THE BEAU BIDEN FACTOR

THE BEAU BIDEN FACTOR

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN AFGHANISTAN, JOE BIDEN

Jim Geraghty points to a sharp exchange Joe Biden had in 2010 with Richard Holbrooke, then President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Biden angrily told Holbrooke:

I am not sending my boy back [to Afghanistan] to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights. It just won’t work, that’s not what they’re there for.

At one level, Biden was making a fair point. Our troops weren’t in Afghanistan to defend women’s rights — we had other good reasons to be there — and defending women’s rights would not, standing alone, justify maintaining U.S. forces there.

But Biden’s reference to “my boy,” Beau Biden, is worth considering as we try to figure out why Biden recklessly pulled U.S. forces out of Afghanistan — a move that neither Obama nor Donald Trump was quite willing to make.

Geraghty points out that a few months before Biden’s exchange with Holbrooke, Beau Biden had suffered a mild stroke. Three years later, he was diagnosed with brain cancer, from which he died in 2015.

Joe Biden later speculated that his son’s brain cancer was the result of serving in Iraq. In 2018, he said that toxins found in smoke from burning waste at U.S. military installations in Iraq could “play a significant role” in causing veterans to develop cancer. And in 2019, he said that because of Beau’s “exposure to burn pits, in my view, I can’t prove it yet, he came back with stage four glioblastoma.”

Thus, Biden blames our intervention in Iraq for his son’s death. And since Biden voted in favor of that intervention, he might well blame himself.

It’s generally not good practice to attribute an official’s public policy decisions to psychological influences. But in this case, Biden arguably invites such attribution by having referred to his son during his argument with Holbrooke. As Geraghty says:

Biden saw the debate about the U.S. presence in Afghanistan in exceptionally personal terms. . .It is fair to wonder if Biden still sees Afghanistan in these exceptionally personal terms. Biden didn’t think Afghanistan was worth risking his son’s life in 2010; he doesn’t think it’s worth risking any American service member’s life now.

It’s also fair to wonder whether Biden sees defending any faraway country as worth risking American lives to defend. Taiwan, for example.

Red China and Taiwan must be wondering the same thing.

Meanwhile, we can only hope that Biden’s Afghan pullout won’t cost the lives of more Americans — civilians who didn’t sign up to fight — than the few troops who were dying defending Afghanistan against the Taliban.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/08/274555.php

CNN: Afghanistan's Fall Is a Neville Chamberlain-esque Failure and It's Joe Biden's Fault

CNN: Afghanistan's Fall Is a Neville Chamberlain-esque Failure and It's Joe Biden's Fault

BY BRYAN PRESTON 

 

AP Photo/Susan Walsh

CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen greeted Joe Biden’s vacation with a harsh but factual assessment of the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan: It is Biden’s fault.

A group of religious warriors, riding on captured American military vehicles, vanquish a US-trained military, which relinquishes much of its power without a fight.

Sound familiar?

That’s what happened in Iraq after the US withdrawal of troops from the country at the end of 2011. Within three years, an army of ISIS fighters was only a few miles from the gates of Baghdad and had taken many of the significant cities in Iraq.

It was then-Vice President Joe Biden who had negotiated the Obama administration’s drawdown from Iraq.

Anyone who has watched Joe Biden’s career could and should have seen this coming. For all his and his supporters’ claims that he is some foreign policy expert, Joe Biden has been expert at getting foreign policy questions wrong. He wanted to pay Iran cash right after 9-11, just because he wanted to. His own staff killed that notion. He’s still trying to pay Iran in cash, just as the Obama administration did while Biden was vice president. One could surmise that Joe Biden really wants to hand Iran, which backs terrorism against Israel and has declared itself an enemy of the United States since the 1979 revolution, large piles of American cash. One could also surmise that Biden is on course to exceed even Jimmy Carter’s disastrous Middle East foreign policy — a foreign policy that helped beget revolutionary Iran in the first place.

Biden wanted to carve up Iraq along sectarian lines as some kind of solution to the violence that plagued the country following the U.S. invasion. Iran was fomenting much of that violence through proxies with the express intent of hurting the United States, destabilizing Iraq, and extending its influence. Any armchair analyst could see that from the comfort of home in the U.S. I saw it first-hand in Baghdad in 2007 and was given a classified briefing on the situation in detail by American Army officers who had been fighting that war for years. But Biden evidently never saw it and still doesn’t.

