Every American alive today has been living in wartime. Every president since December 7, 1941, has been a wartime president. All of them. They can, and should, be judged by how they have waged war, both “cold” and “hot,” against imposing foes and against dangerous irritants. Provided he remains tough, determined and ruthless in this conflict with Iran, President will be the equal of any of them and far superior to most.
There have been stretches of time of largely noncombatant war since the conclusion of World War II, stretches that look a lot like the “peacetime” of the 1920s and 1930s.
From the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11 â 25 years ago this September â for example, the illusion of “peace” was pervasive. Indeed, a “peace dividend” was demanded and paid via deep cuts in defense spending because of that illusion.
That illusion survived the United States invasion of Panama and the first Gulf War, the American cruise missile strikes on Iraq in 1993 which President Clinton ordered, the dozen years of conflict with Saddam that followed under both the first Bush and Clinton with the “no-fly zones,” Operation Infinite Reach â when Clinton ordered cruise missiles fired at Al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan â and NATOs Operation Allied Force which was the 78-day NATO bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from March 24 to June 10, 1999.
Not until 9/11 did most of America collectively conclude that the world contained very bad actors and would never leave us alone or allow us to be indifferent to rising threats.
through the debacle of our collapse in Afghanistan in 2021, no one doubted we were in wars. There were obvious reminders in the tragic killings and wounding of American service members in both the Afghanistan and Iraq theaters. And there was the no-longer-possible-to-ignore threat posed by the rise of China into our “pacing threat,” the descent of Russia into dictatorship and the successful lunge of North Korea for a nuclear arsenal.
Through both the long period of illusory peace and the obvious wartime of 2001 to 2023, the has been at war with the United States. It has been thus since the hostage crisis of 1979, through the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in 1983, the bombing of the Khobar Towers in 1996 and the long shadowy campaign of Iranian surrogates against our military in Iraq which killed and wounded thousands of our troops. The fanatics in Iran have not stopped chanting “Death to America” since 1979. They have always meant it.
Irans grand plan was to gain nuclear weapons. Its secondary plan was to amass a missile force so vast and threatening to its neighbors (and eventually Europe and perhaps even America) to assure that the United States and Israel would never strike at the nuclear weapons assembly line. With the immunity that comes with nuclear weapons, the ayatollahs would have been free to pursue their agenda of the destruction of Israel and America.
Presidents before Trump have all vowed that Iran would not be allowed to have such weapons. All of them since Iran set out on this path. None of them acted. They did not act either against Irans expeditionary force of terrorists â the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard built and deployed in the first instance by Qassem Soleimani â or Irans proxies. Until Trump.
President Carter was paralyzed by the mullahs. President Reagan, intent on confronting the Soviets, withdrew from the confrontation with a much smaller threat in the 1980s, and while President George H.W. Bush destroyed Saddams army in 1991, he did not advance to Baghdad much less beyond and into Iran.
President Clinton could not stop North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons because he believed the cost to be too high. He would not concern himself with a distant threat when he could not contain the immediate one. North Korea became a nuclear power on Clintons watch.
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