It’s Monday, May 20th, 2019, and here’s The Gouge!

We lead off the week with a video, as retired Navy Captain Chuck Nash offers his informed two cents on Iran:

In a related item, to Jim Geraghty writing at his Morning Jolt…

The Choice Isn’t War or No War. It’s How Do We Respond if Attacked?

Conor Friedersdorf argues America needs a permanent anti-war movement. (He somewhat acknowledges that the anti-Iraq War movement of the 2000s was mostly an anti-George W. Bush movement, that complained quietly if at all about Obama’s deployment of troops overseas, drone warfare, involvement in Libya, etcetera.)

We don’t know what Iran is going to do in the coming days, weeks or months. But we know they, or their proxies, may attempt to kill Americans. If that happens, the question then becomes, what do we do? Very few Americans want all-out war with Iran, and an attempt to topple their regime. But we also won’t want any attack on Americans to have no consequence.

While we appreciate the honest anti-war sentiment of folks like Friedersdorf, as well as understanding Geraghty’s point, the reality is we’re already at war with Iran.  As the photos above remind us, America and its soldiers, sailors and citizens have been under Iranian attack since November of 1979, when the theocracy ordered the takeover of our embassy in Tehran, an assault which sharply escalated with the 1983 bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut.

The former made Jimmy Carter a one-term President; the latter cost 241 American Marines, Sailors and Soldiers their lives, including our friend and Naval Academy classmate Jim Surch.  Another friend and classmate, Mike Ohler, was killed in action defending the Beirut airport from Iranian-sponsored forces.

Innumerable other attacks and deaths have followed, both military and civilian, all at the hands of the Shiite theocracy.

So the question truly isn’t whether or not to go to war with Iran, as the reality is, on many fronts…

And if America’s most implacable foe didn’t already possess nuclear weapons, Obama’s Chamberlain-esque deal-of-the-century…

…made Iranian acquisition of them only a matter of time, time that is rapidly running out.

And if you thought suicide speedboats, massed missiles and world-wide terror attacks were bad, wait until Iran acquires the ultimate WMD.  The Mad Mullahs, who believe they can hasten the return of the 12th Imam and paradise on earth by plunging the world into chaos and war, will bring a whole new meaning to the term, “going nuclear”.

Obama tried appeasement:

Coupled with increasingly restrictive sanctions, The Donald’s decided on a different approach:

Here’s the juice: given time and continued coddling, the Mad Mullahs will inevitably confront the world with the same decision Officer Davis believed the city of San Francisco faced in Magnum Force:

As the eloquent Inspector Harry Callahan observed earlier in the same film (in what was, in our humble opinion, one of his best, yet most underrated lines), there’s…

That being said, we are never in favor of war until all other reasonable options…again, with the emphasis on “reasonable”…have been exhausted.  Which brings us to the latest from NRO‘s David French, who summarizes…

“…Put simply, Iran has at least some ability to recreate the threat environment faced by American troops during the Iraq War and to directly strike American troops and ships with a missile force far superior to any wartime adversary the United States has faced in modern times. Moreover, Iranian forces can threaten and even sink American surface vessels. In a notorious 2002 war game, a hostile force simulating Iran (commanded by Marine lieutenant general Paul Van Riper) overwhelmed the Navy and sank multiple ships — an outcome that would represent a monumental disaster for the United States.

Moreover, Iran is the most sophisticated terrorist state in the world. It has proven — for decades — that its proxies can inflict serious harm on U.S. forces. The Marine-barracks bombing in 1983 killed 241 American military personnel, more men than died in any month in either the Iraq or Afghan wars. The 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia killed 19 American servicemen. These casualties don’t include the hundreds of Americans who died at the hands of Iranian militias, militias that often wielded Iranian weapons, during the Iraq War.

Finally, it’s worth pondering the economic effect of a raging conflict in the Persian Gulf. According to Navy analysis, 34 percent of global crude-oil exports pass through the Strait of Hormuz, along with 33 percent of the global liquid-natural-gas market. Disruption of the oil-and-gas trade alone would cause global (and American) economic shocks.

None of this means that America should be afraid of Iran. But no American should be under any illusion that a real fight with Iran would be like anything we’ve seen since 9/11. It would be virtually nothing like the conflict in Libya or the current fight against ISIS — where the prime risk of casualties has been borne by local allies. While there is some best-case chance of a limited conflict conducted not unlike Operation Praying Mantis, it is entirely possible that conflict could lead to the sight of burning American ships in the Persian Gulf, missile strikes against American bases, a significant terror strike outside the Middle East, and an economic shock that disrupts the American recovery.