When it came time to deal with Afghanistan from the Oval Office, Biden once again failed to see the facts on the ground and plan for anything. He even set the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, engineered from Afghan soil by al Qaeda under the aegis of the Taliban, as the date certain for U.S. withdrawal, believing that to be some kind of PR gain. That might be the mother of all head-scratchers unless the intent was to give the Taliban, not the United States, a PR boost.

Now he’s moved that date up to August 31, while also sending more troops in to protect the U.S. embassy in Kabul and at the same time begging the Taliban not to attack that embassy. It’s all as irresponsible as it is incoherent. And it’s all vintage Joe Biden.

CNN’s Bergen likens Biden’s effort to one of history’s most notorious moments of rank cowardice.

(U.S. Ambassador Zalmay) Khalilzad agreed to pressure the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners, several of whom simply rejoined their old comrades on the battlefield once they were released. It’s hard to recall a more failed and counterproductive diplomatic effort. Maybe British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s attempt to reach a lasting peace agreement with Adolf Hitler in 1938 in Munich on the cusp of World War II?

Bergen notes that the fall of Afghanistan will be seen as a significant jihadist victory just as the Obama withdrawal from Iraq was. That withdrawal set the stage for ISIS to arise there and in Syria. Holy warriors poured in and the world saw them perpetrate horror after horror.

Afghanistan is unlikely to be any different. It could be worse, actually, with as many as 20 jihadist groups and tens of thousands of warriors-in-training moving in and setting up shop sure in the knowledge that the Americans will not be back.

Additionally, Pakistan and China will be looking to protect it from any outside influence for their own reasons, while India ponders its moves. Three rival, nuclear powers with records of fighting wars against one another could descend on Afghanistan directly or through proxies as the exhausted superpower slinks away. Russia is likely to want a say as well, so make that four nuclear powers with interests in Afghanistan — and three of them with little regard for human rights.

Most of this outcome was obvious as soon as Biden announced his withdrawal date with no accompanying coherent withdrawal plan. That emboldened the Taliban and dispirited U.S. allies who had worked so hard for so long to attempt to stabilize the country. It put China on notice that an opportunity had just fallen into its lap.

None of this is to suggest that the U.S. had to stay in Afghanistan forever. It is to suggest that a leader has to actually lead, and that Biden failed to do that. He failed to plan and Afghanistan will pay a very steep price. So will the United States.

Afghanistan is very likely to become two things in short order: a terrorist haven and at least a nominal ally or vassal of China once the Taliban consolidates control. China is content to let the Taliban rule as long as it does not menace China or Chinese interests, and China can see an opportunity as well.

The first sets the stage for a resurgence of global Islamist jihadism. The latter puts China in the catbird seat to exploit one of the few valuable natural resources Afghanistan has: the mining of rare earth minerals that we use in modern technology every day (but which the United States does not mine in significant quantities — but guess who does).

Both of these consequences greatly damage the United States. Both of these consequences are Joe Biden’s responsibility.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/08/13/cnn-afghanistans-fall-is-a-neville-chamberlain-esque-failure-and-its-joe-bidens-fault-n1469115?utm_source=pjmedia&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&newsletterad=&bcid=333548a2571394d78f5984884e55069e&recip=28668535

BIDEN’S MUDDLED THINKING ON AFGHANISTAN

BIDEN’S MUDDLED THINKING ON AFGHANISTAN

PAUL MIRENGOFF IN AFGHANISTAN, JOE BIDEN

The New York Times reports on Joe Biden’s decision making regarding Afghanistan. The article is accessible here.

The whole report is worth reading, but I want to highlight this passage:

In late March, [Lloyd] Austin and [Mark] Milley made a last-ditch effort with the president by forecasting dire outcomes in which the Afghan military folded in an aggressive advance by the Taliban. They drew comparisons to how the Iraqi military was overrun by the Islamic State in 2014 after U.S. combat troops left Iraq, prompting Obama to send U.S. forces back.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” Austin told Biden, according to officials with knowledge of the meetings.

But the president was unmoved. If the Afghan government could not hold off the Taliban now, aides said he asked, when would they be able to? None of the Pentagon officials could answer the question.

I think the honest answer to Biden’s question is that the Afghan government can hold off the Taliban on its own when the South Koreans can hold off North Korea without the U.S. presence, or when the West Germans could have held off Warsaw Pact forces without us.

In other words, not in the foreseeable future. Maybe not ever.

