MORNING RANT: The Iran Situation and Trump’s MOU – What Constitutes “Finishing the Job” After the Lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan?

I’m being told that Donald Trump has failed. Instead of bringing about eternal harmony in a region that has never known peace, the president has simply killed off Iran’s senior leadership, obliterated its military, weakened its proxy networks, and destroyed its nuclear capability. In addition, this conflict has finally compelled the Gulf States to start building oil pipelines to the Mediterranean and Red Seas, ensuring that the Strait of Hormuz will not be a chokepoint for global oil flow in the not-distant future.

Unfortunately, and despite our military success, Iran still doesn’t have a secular, pro-western government releasing doves while crooning “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” Neither do Iraq or Afghanistan, for which a tragic amount of American blood was spilled in pursuit of unattainable, western-style democracies. All those regimes deserved to be toppled, but none of them are worth spilling American blood to rebuild.

While it’s a shame that the people of Iran did not rise up and reclaim their country from the Islamists holding levers of power, the U.S. has done enough for now, and if we need to come back and do some more bombing, that remains on the table. But occupation cannot be an option we’re considering. This is a consistent opinion of mine, and I believe it is consistent with much of the MAGA right.

A year ago, right after the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities but well before this latest round of strikes, I wrote a piece titled “President Trump’s Use of Military Power - If We Have to Break It, We Aren't Going to Buy It.” In it I rejected the notion that the only two options regarding the use of military power are either pacifism or boots-on-the-ground nation-building, writing, ”There is another much better option, which President Trump just demonstrated – the use of our military to destroy what needs destroying, and then leaving the mess as a lesson. If Iran attempts to rebuild its nuclear program in coming years, we can bust it all up again. We don’t have to occupy Iran or pretend that it will become a western democracy. It can figure out whatever it wants to become, but if Iran restarts its nuclear program or exports terror again, it can also face our wrath again.”

The full text of that piece is below the fold. I stand by it, and it seems to be the avenue President Trump is pursuing.

But first, here are a few other thoughts I have regarding the domestic U.S. political battles involving Iran and Israel.

• What does “Finish the job” even mean? It if means a resumption of the Crusades and re-Christianizing the Middle East, then I’m all ears. But if it means spilling American blood in the futile pursuit of a friendly “Islamic democracy,” we cannot go down that road ever again.

• After the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, President Bush (41) was criticized for not finishing the job. In the ‘00s, President Bush (43) did attempt to finish the job. We’ve been down this road before in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It went poorly.

• Perhaps I’m projecting myself onto others, but I believe that a solid majority of Trump/MAGA voters are both America-first and solidly pro-Israel. Sacrifices such as higher gas prices and some inflation are a price we’re willing to pay for a while in support of our civilizational ally, but not in perpetuity. American voters elected Trump overwhelmingly for domestic concerns, not to fix what is unfixable in the Middle East.

• The online debate regarding the Iran situation seems to be argued most loudly by Israel-haters and Israel-firsters, but I want to believe both of those camps are at the two ends of a bell curve. I passionately dislike the anti-Israel crowd because they seem to be in service to Islamists, with whom we (western civilization) are engaged in a war that has been going on for 1,400 years. But I’d also like to warn the Israel-firsters that their screeching denunciations of Trump and his voters for not prioritizing Israel above all other concerns is actually deleterious to their cause. If you keep accusing people of “not supporting Israel” if they object to a military invasion of Iran and $200 per barrel oil, they may start to accept the terms of your phrasing.

Below is the text of that June 2025 piece titled “President Trump’s Use of Military Power - If We Have to Break It, We Aren't Going to Buy It”:

Our political class has repeatedly told us that the only allowable “solutions” to pressing problems are alternatives not embraced by the majority of Americans. That is why we finally turned to Donald Trump. Just one example was the border crisis – Democrats argued for mass amnesty and a wide-open border, while establishment Republicans countered by also proposing mass amnesty with a slightly less porous border. Trump laughed in all their faces, shut the border, and started deporting criminal aliens.

In the matter of foreign military engagement, we have also been presented just two bad options over the past few decades.

1) Massive military commitment to foreign wars, including nation building and boots on the ground in perpetuity, all with an endless airlift of fallen troops being flown home to Dover AFB.

2) Pacifism, with the U.S. never unleashing its military might, even where it is appropriate.

There is another much better option, which President Trump just demonstrated – the use of our military to destroy what needs destroying, and then leaving the mess as a lesson. If Iran attempts to rebuild its nuclear program in coming years, we can bust it all up again. We don’t have to occupy Iran or pretend that it will become a western democracy. It can figure out whatever it wants to become, but if Iran restarts its nuclear program or exports terror again, it can also face our wrath again.

I have been waiting for the U.S. to strike against Iran for more than 45 years. The lost wars of the Bush-Cheney era have driven home the futility of trying to impose democracy on those not capable of it. But still, I’ve never stopped wanting there to be righteous retribution against Iran’s mad mullahs. They attacked America on American territory when they took our embassy personnel hostage in 1979, and they’ve been killing Americans wherever they can ever since.

One of the dubious lessons learned from World War II was that we must always rebuild what we destroy in war. In that spirit, Colin Powell famously told President George W. Bush regarding the Iraq War debacle, “If you break it, you own it.” Donald Trump has put that idea to rest.

We broke it (Iran’s nuclear program) and Israel has destroyed Iran’s war fighting capabilities. And now we’re done fighting. What Iran does now is not our problem, unless/until we have to break it again sometime in the future.

With all that said, there are plenty of reasons why the mainstream American right has become so anti-war in recent years. The awful loss of young Americans’ lives in service to other countries interests - but not America’s interests – is paramount. But it is also the realization that the war-pushers have a deep reserve of ashamed-to-be-American guilt that motivates them. There is an inherent contradiction in how they go about waging war. Quite simply, they rush into foreign wars, but then refuse to fight for victory, because they believe:

1) The United State has a moral obligation to fight other countries’ wars because of our power, wealth, etc.

2) It is culturally offensive for the United States to inflict what is necessary to actually win a foreign war.

Donald Trump’s America-First position is rejected by this same war-loving crowd whose loyalty is to the “international community” that wants Americans to fight and to die, but not to win.

A repellant aspect of the “we broke it, we bought it” mindset is the belief that all wars require a Marshall Plan to rebuild the infrastructure and economies of lands where we battled. Perhaps Western Europe would not have rebuilt so quickly without all the American aid post-WWII, but maybe they wouldn’t now be failing welfare states either. We taught them that Uncle Sam will pay to (re)build their countries and provide their defense, thus allowing cradle-to-grave welfare, all while their politicians and populace screech about how awful the United States is. By contrast, Eastern Europeans who suffered under communism received nothing from America, but they are vocally pro-America now because they simply crave freedom, and they learned how awful the alternative was.

By rejecting “we broke it, we bought it,” President Trump is also rejecting any more 21st century occupations and Marshall Plans. That doesn’t mean the enemies of civilization will not incur the fearsome wrath of our military if they try to cause problems outside their borders. But under President Trump, if we have to break it, we’re just going to leave it.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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