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Ten Thoughts on Operation Epic Fury and Its Aftermath
As I write this on Saturday night, there is still a lot going on, and as such I’ll throw myself on the mercy of our readers for whatever has gone out of date between its writing and your reading.
It’s a very fluid situation.
But in what looks like a very, very successful joint operation between the Israeli Defense Forces and the U.S. Navy and Air Force, a significant decapitation strike has greatly degraded the Iranian regime — including harvesting some 40 top leaders of the Iranian regime, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, whose death has sparked worldwide celebrations from Iranians and Iranian expatriates.
There are lots of questions which will be asked about those strikes, and we don’t know what the future will hold for Iran and its relationship not just with the USA but Israel, its neighbors and its allies. But there are a number of things which do come to mind either as conclusions or at least observations of a fluid situation.
1. Read The War Powers Resolution Before You Say This Was An Illegal Order
The first reaction to the strikes on Saturday from Democrats and those others who trashed them was that what the President did was illegal.
And that’s a lie.
You might believe that airstrikes against Iran should require a declaration of war by Congress, and I might be persuaded by your arguments if you have any which are well thought out. But as a matter of legality let’s remember that Congress hasn’t declared war since the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, 85 years ago.
There have been a whole lot of military actions since then.
The President has more or less plenary power to conduct military action against foreign enemies under current law. He doesn’t have the power to sustain that activity for more than a couple of months, but he can call in airstrikes anywhere he wants.
Now the Iranians have fired missiles at practically every other country in the region. So it isn’t just the Israelis and the Saudis who have had it with them.
That’s what you get when you keep a highly competent, far-reaching military in a technological age.
In the days formal declarations of war were established, the purpose of having Congress hold that power was that a free country wouldn’t have the money to maintain a large standing army, so you’d get Congress to declare war as a rationale for spending the money to raise an army to prosecute that war. But we did away with that after World War II, because we were functionally at war with the Soviet Union almost immediately. And in this modern age, when you can launch airstrikes and missiles and change the course of history in ways that entire armies were previously required for, the old calculus doesn’t really hold.
This is a stupid argument, and the people making it aren’t going to profit by making it.
2. No Imminent Threat? There Is One Now
Watching Jonathan Turley on cable news Saturday night yielded an interesting notion. Turley said that by the time Congress would debate an authorization for the airstrikes the facts on the ground would make the conversation utterly ridiculous.
It’s gone almost without saying for most of our lives, or at least most of our adult lives for those of us who are more seasoned citizens, that Iran was an imminent threat to American national interests. But if you’re unimpressed by that fairly obvious fact, then there’s this — now that we’ve hit Iran and taken out Khamenei, the defense minister, the head of the country’s judiciary (he signed off on the slaughter of some 30,000 or more political dissidents over the past few weeks), the head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and a host of others, it’s pretty damned obvious that what’s left of that regime is an imminent threat now.
Including who-knows how many Iranian assets are sitting inside our country right now, waiting to cause mayhem. Or somewhere else where they can attack American interests.
What sticks in my head is a speech Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave after Pearl Harbor. The verbiage FDR used was that…
I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.
We don’t need to do this and I don’t suggest we do. But if you want to go down this road so badly and you want to adhere to that standard, which regardless of what I’d like to see is fairly obviously obsolete based on the differences in reality between now and 1941, where do you think we are vis-a-vis FDR’s message to Congress in December of 1941?
Does a state of war exist between the U.S.A. and the Iranian regime? It doesn’t matter whose fault you think this is; this isn’t a moral judgment so much as a recognition of reality. And the reality is you’d better not pull in the claws now.
3. Libya Was Unprovoked; This Wasn’t
The other stupid argument being thrown around — my favorite advocate of this is Ben Rhodes, he of the asinine Obama Iran deal — is that the attacks on the Iranian regime were “unprovoked.”
The administration Rhodes somehow managed to become relevant in bombed the Qaddafi government in Libya out of existence during the so-called Arab Spring in 2011.
Now THAT was unprovoked.
Whatever you think of Qaddafi — and you shouldn’t remember him too fondly — the Bush administration sent Condoleeza Rice to strike detente with him, he’d surrendered his weapons of mass destruction programs, and he was working with us to identify and eliminate Al Qaeda terrorists. We hadn’t just normalized relations with him, we’d gotten due considerations for having done so.
You can say it was stupid or craven that we did so, and I’m agnostic about that. But once we had, we didn’t have a casus belli with him. And yet, the administration Ben Rhodes worked in unilaterally, and without provocation, bombed his regime out of existence and set him up to be torn apart by a mob of animals in the middle of the desert.
These same people want to talk about the injustice of bombing Khamenei and his friends into oblivion?
At some point, maybe you should ask yourself whether you’re really just anti-American rather than anti-war.
4. Regime Change In Iran Is 47 Years Overdue No Matter How Isolationist You Are
Whatever you think of Trump, and whatever you think of Israel, you have to admit that what happened on Saturday was the fault of the Iranian regime.
