Five Takes on Bombing Iran

From the department of Earth-shattering kabooms

People have been singing about it since 1980, but yesterday’s bombing raids on Iranian nuclear facilities were the first bombing attack since the 1979 hostage seizure.

Despite numerous calls for action against the Islamic Republic, Operation Midnight Hammer was the first U.S. military action against important Iranian assets on Iranian territory. The bombs fell less than 24 hours ago, but here are a few preliminary takes.

Competence. The most striking thing about the attacks was the extreme competence displayed by the Air Force, the Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth, the various intelligence assets involved, the State Department, and the entire administration. There were no leaks. (How did they avoid leaks? Basically, they didn’t tell any Democrats what was coming. Take note.)

Not only were there no leaks, but President Trump and the diplomatic apparatus kept the Iranians in the dark, giving the impression of waffling in the White House even as things were being lined up. They received unintentional help in this from Sen. Charles Schumer, who had been for some time pushing the “TACO” acronym — Trump Always Chickens Out — in the service of a storyline that Trump was all bluster and no follow-through. The Iranians, apparently dumb enough to believe Democrats and the mainstream news media (but I repeat myself) were snookered.

New Diplomacy: In dealing with the Iranians in the 1980s, Donald Regan told President Reagan that America had been repeatedly “snookered” by a bunch of “rug merchants.” The Iranians were in fact very good at leading Americans down the garden path, invoking (often imaginary) splits between “hard-line” and “moderate” Islamists in their government as excuses for delay and backtracking.

In truth, as Henry Kissinger once said, “An Iranian moderate is one who has run out of ammunition.” After these raids, and the many Israeli attacks that led up to them, all of Iran is out of ammunition.

We’ll see if moderation follows. (I doubt it, as I think the “irrational regime hypothesis” applies heavily to Iran. See below.) But one thing that follows is that threats and deadlines from the Trump administration, unlike those from the Obama and Biden administrations, will be taken seriously in the future. Obama’s “red line” was bluster; Trump’s was not. He gave the Iranians a deadline and when they failed to comply, he destroyed their nuclear capability.

For a couple of decades after World War II, U.S. diplomacy was backed by the belief that words would be backed by force. After a while, our foreign policy elite began to see diplomacy as a substitute for force, not an adjunct to it. As soon as that happened, diplomacy lost most of its power. “Jaw jaw” as Churchill said, may be better than “war war,” but the jawing mostly works because war is the alternative. If the alternative is just more jawing, not so much.

Unsurprisingly the author of “The Art of the Deal” knew this.

The Humiliation of the Foreign Policy Establishment

We’ve had “Middle East experts” for years. Their track record, as the above suggests, has been poor. Our universities have departments of “Middle East Studies,” who have mostly pumped out poorly informed activists, and horrible takes by risible faculty members. Their existence has revolved around the Arab-Israeli conflict, which is in the process of disappearing as the Arab nations have all reached accommodations with Israel, and as the Palestinians suffer humiliating defeat, and the loss of their last major patron, Iran, which will be in no position to help them financially or militarily any time soon, if ever.

Well, an establishment that is organized around a problem is unlikely to go about actually solving that problem: What will its high-paid people, in prestigious jobs, do if that happens?

As it turns out, the solutions were always pretty simple, it just took someone from outside the field to find them. Trump brought Arabs and Israelis together under the Abraham Accords in his first term; now he’s bringing Iran to heel in his second. In both cases it took a willingness to be hard-nosed, and to say and do things that were anathema before because they would have interfered with big donations from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Keep It Simple, Stupid. And that’s a bigger lesson regarding the Trump approach. Our establishment at some level wants things to be complicated and intractable. Solving problems makes them go away, which is unfortunate. We were told before that addressing illegal immigration across the borders required legislation from Congress that would be complicated and require the greasing of lots of interests. Instead Trump just enforced the law, and illegal border crossing basically stopped. We were told that government spending was impossible to control and DOGE showed us otherwise. Obama told us we couldn’t drill our way out of oil shortages. Turned out Sarah Palin was right and “drill baby, drill” did just that — not so coincidentally also strengthening our hand in bringing about the Abraham Accords, etc. Iran’s nuclear program, we were told, was just something we’d have to live with, only it turned out it was something the Iranians could die with.

Our Political Class is Full of Traitors, Liars, and Fools. Okay, this isn’t really news. I’ve been pointing out for over two decades that the “anti-war” movement isn’t so much antiwar as just on the other side. But the speed with which mobs waving Hamas flags turned into mobs waving Mexican flags and then into mobs waving Iranian flags — al with support from pretty much the same gang of pundits and politicians — has been truly striking. Ed Morrissey points out Democrats’ “breathtaking hypocrisy” on War Powers, and of course, it would be more breathtaking if it were any sort of surprise.

Democrats thought it was fine when Obama did it because Lightbringer.

Whatever, Chardonnay Lady.

Anyway, no need to take these people seriously on this, and nobody does. Even Ilhan Omar is being corrected by an Imam:

Behave yourself, indeed. Well, I’m not naive enough to expect that will happen. But I do think the Democrats attacking this action are once again on the 20% end of an 80/20 issue.

Iran, as I mentioned above, seems to be an example of the “irrational regime hypothesis,” in which the actions needed to achieve internal power in a regime are at odds with the actions needed to succeed in the outside world. (World War II Japan is a classic example.) But it looks as if the Democratic Party today is another such irrational regime, in which the actions needed to move up the ladder with internal activists and donors are counterproductive in the larger world.

It generally takes a big shock to overcome this dynamic once it’s in place. Hiroshima and Nagasaki did it for the Japanese. The Israeli/American air campaign may do it for Iran. I have no idea what might turn around the Democratic Party.

It’s going to take more than losing another election, though.

[As always, if you enjoyed this essay, please consider taking out a paid subscription. I will thank you, and my family will thank you.]