But that doesn’t mean the Afghans couldn’t have held off the enemy with the help of a relatively small U.S. force. In fact, they were doing so. Nor does it mean we should have abandoned them.

That’s not what great nations — or good, honorable ones — do.

It’s interesting, too, that Austin and Milley reminded Biden of what happened when we pulled out of Iraq. The reminder was pointed, or should have been, because Biden was an architect and perhaps the prime mover of the disastrous decision to withdraw from that country.

That Biden withdrawal led to ISIS capturing much of Iraq, establishing a caliphate, and terrorizing the West, including America. Obama had to bring our troops back to Iraq. (I don’t recall anyone objecting that if, after all the training and equipment we provided the Iraqis, they couldn’t defend themselves, too bad for them.)

We won’t be sending troops back to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban again. And maybe this time around, the Taliban won’t allow Afghanistan to become a launching pad for worldwide terrorism.

But there was no need to take this risk, to suffer a massive national humiliation, and to allow the Taliban to have its bloody way with the Afghans who supported us or who simply want to enjoy basic human rights and freedoms.

Biden’s rationale for doing so apparently was nothing more than the fact that the generals couldn’t tell him that our limited troop commitment would not be open ended. This, then, was the case of an unintelligent president basing a crucial policy decision on an answer to the wrong question.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/08/bidens-muddled-thinking-on-afghanistan.php

KYLE SMITH MEETS TOKYO JOE

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, JOE BIDEN

National Review has posted Kyle Smith’s article “Wrong-Way Biden” behind its premium paywall. The article is published in the magazine’s September 21 issue and it is excellent. I appreciated the first-person opening of Smith’s article in which he meets “Tokyo Joe” coming through on “a mischievous enemy radio station.” Smith writes:

In January of 1991, I was a second lieutenant in the 178th Personnel Service Company, an administrative appendix to the buffed body of the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment. My troops and I had landed in the Gulf town of Dhahran a week before Christmas and gradually made our way inland by long, grim, nearly silent convoys — creeping, 20-mph slogs across the one two-lane highway, then off the road and across the sands to set up camp.

In mid January, after maybe twelve hours of deliberate, dusty driving, I climbed out of a deuce-and-a-half and stretched my limbs as the soldiers began unloading, somewhere beneath the triangle where Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia meet. A radio was playing in someone’s truck. Radio options were limited in this landscape; occasionally you could find the signal for the Armed Forces Network, if there was a large enough base nearby, but sometimes you couldn’t. AFN, Stars and Stripes, and occasional copies of a surprisingly good English-language broadsheet called “Arab News” were our sole media diet apart from whatever magazines we subscribed to, which would arrive weeks late in the mail. All three of our main sources were, of course, pro-U.S., which was fine by me. I had no idea what we were in for. I wanted only the most optimistic spin on things.

Which is why it was so startling to hear an American voice raining hellfire warnings on us over the radio. At first I assumed I was hearing AFN, but AFN didn’t let speeches go on like this uninterrupted, except maybe presidential addresses, and was strongly averse to downbeat messages. It dawned on me that we were listening to a mischievous enemy radio station that was blasting out unnerving propaganda to sap our morale like Tokyo Rose. Except the speaker hitting Saddam’s talking points was not a foreigner. It was Senator Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. Tokyo Joe.

“What vital interest of the United States of America justifies sending young Americans to their death in the sands of the Arabian peninsula?” Biden asked, in his speech announcing his vote against the war resolution on January 12, 1991. “The appeasers of the past are now ready to vote to spill my son’s blood and his generation’s blood to satisfy and salve their consciences,” he declared. (I don’t know why he specified his son, as neither of his boys was in the military at the time; Beau eventually signed on, but that was twelve years later.) Biden gravely informed us that we did not enjoy America’s backing: “President Bush, . . . I implore you to understand that even if you win today, 46 to 54, you still lose. The Senate and the nation are divided on the issue. You have no mandate for war, Mr. President. . . . The impatience you feel, the anger you feel are all justified, but none of them add up to vital interest and none of them — none of them — justify the death of our sons and daughters.”

He called the proposed attack “dangerous folly.” He predicted it “could cost tens or hundreds of thousands of lives,” meaning U.S. ones. He predicted “loss of American international support in the future.” He asked, “Who do we think we are? What do we think of our capabilities to do what has seldom been done in history without total occupation of the entire region?”