They’ve absolutely had it coming.
This is a government which, as we’ve discussed in this column, has allowed one of the most basic functions of governance — getting enough fresh water to supply their own capital — to go completely unaddressed while wasting their money on a missile program, a nuclear program, staffing up terrorist armies in Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, becoming a world leader in the production of military drones, and a host of other bad-guy activities.
Not to mention building a multi-layer secret police apparatus to oppress their own people.
And from an American perspective, we have a half-century of damned good grievances against the Iranians, starting with the hostage crisis back in 1979, the Beirut Marine barracks bombing in 1983, a whole host of terrorist attacks, the roadside IED bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hamas’ various attacks which affected Americans culminating on October 7, 2023, Hezbollah’s terrorist and criminal activities for half a century which affected Americans, the Houthis attacking our shipping in the Red Sea and elsewhere … this has gone on forever, and it has almost never let up.
Saturday was long overdue and everybody knows it. For that reason, despite everything you heard the initial polls gave a comfortable margin of favorability for those attacks.
5. Let’s Not Forget That Both Israel And The Saudis Asked Us To Do This
That’s from The Washington Post, which had a story on Saturday which said both the Saudis and Israelis lobbied Trump for a green light on the attacks. That Israel and the Saudis would agree on anything is notable, but it’s even more so that they’d agree on, essentially, a mini-war on a Muslim country.
It should challenge your notions about Saudi Arabia.
Suspicion of their motives is certainly warranted — it’s not a secret that Saudis were the funders and facilitators of the 9/11 attacks. On the other hand, that was 25 years ago, and Saudi Arabia is not really the same country a generation later. It’s more Western, definitely more pro-American, and, without question, more suspicious of Iran.
It isn’t our responsibility to rebuild Iran when its regime falls. Nor is it in our interests.
The whole Sunni-Shiite issue is undersold, certainly in Western media, and the fact that Iran is the leading Shiite Muslim power while Saudi Arabia is the seat of Sunni Islam and the keeper of the Islamic holy places — something that Sunnis and Iranians have twice turned into bloody conflicts in the holy city, are part of the problem. The fact that the Saudis were just recently in a proxy war with Iran’s Houthi cat’s-paws in Yemen is another. Don’t forget that when the Houthis started firing rockets at ships in the Red Sea during the Biden administration, attacks that all but shut down shipping in the Red Sea, it affected Saudi Arabia more than anything else; the Saudis’ main port at Jeddah is on the Red Sea, and it was all but shut down.
Now the Iranians have fired missiles at practically every other country in the region. So it isn’t just the Israelis and the Saudis who have had it with them. This is an irritant the whole region is ready to see go away — especially now that they’ve seen it’s actually possible to do it.
6. Stop Demanding A Plan For Iranian Succession. That’s For The Iranians To Do.
I keep seeing these people — the most prominent of them is the atrocious Anne Applebaum, who posted a ridiculous piece at The Atlantic titled “Trump Has No Plan For The Iranian People” — trashing Saturday’s strikes over the contention that because we don’t have all the answers for what comes after the Khamenei regime gets taken out, we shouldn’t take them out.
This is utterly idiotic, globalist bullshit.
It isn’t particularly our business what comes next in Iran. Sure, we might have an option or two to offer — if the Iranians would accept Reza Pahlavi’s offer to return as a transitional leader on the way to something reflecting more of a consensus of the Iranian people, that’s great, but it’s hardly the only way to go.
Maybe there’s some opportunistic commander within the regime who knows what time it is and is capable of going with the flow. A couple of people who were supposed to be at that meeting at the Supreme Leader’s palace but magically didn’t show up might have shown themselves worthy of a deal.
But at the end of the day, this is something the Iranian people have the right to decide for themselves. After all, haven’t some 30,000 or more of them bought that right with their lives?
Stop pretending that Colin Powell knew what the hell he was talking about when he sold George W. Bush his stupid Crate and Barrel “If you break it, you buy it” doctrine. That was never a legitimate standard for American foreign policy.
It isn’t our responsibility to rebuild Iran when its regime falls. Nor is it in our interests. This is much simpler than that — take out the regime, you’ve taught a lesson to anybody who’d like to run that country, which is that to do so in contravention of American interests can be deadly, and then get out of the way.
Let’s remember that the Iranians are the most pro-American population in the region. More than 80 percent of them wanted to be rid of the most anti-American regime that side of Minnesota or New York City. How about giving them a shot at this? Haven’t they earned it with all that suffering?
7. Exorcising The Demons Of Iraq And Afghanistan, Finally
I stole some of my own thunder here in denouncing the Crate and Barrel strategy, which was one of the dumbest ideas ever to be turned into American policy. But beyond that, what this event has done is to totally change the formulation of how military operations or other strategic moves are analyzed.
