Media hysterics take note. Honest commentary on the Trump administration's 2019 diplomatic, economic and military clash with Iran's vicious dictatorship requires historical context.
Here's critical historical Fact One: Since 1979, the year the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his initially broad coalition toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the revolutionary Islamic Iranian regime Khomeini established has been at war with the United States. My sources include Khomeini and his fanatics who commandeered dictatorial power in 1980 after marginalizing non-Islamists in the anti-Shah coalition. Contemporary sources include the disgustingly corrupt clerics and Revolutionary Guard Corps officers who mastermind regime rackets, graft, oppression, war-making and terror operations.
In November 1979, Khomeini's thugs seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran. These terrorists held American diplomats and Marines hostage for 444 days.
The Carter administration's failed Desert One rescue mission was a combat operation supported by the CIA and U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force units in the Middle East and Central Asia. Agreed, CIA is a covert organization, operating in war's gray zone. However, USAF strategic bombers and USN carrier battle groups epitomize military power. Desert One was an inept act of war by then-President Jimmy Carter. Describing Desert One as anything other than an act of war is to collude in the distribution of fake history. (Working definition of fake history: ossified fake news recycled by propagandists.)
Fact Two: The Khomeinists released their hostages in January 1981 when Ronald Reagan became president. Why? They knew they were at war. They feared Reagan would unleash the B-52s since he had the will to do so. The Ayatollah knew his regime needed time to gain strength. Read his speeches: He fervently believed the Great Satan (the U.S.) was fading (Vietnam syndrome, Jimmy Carter); lesser Satans Russia and France would wither; Zionist entity Israel would die. Khomeini's vision was imperialist. Iran would return to the center of world history.
Fact Three: Iran continued to prosecute bloody war on America. I'll cite two of several hundred atrocities: the 1983 U.S. Marine barrack bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, and the 1996 bomb attack on Khobar Towers that housed USAF personnel in Saudi Arabia. Iran used proxy agents to target American personnel. However, solid intelligence work connected these acts of war to Tehran.
Several military historians make the argument that the 1979 embassy seizure was the beginning of America's global war on terrorism (GWOT, the bowdlerized acronym for global war on militant Islamist terrorists). After all, Khomeini claimed to speak for the entire Islamic world.
The Obama administration erased the term GWOT; however, what your enemy says and does matters. Al-Qaida, the Islamic State and Khomeini's regime continue to wage war against America.
Fact Four: In the 1996 edition of "A Quick and Dirty Guide to War," my co-author James F. Dunnigan and I identified Iranian involvement in 18 different conflicts. Tehran instigated or escalated these conflicts to achieve its political goals.
Fact Five: In 2019, the Khomeinist Iran is a globe-girdling pariah. My latest book, "Cocktails from Hell" (Bombardier Books, 2018) notes that Iran wages proxy war "throughout the world, from Iraq to the Balkans to South America to Southeast Asia to Afghanistan." It is savaging Yemen and has hijacked Lebanon.
The Obama administration capitulated to the Khomeinists' nuclear weapons quest. Well, that's changed. President Donald Trump made it clear in a June 17 Time Magazine interview that the robed regime will not get nukes. If the Khomeini regime escalates its war on America, it does so at its own peril.
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