Smith’s article winds up with a compelling conclusion that cuts through the fog of war:

Those who fret that the current president is not always being forthright should note that Biden, who suffered two brain aneurysms in 1988, which required a seven-month break from his Senate duties and which were so grave he was given only a 50 percent chance of survival by doctors, has not released any medical records in twelve years, when he first ran for veep and revealed that he suffered from an irregular heartbeat. Studies link aneurysms to decreased life expectancy, which for a man of Biden’s age is already less than ten years. Biden will, on Election Day, be exactly as old as Ronald Reagan was on his last day in office and a couple of weeks shy of his 78th birthday. Every day his administration lasts he will set a new record for the oldest chief executive in the history of the United States.

Alas, Abraham Lincoln is not on the ballot this year. Two flawed men present themselves for our inspection. Biden may promise “hope and light and love,” but that is merely the accepted euphemism for greatly expanded federal powers to reshape everything from the energy sector to girls’ locker rooms. The distractions of personality foibles, Twitter wars, and misadventures in assertions of truth aside, the crux of this election is that we are confronted as usual with one party that says, “Let’s get to work reshaping everything in the United States” and another party that says, “Let’s not.”

While Smith does not do justice to the merits of Trump’s record, the focus of his article is on Biden and he nails the “crux of this election[.]”

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/09/kyle-smith-meets-tokyo-joe.php

FLASHBACK: Obama Repeatedly Ignored Intelligence Briefings on the Rise of ISIS

BY MATT MARGOLIS 

Now that the whole “Trump ignored intelligence about Russian bounties on U.S. Troops” story has been debunked by multiple military and intelligence officials, it seems appropriate to assess why Democrats and the media are still clinging to the story, pretending it’s true and believing it to be more Trump/Russia fodder.

The media and the Democratic Party were quick to jump on the alleged bombshell report from the New York Times because they wanted it to be true. It also served as a great counter to one of the most significant intelligence blunders of the past decade: the failure of the Obama-Biden administration to stop the rise of ISIS.

Despite the story being debunked, Joe Biden accused Trump of “dereliction of duty” and said Trump “doesn’t seem to be cognitively aware of what’s going on.”

Make no mistake about it, this is all a smokescreen to help Joe Biden when he has to answer for intelligence failures while he was vice president. The media wants to project the weaknesses of the Obama-Biden administration onto President Trump to undermine his reelection narrative.

Remember, Obama claimed that the White House was caught off guard about the rise of ISIS, even though he was repeatedly warned about it, but failed to act on it.

A national security staffer in the Obama-Biden administration told the Daily Mail in 2014 that Barack Obama was getting “highly accurate predictions” about the rise of the ISIS “before the 2012 election.” The intelligence was described as “actionable.”

Rather than accept responsibility for his failure, Obama publicly faulted his Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, for underestimating ISIS.

A former Pentagon official also told then-Fox News national security correspondent Catherine Herridge that Obama received “specific intelligence” about the rise of ISIS in his presidential daily briefings for at least a year:

A former Pentagon official confirms to Fox News that detailed and specific intelligence about the rise of ISIS was included in the PDB, or the President’s Daily Brief, for at least a year before the group took large swaths of territory beginning in June.

The official, who asked not to be identified because the PDB is considered the most authoritative, classified intelligence community product providing the President with analysis of sensitive international events, said the data was strong, and “granular” in detail, adding a policy maker “… could not come away with any other impression: This is getting bad.” 

The official who has close knowledge of the process said the President, who reads the PDB unlike his predecessors who traditionally had the document briefed to them, was not known to come back to the intelligence community with further questions or “taskings.” Asked to describe the frequency, the former Pentagon official said “not generally.”

After suggestions that the administration may have been blindsided by the rise of ISIS, and that poor intelligence was to blame, the former Pentagon official said some of the intelligence was so good it was described as “exquisite”.

According to Lt. General Michael Flynn, who was Obama’s former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Obama White House ignored reports warning about the rise of ISIS in 2011 and 2012 because they did not fit Obama’s reelection narrative that al Qaeda was on the run and that we were winning the war on terror.

“I think that they did not meet a narrative the White House needed. And I’ll be very candid with you, they just didn’t,” Flynn told CNN in 2015. “I think the narrative was that al Qaeda was on the run, and (Osama) bin Laden was dead. … They’re dead and these guys are, we’ve beaten them.”

