Is America At War With Iran? Should It Be?

Under president Trump’s leadership, America is determined to stop Iran from achieving their long-time goal of taking over Iraq and establishing a new Persian Empire because that would be very bad for all Americans

I have long given up on the anti-MAGA crowd, the Rose McGowans and the Tulsi Gabbards, to say nothing of the Squad creatures. They range from being hysterically anti-American to burning with a cold, calculated hatred for the country that gave them everything. From the MAGA movement, which I support, I expect a more logical and more knowledgeable approach because we should know what it takes to make something great and keep it that way.

America was great and is great precisely because there was not a single day from the day that the shot heard around the world was fired to this very day that America had not been at war. Of course we can quibble on what the definition of war is, buy I consider that to be a fool’s errand. We already have the two hundred year old definition of war as continuation of politics by other means provided to us by the German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz and it’s a good one. I would perhaps venture to amend it to state that war is the achievement of geopolitical and economic objectives by other means, i.e. via the use of well-organized and purposeful violence.

By that definition, the US has always been at war. First to obtain independence from Britain, then to extend its boundaries northwards (unsuccessfully) as well as westard (successfully) and southward (with partial success). Simultaneously the US fought wars to maintain, expand, and protect its trade routes and obtain dominance in every one of the world’s major waterways. The US fought native American tribes, most European nations at one time or another, as well as Japan and various communist proxies of China and the USSR such as North Korea and North Vietnam. It is much easier to name the places on the globe in which American military has never been and is still not present today than those in which it was and still is present.

There is nothing wrong with any of that. If you believe, as I do, that America is a force for good in the world, then you must believe that American expansionism, the projection of its geopolitical and economic influence by means both peaceful and violent was and still very much is a good thing.

What is less good is burying our heads in the sand and pretending that America came into being, deus ex machina, as a country occupying the best and biggest part of the North American continent and as a global superpower that had substantially put the rest of the world to work for its own (as well as theirs) benefit. This kind of thinking is not only naive, it belittles the memory of the hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans who gave their lives in battle to achieve this amazing result.

As to Iran, America has been at war with it ever since the ayatollah regime attacked and took over the sovereign ground of the American embassy in Tehran, a building that still stands, that has never been returned, and for which clearly warlike action there has never been the hint of an apology.

It takes only one to start a war, but two to make peace and Iran has never shown the slightest inclination to do so.

Today, America is continuing its war with Iran, a war in which it was never the aggressor, by containing the malignant Iranian influence in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. The most recent theater of operations is Iraq, a country that was destabilized by the unnecessary and disastrous Iraq war in which America tipped the power balance in the country from the Sunna to the Shia, giving Iran an opening to make it into its vassal state.

Should Iran achieve this objective, it would be in control of strategic assets in the form of fossil fuels and both land and waterways that would very significantly harm American geopolitical and economic interests. The traitorous and anti-American Obama administration was willing to not only let it happen, it was actively assisting Iran in achieving these goals precisely because it would strategically weaken American interests and America itself. The pro-American Trump administration is unwilling to let it happen and since the only way to stop it (the sanctions having been maxed out) is war, the US under president Trump’s leadership is not shrinking from its responsibility to prosecute this war to the only conclusion that is aligned with American interests: victory.

So to answer my second question, yes, America not only is at war with Iran, it should be at war with Iran because Iran wants to be at war with America and refusing to fight would be exceedingly detrimental to the interests of all Americans.

What is victory? Victory is the termination of war when one’s geopolitical and economic objectives have been met to a higher degree than those of the enemy. America has no interest, needless to say, in occupying Iran or even interfering with its internal politics. America does have an interest in limiting Iran’s ability to project its power across the entire Middle Eastern region from Yemen to Turkey. The key to achieving that goal is stopping Iran from substantially taking over Iraq.

To achieve this goal America has eliminated Qasem Soleimani, the general in charge of taking Iraq over for Iran’s supreme leader Khamenei. The day after Soleimani and his top deputies, both Iranian and Iraqi were dispatched, America began eliminating the second tier of command, killing six top Iraqi members of pro-Iranian militia. Thirty five hundred hundred American troops are on the way to the region and a 700-strong special forces brigade is on high alert in Italy ready to deploy to a specially prepared airfield in Lebanon should the Iranian-backed Hezbollah try to attack American interests in that country, chief among them the American embassy in Beirut.

Conservative and MAGA pundits, especially Jewish ones like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin should refrain from the patronizing attitude they so often adopt towards their audiences. They should stop with the “limited air strike is not a war” nonsense. The use of organized violence against an enemy in order to achieve well-defined geopolitical and economic objectives is war by definition and that is exactly what the US is doing in the Middle East when it comes to Iran.

As a corollary, those American patriots who support president Trump should accept that a major country, Iran, declared war on them over four decades ago and in this war there can be only two outcomes: America can lose or it can win. President Trump is choosing to win; what will his supporters choose?

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