Of course we would deal greater damage to Iran than they would to us. Of course we’d (over time) get the best of any military exchange. But it’s easy to imagine a shocked American public looking at the loss of life, the loss of material, and the economic disruption and wondering, “When did we agree to this?”

And unless the administration goes to Congress and the American public, lays out its case for conflict, and receives congressional authorization, the answer would be simple and potentially politically catastrophic: They did not agree. America should not stumble into war. Aside from the demands of immediate self-defense, there should be no conflict with Iran absent congressional approval. Congress, for its part, should not approve such a conflict absent the most serious, urgent, and compelling need.“

Food for thought…but not an excuse to shy away from confronting the world’s foremost fomenter of terrorism, and an adversary who’s been killing Americans with impunity for almost 40 years.

If the battle’s to be fought…and again, absent the overthrow of the Mullah’s theocracy, we believe the battle to be inevitable…then let it be on our terms and timing, and before Iran has a deliverable nuclear capability.

Next up, in a forward from Jeff Foutch, Biz Pac Review is reporting…

Trump admin reportedly ready to use ‘Insurrection Act’ to root out and boot illegal immigrants

“The Trump administration reportedly plans to use the “tremendous powers” of the 212-year-old Insurrection Act to boot illegal aliens from the United States. “We’re doing the Insurrection Act,” one unnamed official confirmed to The Daily Caller

Signed into law by then-President Thomas Jefferson in 1807, the law allows the president to deploy military troops to root out “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States,” according to the Legal Information Institute.

…It was last used by then-President George H.W. Bush in 1992 to deal with the Los Angeles riots, which had spawned following the acquittal of the four officers involved in Rodney King’s beating…”

Two thoughts come to mind: first, it’s about time!!!

Second…

Then there’s another item from the Morning Jolt, as Jim Geraghty asks what inquiring Conservative minds want to know:

Do You Really Trust Justice Roberts with a Challenge to Roe vs. Wade?

“…Roberts “initially voted in a private conference to strike down the individual insurance mandate — the heart of the law — but he also voted to uphold an expansion of Medicaid for people near the poverty line. Two months later, Roberts had shifted on both.” We don’t know precisely why Roberts changed his views so dramatically, but there is a widespread belief that the public pressure campaign affected Roberts’s decision.

As CBS News Jan Crawford reported at the time:

Over the next six weeks, as Roberts began to craft the decision striking down the mandate, the external pressure began to grow. Roberts almost certainly was aware of it.

There were countless news articles in May warning of damage to the court – and to Roberts’ reputation – if the court were to strike down the mandate. Leading politicians, including the president himself, had expressed confidence the mandate would be upheld.

Some even suggested that if Roberts struck down the mandate, it would prove he had been deceitful during his confirmation hearings, when he explained a philosophy of judicial restraint. It was around this time that it also became clear to the conservative justices that Roberts was, as one put it, “wobbly,” the sources said.

It is not known why Roberts changed his view on the mandate and decided to uphold the law. At least one conservative justice tried to get him to explain it, but was unsatisfied with the response, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation.

Roberts has never laid out, in detail, what drove him to change his mind so dramatically. Maybe he really did rethink it and conclude that the individual mandate was just an unorthodox but constitutional exercise of the Congress’ well-established power to levy taxes.

But if Roberts really was swayed by a fear that striking down a priority of liberals would do irreversible damage to the Supreme Court’s reputation…a guy who wasn’t willing to reverse the individual mandate sure as heck isn’t going to reverse Roe v. Wade.

…Gun owners won with Heller. Will the pro-life movement win a legal challenge to these state laws on abortion? And how much do they want to bet with Roberts as the fifth vote?“

Not merely “no”, but “HELL NO!!!”.  For that matter, until he proves differently, neither do we trust Kavanaugh to withstand the MSM pressure, particularly if Roberts were to suddenly grow a set and side with Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch, making Brett the swing vote.

But absent the demise of Darth Bader and Trump’s appointment of a fourth dependable strict-constructionist on the Court, there may not come a better time.

Which brings us to The Lighter Side:

Finally, we loved these three from Shannon, in whose breast beats the deep, true heart of Texas:

We’ll be floating on the Severn River most of Tuesday enjoying the Blue Angels practice show, so ’til Friday…

Magoo