So, while Obama was warned, repeatedly, with accurate and actionable intelligence about the rise of ISIS but failed to act, the alleged Russian bounties were, according to an intelligence official, uncorroborated, and only reached low levels at the NSC because there was dissent within the intelligence community about its accuracy. It never appeared in a presidential daily briefing.

Territory in Iraq was quickly lost to ISIS as they grew in strength and numbers thanks to the incompetence and inaction of the Obama-Biden administration. It took Donald Trump becoming commander in chief to defeat ISIS.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/07/01/flashback-obama-repeatedly-ignored-intelligence-briefings-on-the-rise-of-isis-n595008?utm_source=pjmedia&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&newsletterad=&bcid=333548a2571394d78f5984884e55069e&recip=28668535

Barack Obama Violated the War Powers Act, Not Trump

Barack Obama Violated the War Powers Act, Not Trump

 

BY MATT MARGOLIS 

President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump shake hands following their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

In the wake of the strike ordered by President Trump that killed General Qasem Soleimani, many on the left have rushed to criticize Trump for retaliating against the attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. 2020 Democrats, in particular, piled on Trump with condemnations. "President Trump just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox," said Biden. Cory Booker, who apparently is still in the race, claimed, "We have a president who has failed to show any larger strategic plan." Elizabeth Warren acknowledged that Soleimani was an evil terrorist responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans, but also said, "this reckless move escalates the situation with Iran and increases the likelihood of more deaths and new Middle East conflict." Bernie Sanders naturally agreed, "Trump's dangerous escalation brings us closer to another disastrous war in the Middle East that could cost countless lives and trillions more dollars." Blah, blah, blah.

Democrat leaders in Congress also complained about the strike and the lack of congressional authorization.

Adam Schiff

✔@RepAdamSchiff

Soleimani was responsible for unthinkable violence and world is better off without him.

But Congress didn’t authorize and American people don’t want a war with Iran.

All steps must now be taken to protect our forces against the almost inevitable escalation and increased risk. https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1212931309955366912 …

The New York Times

✔@nytimes

Breaking News: The U.S. confirmed it was behind the strike that killed the powerful Iranian commander Qassim Suleimani, a major escalation in a conflict with Iran https://nyti.ms/2QFz4pN 

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The media has also done its part to paint Trump's actions in a negative light. And some Democrats in Congress have whined about Trump not informing Congress about the strike before it happened, and some are even accusing Trump of violating the War Powers Act—for a retaliatory action well within his constitutional authority—which means they'll probably try to impeach him over it, too.

Except that would once again demonstrate the hypocrisy of the Democrats. For example, Adam Schiff was fully behind Obama's illegal war with Libya. As National Review's Andrew McCarthy noted on Twitter, Adam Schiff "supported President Obama’s war on Libya, which was unauthorized by Congress, unprovoked by any attack or threatened attack on the US, and unwanted by Americans."

Despite the fact that Obama's war in Libya wasn't in response to any attack or threat, Obama actually argued the War Powers Act didn't apply because “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve U.S. ground troops.”

But many experts disagreed. Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale, argued in an op-ed in the New York Times on June 20, 2011, that Obama had indeed violated the War Powers Act, and was engaging in an illegal war. "It has now been over three months since the first NATO bombs fell on Libya, yet President Obama has failed to request Congressional approval for military action, as required by the War Powers Act of 1973," Ackerman wrote. "The legal machinations Mr. Obama has used to justify war without Congressional consent set a troubling precedent that could allow future administrations to wage war at their convenience — free of legislative checks and balances."

Member of Congress on both sides of the aisle called the War in Libya a violation of the War Powers Act, and it even prompted a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers to sue the Obama administration over its constitutionality.

Trump's authority to respond to the attack on the U.S. Embassy, however, was constitutionally justified. “[Soleimani] was a combatant,” Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz explained on Breitbart News Tonight on Sirius XM. “There’s no doubt that he fit the description of ‘combatant.’ He [was] a uniformed member of an enemy military who was actively planning to kill Americans; American soldiers and probably, as well, American civilians.”

Dershowitz added, “It was the right thing to do. It was legally justified, and I think we should applaud the president for his decision. We send a very powerful message to the Iranian government that we will not stand by as the American embassy is attacked — which is an act of war — and we will not stand by as plans are being made to attack and kill American soldiers."

