Trump must drive home message that Islamic fanatics can’t have nukes

The second crucial message is the argument about “Why?” and on the question of why Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, Trump has not yet achieved the necessary level of “message discipline.”

Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have both been blunt: The rulers of Iran, both those who have been killed and those still alive, are “lunatics.” (“Insane in the head” was another memorable construction from Rubio about the rump regime still alive in Iran.) More effort is needed to drive home the point that lunatics should not ever have any weapons, much less nuclear weapons.

In the context of our own communities and neighborhoods, we all know this. Even the most ardent defenders of the Second Amendment don’t argue for the right of “insane in the head” people to have firearms.

The whole world, including Iran’s totalitarian allies, should join in expressing not just the bottom line on the result of this battle but also on the core explanation for what the United States and Israel are doing.

Iran is an ancient culture with a remarkable history. Our own 250 years as a nation is the majority of our 400-plus years as an offshoot of the European Enlightenment. But even if we use the more generous time span of 400 years as a marker by which to make comparisons of our civilization with the Persian civilization, the latter is at least a dozen times as old as America’s, and the Persian nation is 2,500-plus years old.

As with every old culture and nation, the history of that civilization (which is a mixture of culture and polity) is always marked by alternating periods of extraordinary progress and prosperity and deep division and near-shattering of the state and the people.

Our own greatest challenge came in 1860, when the states that formed the Confederacy attempted to secede from the constitutional order to preserve and — many among them hoped — expand its empire of slavery. Abraham Lincoln and the Union armies stood in their way and stopped their plans at enormous human cost.

The carnage of those four years of civil war was immense, but it righted the nation’s trajectory back to the original course charted by Thomas Jefferson and the more enlightened signers of the Declaration of Independence. There is no denying the deep evil of slavery that blots out our earliest history as a nation, but also no denying that we have overcome that “original sin” and prospered enormously since, though not in anything like an even path or at a steady pace of increase for all Americans. We remain, however, on the Jefferson-Lincoln path of human equality and freedom — the path laid out in the Declaration of Independence and reaffirmed by Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address in 1863.

Since 1979, both the ancient Persian civilization and the Iranian nation have been captured by a sinister ideology that rivals that of John C. Calhoun’s for wickedness and disregard for human rights. All of the great Iranian people have been forced to flee or submit to the rule of an elite comprised of religious fanatics and their ruthless paramilitary elite.

A quarter-million shock troops of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps protect a small clerical neo-royalty of less than 100 “ayatollahs” from among the tens of thousands of Shia Muslim clerics in Iran. Like any religious organization, there is a pyramid within it that tops off in an elite. For the past 47 years, the Islamic Republic has been a theocracy, with a single religious dictator in charge.

Khomeini was succeeded by the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed by bombs on the first day of the war between Iran and the U.S. and Israel as the two allies acted to decapitate the Islamic Republic’s leadership.

Khamenei’s son, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has been named the supreme leader of Iran, according to regime spokesmen. Whether Khamenei’s son is actually alive and communicating any kind of coherent orders to the remaining leadership of the Guard is at best very doubtful, but the regime that killed tens of thousands of its own people over 36 hours in January was ruled by “hard-line” fanatics then and by “hard-line” fanatics now.

“Mass murderers with missiles, mines, and machine guns” is a more complete description of the fanatics who run that rump regime, and their fanaticism is perhaps the one thing Trump should explain more often than he has. The “why” behind the “won’t” of the Islamic Republic never having nukes is the theological fanaticism of the religious extremists atop the regime. They would consider uses of nukes as acts blessed by God in furtherance of God’s design, especially if they could figure out a way to drop nuclear bombs on Israel and America… full stop.

If you understand that, you understand the “why” of the war. Iran’s rulers would use any nukes they obtained regardless of the certain destruction of their geography that followed, which is why they cannot obtain them, even at the cost of this battle. The nihilist attack on Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and the massacre that followed on that day was a mini-dress rehearsal for what Khomeini/Khameini would have unleashed on the world.

Trump has consistently declared the objective. But he ought to spend more time spelling out the details. When he does so with the same repetition as he employs when declaring the strategic objective, the support for the war, especially among independents and old-school Democrats, will rise, perhaps by significant margins.

Because sane people don’t want religious fanatics to have nuclear weapons. It is that simple. And that simple message should be repeated as often as necessary to drive that message home.