On the right, it has turned into a catechism, particularly as part of perceived Trump doctrine, that we’re rejecting globalism and embracing a more America First philosophy which is more isolationist — and the sales pitch for it is that it involves a rejection of stupid adventurism like we saw in Iraq.
Nobody wants stupid adventurism like we saw in Iraq.
Incidentally, one reason we spent so much time, treasure, and blood in Iraq was Iran’s meddling in Iraq’s internal affairs, which was expressly intended to bog us down there. And until Trump took out Suleimani in his first term there were never any negative consequences for that meddling.
Ditto for Afghanistan. Why we stayed in that place for 20 years when it was never worth more than six months of our time was only explainable as a function of corruption and greed on the part of NGOs and contractors, but the pullout from that adventure and the American disgrace it entailed scarred our national prestige.
Between our attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities last summer, the raid on Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela earlier this year, and Saturday’s strikes — and so far, there are no American military casualties to report out of any of the three — this is a different situation altogether.
Yes, Iraq is a cautionary tale. No, it isn’t a determinative experience. We don’t have to parachute troops into Tehran to govern the place, and there is no reason to think we would do that.
Scott Jennings said on CNN Saturday that it’s more likely Trump prevented a war than that he started one.
8. NATO Is Worthless and Our Participation in It Isn’t Very Urgent Anymore
Both Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron took pains to assert that neither Great Britain or France had anything to do with Saturday’s strikes. That was a sop by both to the radical Muslim minorities who not only have the power to paralyze their countries with civil unrest but utterly control them given the European Left’s recruitment of Muslim immigrants for the sole purpose of creating client voting majorities to include unassimilable immigrant populations.
But it was more significant even than that.
Had the Brits told us they wanted in on the strikes, it would have been more a matter of us making room to give them something productive they could do than actually needing them. As for the French, please.
The Europeans like to talk about the help they gave us in Iraq and Afghanistan. Was that significant? Not particularly. Nothing we got from Britain, France, Germany, or any of the other NATO allies made much of a difference in the outcome of either campaign.
And now, we find out we don’t need them at all to take out the bulk of the Iranian regime from the air. The Israelis are enough.
Except for the B-2 bombers sitting at Diego Garcia that Starmer has so far objected to us using from what’s nominally a British base in the Indian Ocean. Now that U.S. bases have been hit by Iranian missiles, will he maintain that position? Can he even stop us from sending those planes? What happens if he tries?
Where does all this leave us with respect to the Euros?
We’ll leave that question open — but what’s clear is it isn’t really that important in the grand scheme of things. Europe is a backwater now.
9. What About Russia? They’ve Been Badly Outplayed.
Oh, but Ukraine, you say.
There’s a report that suddenly the Russians are willing to come to the table following Saturday’s takedown in Iran. I haven’t seen too much confirmation of that and I don’t know that it’s true. What I do know is that Russia responded to our knocking out their last remaining Middle East ally with weak protestations referencing “international law.”
International law? No. You don’t get to invade Ukraine and then play Clarence Darrow over us bombing Ali Khamenei into next week.
It is worth noting that Trump got into office and immediately attempted to stop the war in Ukraine. And he buffaloed the Ukrainians into acceding to what many thought was a dictated peace with Russia. And then the Russians wouldn’t agree to it.
Rather than lard the Ukrainians up with a surfeit of weaponry we can’t even spare, Trump set about taking down Russia’s friends around the world.
Maduro in Venezuela. The toppling Diaz-Canel government regime in Cuba. The Indians who’ve agreed not to buy their oil. Now Iran.
Trump has done more to isolate the Russians than anybody else has, all the while making noises inviting Russia to make peace in Ukraine, and attractive terms to do so.
Will anybody give him credit for that? Probably not.
10. China’s Response? Send The Baizuo.
Baizuo is a Chinese word for white leftists. It basically translates to “useful idiots.” And no sooner did Trump announce that the strikes on China’s pals and major source of crude oil was under attack but there were baizuo in the streets of New York and Washington screeching about Trump’s “illegal war” with Iran.
By leftist organizations funded by the Chinese who had pre-printed signs for all the baizuo.
It was pretty bad stuff for China that we would take out the Iranian regime. Let’s remember that we’d already shut down the “ghost fleet” of oil tankers trafficking in Venezuelan and Iranian sanctioned oil, almost exclusively to China. Now, China’s going to have to make do without below-market Iranian crude to fuel their ships and jets drilling for a potential attack on Taiwan.
Yes, we’re expending a lot of Tomahawk missiles and there’s a real problem that we don’t have enough, and we stupidly relied on Chinese parts for them that we need to effectively replace. That’s a problem, but it isn’t half as bad as not having any fuel.
I’ve said before that for a number of reasons the Chinese aren’t going into Taiwan. Instead, they’ll adopt the KGB’s old tactics and simply buy the American Left.
Which they’re doing. Don’t mistake for a second that the pro-Iran bent of politicians and activists is actually deployed by China. Because that’s exactly what it is.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
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