The brutal historical reality is Iran has been waging war against the United States since 1979. Those who critique the current military mission of the United States to degrade and destroy Iran’s offensive capabilities, including its nascent nuclear weapons program, are denying history when they claim our response is unjustified and unprovoked.
Iran’s clerical, despot rulers openly avow to kill Americans and destroy our nation. Historically, most attacks by Iran have been asymmetrical, conducted through terrorist proxies. However, in recent years, the attacks have included barrages of munitions from Iran itself with ballistic missiles and drones targeting our troops and more recently our allies in the region.
In addition to waging war on our armed forces, Iran is the one nation in the middle east indisputably complicit in large scale, starvation genocide conducted through its Houthi militia proxy . In Yemen, the UN estimates that nearly 400,000 Yemeni civilians, including as many as 85,000 children, have died in the Iran-backed Houthi ignited civil war raging in that nation since 2015. Nearly half of all Yemeni children under 5 are stunted due to malnutrition, the UN said.
The appeasement of Iran, starting with President Jimmy Carter, has only brought horrendous human misery for those in the region. Iran is also responsible for instigating and underwriting terror across the world, including two terrorist attacks in Australia, two terrorist attacks in Argentina, the massacre of those in Israel when invaded by Hamas, the ongoing starvation of the people of Yemen by Houthi militias, and the insidious destruction of once flourishing Lebanese civil society.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah terrorists, financed and logistically supported by Iran, with thousands of missiles, operate with impunity and allegiance to Tehran, defying the sovereignty of the Lebanese nation.
As a visible terrorist militia, they roam Lebanon at will and fire missiles at Israel with impunity and no apparent accountability to the government of that nation. In 2020, the largest non-nuclear explosion in human history occurred at Beirut’s port killing nearly 200, injuring thousands, and leaving 300,000 homeless in Lebanon. Responsibility for the explosion has never been determined but many suspect Hezbollah had negligently stored the volatile explosive material.
In Yemen, Iran-backed Houthi terrorists – who were for a time delisted as such by the Biden administration- have attacked and threatened commercial waterway navigation in the Red Sea, fired missiles at Israel, and thwarted humanitarian relief efforts for their civilians, according to the United Nations and other agencies.
For those who are indifferent to the foreign suffering inflicted by Iran, consider that thousands of Americans, including our soldiers and our government officials, have been victims of this outlaw, tyrannical regime. The White House has posted a comprehensive list of Iran atrocities committed against Americans. (See The Iranian Regime’s Decades of Terrorism Against American Citizens – The White House )
The barbaric belligerence of Iran and their terrorist allies against the United States includes, to cite a few examples, the 1979 holding of US Embassy personnel as hostages for 444 days, the 1983 bombing of US marines in their barracks on a peace-keeping mission in Beirut; the 1984 torture and murder of William Buckley, a US intelligence official; and a navy seaman passenger on a commercial flight, Robert Stethem of Waldorf, Maryland tortured and beaten to death on a Beirut airport tarmac in 1985.
The brother of Seaman Stethem impassionedly testified before Congress in 2015, urging American action against Iran, stating “I think that the greatest way in which the federal government has failed terrorist victims and their families is the same way it has failed all Americans – our leaders have lacked the political will in dealing with Iranian and Palestinian terrorism.”
Furthermore, according to the current White House, between 2003 and 2011: Iran-backed militias killed at least 603 U.S. troops in Iraq — “roughly one in every six American combat fatalities in Iraq.”
Iran committed these heinous acts with no substantial, punitive military retaliation from the United States. Instead, they were pandered, with President Barack Obama providing almost two billion dollars in incentives to constrain their nuclear weapons development.
The coddling of Iran by prior U.S. Presidents occurred even as they suppressed and brutalized their own people. Public aspirations in Iran for modernity are crushed by religious fanatism, enforced by martinets, street thugs, and clerics. Iranian women have been beaten to death for failing to comport with their domestic codes of conduct. As many as 30,000 may have been killed as the result of protesting against the regime.
With the exception of Al Qaeda, American military engagements in North Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, by comparison, had no casus belli commensurate with the lethal terrorism inflicted on us by Iran. Our current military action is wholly justified, and long overdue as a necessary, pragmatic execution of a strategic imperative for the United States: disabling Iran’s military infrastructure and destabilizing, if possible, the regime. There has been too much American blood shed by Iran and now they are finally paying for their crimes.