Congressional critics of the war with Iran are not in short supply. Their statements and social-media posts read as if they come from the same song sheet. No surprise there.
These voices are marching in lockstep on the applicability of the War Powers Act, breaches of “international law” and “illegal regime change.” And there is no question that party politics play a role in all of this.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) decried the attack on Iran that occurred during Ramadan, saying, “I am convinced it isn’t what these countries [Iran now and Iraq in 2003] have done to violate international law, but about who they worship.” Not a mention of Iran and its nearly 50-year history of sponsoring terror globally, or about its race to produce nuclear weapons.
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) stated, “Make no mistake, this war may be in the interest of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Israel, but it is not in ours.”
Then there was Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who lamented “wasting American tax dollars” on the war. Again, no mention of Iran as the puppet master of proxy, terrorist armies or the regime’s gunning down of tens of thousands of Iranian protesters only a month ago.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) weighed in with charges that American military operations were nothing more than “aggression.” Nothing at all about the decades the Tehran regime has spent as the world’s most frequent abuser of juvenile and LGBTQIA rights. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, proclaimed that the president’s assertions about Iran’s nuclear program are “always lies.”
And then there was the incredulous comment on Iran that came from Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), saying “they showed nothing to the American people as to any threat posed to the United States or any imminent threat posed to our allies who are in the region.”
What is striking about all this is the generational ties that bind these most vehement of critics. Many were not born when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned in 1979 from exile in France to lead the Iranian Revolution and begin a 47-year reign of terror carried out by him and his successor, Ali Khamenei. There seems to be no recollection of the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Iran and the 444-day ordeal for the 66 American hostages grabbed by regime-backed street toughs in November of that year.
A few were toddlers when Iran’s Hezbollah henchmen blew up the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983, resulting in the death of 241 American servicemen. And 35 years ago, when some of these congress members were pre-teens, a truck bombing of the Khobar Towers near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, carried out by Hezbollah, killed 19 U.S. Air Force personnel and injured a total of 498 persons.
Many of these examples may be ancient history to these lawmakers, though certainly not the assassination attempt on Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States by Iranian agents at Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C., in 2011. Or the killing of an estimated 2,000 American servicemen and the wounding of countless others from Iranian-supplied IEDs (roadside bombs) in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. Not to mention what many believe were Iranian-directed attempts last year on the life of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Of course, many were not born when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, and Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan in 1941. Still, we fully understand the rationale behind the need to defeat those tyrannical regimes. In the case of Germany, it, too, had proxies: those collaborators in lands under its control who carried out crimes against humanity just like their masters in Berlin.
What seems to be missing in the indignant, self-absorbed statements by these members of Congress and others in the media, academia and elsewhere is a severe absence of self-respect for their country and for the “values” they say they hold. Iran paid no serious price for any of the above crimes committed against the United States and its citizens, save for periodic economic sanctions which it worked furiously to evade.
The self-negating isolationism and “don’t confuse me with the facts” attitude of those who are outraged by the campaign against the Iranian regime suggests a shallow understanding of history and a frightening disregard for American national interests.
The prospect of a nuclear Iran and what that could mean not only for Israel and the Middle East and the United States, but for an international order of global stability, seems to draw yawns from those in Congress who would give the tyrants in Tehran a pass for crimes committed and those yet to be carried out.
A worldview that is in denial about the threats posed by Iran does not augur well for the kind of national resolve so necessary for the United States, as it is buffeted by threats—terror, cyber, nuclear—both near and far. In the meantime, the clear-eyed campaign to bring an end to Iran’s despotic regime moves forward. Its success is in everybody’s interest.
