acquiescence to its nuclear ambitions.
President after president of both parties vowed that Iran would never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. President Trump made good on that vow with the order to conduct Operation Midnight HammerOperation Midnight Hammer last June, which obliterated the ongoing enrichment and weaponization programs inside Iran.