Despite allegations of Trump acting recklessly, Fox News' Gregg Jarrett also believes Trump has demonstrated "remarkable restraint" in dealing with Iran. "He did not retaliate with military action months ago when Iran shot down a U.S. drone or attacked oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman or fired rockets into an installation housing American military personnel. One can argue that his forbearance only emboldened Iran’s belligerence."

According to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, General Soleimani was planning "imminent" attacks against Americans in the Middle East. "It was the time to take this action so that we could disrupt this plot, deter further aggression from Qasem Soleimani and the Iranian regime — as well as to attempt to de-escalate the situation," Pompeo explained on CNN's "New Day" on Friday. "The risk of doing nothing was enormous. The intelligence community made that assessment, and President Trump acted decisively last night."

In the wake of this strike, Democrats seem intent of stirring up fears of a war with Iran—something Trump has repeatedly declared he does not want. It reminds me of how in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, Democrats claimed President George W. Bush was going to bring back the military draft, when in fact the only people even proposing bringing it back were Democrats. The left seems to be operating under the theory that acts of war by enemy nations should not be met with retaliation.

_____

Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama's Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis

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YES, WE CAN

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN IRAN, TRUMP FOREIGN POLICY

When Iranian-backed militias attacked the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Ayatollah Khamanei reportedly boasted that America “cannot do a damn thing” about it. This harked back to America’s failed effort in 1979 to rescue hostages Iran held. During a demonstration in Tehran following that fiasco, one of the signs said, “America can’t do anything.”

All nations respect nations that can do things — in other words, nations that effectively wield power. They tend to view nations that can’t with contempt.

Iran, I think, is particularly impressed by the effective wielding of power. At the beginning of World War II, the then-Shah (father of the one we remember) incurred the displeasure of the British, who thought he was too sympathetic to Germany. The British responded by forcing this powerful dictator to abdicate in favor of his son (the Shah we remember). The old Shah was sent into exile and died during the war.

In the early 1950s, the new Shah appointed the popular Mohammad Mosaddegh as prime minister. Mosaddegh proceeded to nationalize the oil industry, to the chagrin of the British. The British persuaded President Eisenhower to help them oust Mosaddegh. The Shah, who had left for Rome, returned to take back the reins.

These exercises of power made a lasting impression on Iranians. So lasting, that for decades, and long after the sun had set on the British empire, Iranians of a certain age attributed to the British everything important that happened in the Middle East.

As late as the 1990s, my law firm was involved in litigation between very high level Iranian ex-pats. The partner in charge of the litigation told me how puzzled he was that, for some reason, the old Iranians he dealt with saw the hand of Britain everywhere.

A new generation of Iranians formed a very different impression when it came to America. The humiliation the mullahs inflicted on us in 1979 caused them to believe, as that sign said, America can’t do anything.

The overthrow of Saddam Hussein temporarily changed this impression. So much so that, according to our intelligence services, Iran halted its nuclear program. It had seen how America responded to evidence that a hostile power in the region was developing weapons of mass destruction. We could do something big in the region, after all.

Unfortunately, the U.S soon met with serious reversals in Iraq. Thus, Iran’s nuclear program soon was back in business (assuming it really had been halted).

Then came the Obama administration. Suddenly, it wasn’t just that America couldn’t do anything to stop Iran. Now, it no longer even wanted to. On the contrary, Obama was prepared to subsidize the regime — to pay it tribute. We had become truly pathetic in the eyes of Iran’s tough-minded rulers.

President Trump quickly reversed course. And now, by effectuating the killing of Gen. Soleimani, he has demonstrated, in a way he hadn’t previously, that the U.S. can some do some impressive military things to Iran, and is willing to do them.

I’d like to say that, with this demonstrated, Iran will back off. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely.

For one thing, the regime needs to save face. For another, it holds some good cards. It controls strong militias throughout the region and, I assume, terrorist cells in key parts of the world including, perhaps, America.

The U.S., by contrast, seems to be spread pretty thin in the region. And President Trump clearly doesn’t want a massive redeployment of troops to Iraq, much less a ground war with Iran and its militias.

Thus, I expect Iran to deploy some of its military assets to hit back at the U.S.

However, the U.S. holds the best card. We can take the fight to Iran in ways it cannot take the fight to us.

My sense, then, is that President Trump will have to keep demonstrating what the U.S. can do to Iran. If he does, Iran probably will finally get the message and stop short of forcing Trump to crush the regime. If he doesn’t, Iran will regain its confidence and continue to be a menace.

Trump, though, seems determined not to let that happen.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/01/yes-we-can-2.php