The most remarkable aspect of our long-overdue cancellation of terror-master Qassem Soleimani was the cowering, craven reaction from so much of the media and our Democratic presidential candidates.
We were told that the bully Trump was intent upon provoking a war with Iran. That the draft might have to be reinstated. Maybe full national mobilization too.
It was as if the mullahs were in possession of the combined powers of Napoleon's Grande Armée and Hitler's Wehrmacht. Our only chance for survival was to hope for their restraint in the face of Trump's provocations and warmongering.
The theocrats in Tehran were undoubtedly pleased by the level of fear that was whipped up in the land of the Great Satan, although apparently, for some perhaps revealing reasons, not to the point yet of wishing to push matters beyond a certain symbolic and ineffective retaliation.
When stepping away from all the hysteria we are, however, struck by the failure, dating back to the revolution that brought the malignant Ruhollah Khomeini to power, of the American superpower to successfully establish anything resembling the kind of deterrence vis-à-vis Iran that one would expect when the powerful (us) confront the weak (them).
Iran is a country with a GDP roughly equivalent (actually, at last glance, slightly below) the state of Massachusetts. At the peak of its Khomeini-inspired revolutionary fervor it was unable to defeat Saddam Hussein's miserable minions in a decade-long war. It has no modern naval or air forces to speak of, no powerful allies willing to run risks on its behalf (particularly in any confrontation with America), and, for the time being at least, no nuclear weapons. It is despised by virtually all of its neighbors in a neighborhood pervaded by despicable regimes.
It would be only a mild overstatement to say that Iran has only a slightly better chance of prevailing in a war against America than Burkina-Faso or the Seychelles do. It is a weak country heavily armed only with malice, especially for Americans.
Iran's primary weapon--terrorism, of the kind Soleimani specialized in--is precisely the reason we should have done away with both him and his medieval clerical masters many years ago.
Instead, a bizarre relationship was established in which Iran was allowed to continually carry out terrorist attacks that killed scores of Americans and American allies while paying virtually no price for such behavior (until now). Indeed, the underlying premise of those criticizing Trump for sending Soleimani to an especially hot and deserved place deep in the bowels of the earth is that provocation exists only when America kills the terrorists who have been killing Americans--a premise which also neatly explains why Iran and scum like Soleimani have gotten away with killing so many for so long.
If Iran attacks us, we deserve it; if we retaliate, we are "escalating" the conflict and provoking war. Such thinking raises the question of what precisely Iran would have to do, beyond what it has been doing for four decades now, for an American response of any kind to be justified.
Instead of praising him for delivering justice by killing a war criminal, our media somehow made Trump the war criminal, and the war criminal the victim. Instead of a national day of celebration similar to that when Barack Obama got Osama bin Laden, we got a national bout of fearmongering and handwringing because Trump ordered the justified killing of an even more dangerous terrorist.
It occurs that the scandal in all of this isn't that Trump did what he did but that the Obama-Biden administration didn't do what Trump did, and thereby save the many lives that have been lost to Soleimani-directed terrorism in the years since.
In a fair world one might even hope that a media that specializes in demonizing Trump (even when, as with the killing of Soleimani, he does something right) might be interested in doing a little digging to find out what role former vice president and current Democratic front-runner Joe Biden played in the decision to allow Soleimani to roam free and wreak havoc. More specifically, whether Biden's former boss passed, perhaps with Biden's concurrence, on any opportunities of the kind Trump exploited to eliminate Iran's terrorist in chief.
Let there be no mistake: Any decision to let Soleimani live was also a decision to let more Americans and American allies die.
The last thing the Iranian leadership wants is a war that they know would result in the immediate destruction of their regime. And the next to last thing they want is for us to know that they know that.
Because with that knowledge also comes an awareness that Iran can get away with only what we let it get away with, and that, as with Soleimani's evil career, we've been letting it get away with way too much for way too long.
During the Cold War we had to co-exist with the Soviet Union because it had more than 11,000 strategic nuclear warheads, but we don't have to co-exist with the mullahs of Iran.
Which means they govern only with our forbearance, and our forbearance should have limits.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 01/20/2020