The Common Sense’s Diary

Why did Trump decapitate the Iranian leadership when generations of American presidents had not? That is quite a question. They all could have. And the threat posed by Iran has been present for decades. The reason is likely that between the 1979 Iranian revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall a decade later, US leaders were still unsure what to make of the Iranian theocrats. After 1989, the Western world came to believe in the “end of history delusion” that the collapse of the Soviet Union marked the collapse of the last threat to the Western liberal order and that, as a consequence, hard power would need to play no future role in diplomacy as liberal democracy was to spread across the world. Twenty years later, wokeness spread across the West, and Western leaders came to believe that their societies were inherently illegitimate, and that exporting influence through force thereby echoed what they regarded as their countries’ detestable colonial pasts. The Trump administration did not believe in any of that.

A wandering albatross remarked on how easy it was to decapitate the leadership. Generations of world leaders said it could not be done; it was too difficult; it was not feasible; and then with the swoop of a missile, the leadership was gone. Much like the closing of the US southern border.

What comes next is, of course, important. It’s a race now between Iran’s drone supplies and its missile launch abilities and the stocks of US-made air defences. Whoever wins that race has the upper hand in settling the peace.

Was it justified? Of course it was. The Iranians were well on their way to developing a nuclear weapon and a ballistic missile development system. They’d have used both. First to wipe out Israel, then to go after their Arab neighbours, and then Berlin, Paris, London, New York, and Washington, in roughly that order. How strange a human you must be to think that Islamist theocrats can be reasoned with. No, sometimes war is the only way, and in wars, people will die, and they can also escalate. But that does not change the fact that the basis of this one was rock solid.

Another albatross remarked on how young Westerners observed frolicking on the beach, just as the first American and Israeli strikes landed, likely had no inkling at all of how profound the actions taken by the young American and Israeli pilots that struck Iran would turn out to be to their own lives and futures. Imagine that: being a young American pilot circling high above the Iranian desert, wiping out the missile and nuclear infrastructure that would otherwise have been targeted at wiping out the Western way of life. Many of those young pilots and the troops supporting them were likely no older than the kids frolicking on the beach.

Wars like this also bring out the greatest stupidity in mankind. Some complete idiot, safe in his Western university, managed to draft an article that peace was about to break out with Iran when the Americans decided to strike Iran. The Iranians, you see, were about to do a deal where they agreed not to kill Jews and Westerners – but now they have again been provoked into doing that. Another “analyst” said the war was premature as it would be at least 10 years until the Iranians could develop a nuclear weapon able to reach the continental US. What wonderful news – ten whole years (Trump, you see, plainly is a lunatic). It’s a special kind of stupid only outdone by the Western television journalist who managed to contort the pretzel of an argument that because Netanyahu had been accused of war crimes (by deeply flawed global institutions that the West had no business outsourcing their moral agency to in the first place), the strikes on Iran were illegitimate. There is a moral equivalency, you see, between Iran and Israel (and the broader liberal West). The idiot class in the West will never know with what grateful thanks they should fall on their knees before those young American and Israeli soldiers and thank them for what they are doing to save the world from tyranny and oppression.