ABOUT FAITH & FREEDOM

Monday, January 06, 2020

Bombs Over Baghdad--Trump Calls Ayatollah's Bluff

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In recent years, as Iran has become openly adversarial toward America and Israel---threatening to destroy America (the great Satan) and wipe Israel (the little Satan) off the map, US leaders, particularly President Bush and President Obama, have tried to appease them.

Obama gave them upwards of a billion dollars in cash; delivered to the Iranian government in the middle of the night on pallets, and a nuclear deal that ensured they would have an atomic bomb within 10 years.

Other leaders simply remained silent.

Appeasement has never worked.

Now President Trump has called their bluff and the Left has erupted in anger.

Here's what we can expect.

Be informed.

As you know by now, President Trump gave the order for our military to take out Qassem Soleimani, head of the Iran Islamic Revolutionary Guard. The drones flew, the precision bombs dropped. Soleimani is dead.

A second US strike took out several other terror leaders in Iraq.

Most all clear-minded patriots saw it as a stunning blow to international terrorism and a reassertion of American might and will to be free. And safe. But the progressive Left is shrieking, "Trump is taking us to war."

But it is now Trump, not Ayatollah Khamenei, who has taken the upper hand.

Soleimani has master mined terror all over the world for decades, including the killing of hundreds of Americans---if not thousands.

While US presidents have loudly condemned him---none of them had the courage to do anything about him. In his Islamic world, he was next to Allah.

For years Iran has set the rules. It was Iran who set the time and the place of confrontation.

Not any more.

There will be fall out, but will it be another war like Vietnam or Afghanistan?



President Trump has conditioned his policies on Iranian behavior. When they spread their malign influence, Trump has acted to check it. When Iran struck, Trump struck back. In my opinion, Trump does not want to allow the Greater Middle East--Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen or Afghanistan---to dominate his presidency like President Bush and President Obama did.

His "maximum pressure" campaign against the Iranian economy has all but destroyed their economy. It's in shambles. Yet all of the economic pressure has always been preceded by an offer to Iran to negotiate a peace agreement.

But Iran won't back off. Their leaders hate America and Israel more than they love their own people.

Last June, Iran's fingerprints were all over two tankers that exploded in the Persian Gulf. Trump tightened the screws. Iran downed a US drone. Trump did not strike back but responded with more sanctions and more cyber attacks.

Last September a drone fleet launched by Iranian proxies in Yemen devastated the Aramco oil facility in Saudi Arabia.

Iran has slowly brought the region to a boil. First, it hit boats, then drones, then the key infrastructure of a critical ally.

On December 27 it went further. Members of the Kataib Hezbollah launched rockets at a US installation near Kirkuk, Iraq. Four US soldiers were wounded. An American contractor was killed.

Trump responded.

Some are concerned that this will turn into another Vietnam or Afghanistan. I personally don't think it will.

Trump has said repeatedly he wants "out" of these protracted wars---not "into them."

When he approved the strike on Soleimani and the others, the President said: "I am keeping us out of a war, not getting us into one."

Criticism toward the President is furious. And irrational


Before the dust had settled on the first drone strike that took out Soleimani, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and others on the Left, were railing against the President for not giving them advance notice.

Here's why he didn't give then advance notice.

Immediately following the strike, the President did give an intelligence briefing.

We learned yesterday that "two 'sources' (Obama holdovers) who had been in the intelligence briefings immediately leaked information from the briefing to the New York Times with the motive to push the narrative that President Trump's drone strike was based on 'razor-thin' evidence."

They claimed Soleimani's travel to Syria, Lebanon and Iraq to meet Shia proxies was not suspicious, it was just "business as usual."

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT.) was on CNN yesterday condemning President Trump for leading us toward a "massive war" with Iraq.

The CNN host then asked Maj. General James "spider" Marx, also a guest on the show, what he thought.

Marx said, "What I would say to Senator Murphy is 'just be quiet'." He went on to say he found it "amazingly brazen" that Soleimani was visiting Baghdad during the attack on the US embassy.

Hollywood has lost it--- screaming and cursing at the President on social media.


Actress Rose McGowan took the cake. She apologized to Irag with this tweet:
"The USA has disrespected your country, your flag, your people. 52% of us humbly apologize. We want peace with your nation. We are being held hostage by a terrorist regime. We do not know how to escape. Please do not kill us." #Soleimani.



Then she---and her comrades in Hollywood, began using words to describe the President that I won't repeat.

They hate President Trump much more than they love our country. And they have a twisted view of appeasement.

Appeasement has never worked,



British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who favored appeasement, infamously had dinner with Hitler. Upon returning to Britain, he assured those who did not favor appeasement that he had spoken with Hitler and everything was going to be just fine.

Winston Churchill once said, "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."

Ronald Reagan gave one of the greatest speeches of all time on appeasement, called "A Time For Choosing." A video of the speech can be seen here.



This is the transcript:

“Let’s set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace–and you can have it in the next second–surrender.
Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face–that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand–the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he would rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin–just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it’s a simple answer after all.
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said that “the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits–not animals.” And he said, “There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness. “
Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Prayerful. Be Bold.