Since last weekend in the befuddled attempt to justify our bombing of Iran, one of the tropes sadly trotted out was to reference the 1979 hostage taking in Tehran.
Apparently, according to MAGA kidnapping Americans is an act of war....
So in the same spirit, I was hoping one of the MAGA supporters could list all of the nations that we're currently at war with/nations (or groups) that have declared war on us so we can discuss why Trump isn't bombing them as well.
For example, most recently HAMAS took Americans hostage--precisely what the Iranians did. But we haven't bombed them. But they're not alone. Lybia, Somalia, Mozambique, Japan, Israel, Syria, UAE, Italy, Russia, Pakistan, Cuba--just to name a few have all detained Americans in the last 20 years. Sometimes they died in custody.
So all of those nations have declared on war on us too then....right? Should be bomb them too?
In April 1983, Iran’s Lebanese arm bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 17 Americans. Six months later, the group killed 241 U.S. servicemen at the Marine barracks in Beirut. In January 1984, Hezbollah assassinated the president of the American University of Beirut, Malcolm Kerr; in March it kidnapped, tortured, and killed CIA Station Chief William Buckley; and in September it bombed the U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut, killing 23, including two U.S. service members. In December 1984, the Lebanese terrorists hijacked a Kuwait Airways flight and tortured and killed two officials of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Charles Hegna and William Stanford. In June 1985, Hezbollah hijacked a TWA flight and tortured and murdered U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem; and in July 1989, Hezbollah kidnapped, tortured, and killed U.S. Marine Col. William Higgins.
Hezbollah’s kidnapping, torturing, and murdering of Americans dropped off with the end of Lebanon’s civil wars in 1990, but Iranian-backed groups continued to kill U.S. forces throughout the region. The biggest attack was in Saudi Arabia when 19 U.S. Airmen were killed after a truck bomb drove into Khobar Towers June 25, 1996.
In his 2000 book
The America We Deserve, Trump was rightly concerned about the possibility that Iran’s proxies might soon be operating under their sponsor’s nuclear umbrella. He wrote: “You can be assured that right now there are fanatics, whether they sit in the counsels of doomsday cults or in the cabinets of rogue states, who are plotting and waiting for their moment to strike. The question then is What can we do to best protect our cities? A lot more than you might think.”
As the number of U.S. troops killed by the Iranians in Iraq reached 603 in 2011, Trump spelled out what he’d do in his book published that year,
Time to Get Tough. “America’s primary goal with Iran must be to destroy its nuclear ambitions. Let me put them as plainly as I know how: Iran’s nuclear program must be stopped—by any and all means necessary. Period. We cannot allow this radical regime to acquire a nuclear weapon that they will either use or hand off to terrorists.”
At the start of his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump said, “We need to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. We cannot allow a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.” Of the Barack Obama administration’s Iran nuclear agreement, the candidate said, it’s “very dangerous. Iran developing a nuclear weapon, either through uranium or nuclear fuel, and defying the world is still a very real possibility. The inspections will not be followed, and Iran will no longer have any sanctions. Iran gets everything and loses nothing.”
During his first term, Trump withdrew from Obama’s deal and imposed sanctions on Iran to force it to abandon its nuclear program. On the campaign trail for the 2024 race, Trump
warned against the prospect of an Iranian bomb many dozens of times. Most significantly, after Joe Biden told Israel to refrain from hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities, Trump blasted his rival. “That’s the thing you want to hit, right?” said Trump. “It’s the biggest risk we have, nuclear weapons.”
Maybe a handful of very low-information voters—i.e., Americans who live in caves or are otherwise cut off from civilization—who went with Trump for the first time in 2024 were unaware of his long and well-documented statements about Iran, its nuclear weapons program, and the war it’s been waging on America since 1979. But for media celebrities, like Carlson, Kelly, Walsh, and the rest who pride themselves on knowing “what time it is,” it’s inconceivable they didn’t know about Trump and Iran. So what’s really going on?
The name given to the Iran campaign, Operation Epic Fury, suggests that Donald Trump’s political trajectory may have begun with the 1979 embassy takeover. It was plain proof that America was losing, and it inspired him to turn things around. America’s defeat in Vietnam, left-wing political violence, and rampant drug use left our country sucking wind during the ’70s. But the embassy siege was a public humiliation that lasted 444 days, during which the revolutionary cadres ground our faces in excrement: “The United States has made threats and raised a great deal of noise,” said Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. “America can’t do a damn thing.” And because America didn’t do a damn thing, it acclimated itself to losing to Iran and its regional allies.
President Reagan rolled back the Soviet empire but blinked after the Iranians directed Hezbollah to kill U.S. armed forces, spies, and diplomats in Beirut. Bill Clinton admitted he was a loser. After the U.S. president spent political capital and personal prestige to bully Israel into giving up land to create a state under the Iranian revolutionaries’ old friend Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian terror master told Clinton no. “I’m a colossal failure,” Clinton told Arafat. “And you made me one.”
George W. Bush’s global war on terror turned Iran into a regional hegemon, presiding over what was for a time known as the Shiite crescent, reaching from the Persian Gulf to the eastern Mediterranean. Democratizing Iraq meant ensuring power would rest with the country’s Shiite majority, whose political leaders, with few exceptions, were controlled by Tehran. Even though the administration had been warned that elections in the Palestinian territories would lead to a Hamas victory, Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pushed for elections, which the Iranian-backed terror group won, leading to Hamas’ eventual takeover of Gaza. As if the freedom agenda hadn’t done enough harm to American regional interests, Bush stopped Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah to protect a Lebanese government the administration saw as a beacon of democracy, even if it was controlled by Hezbollah.
Who Wants This War? Winners. - Tablet Magazine
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