The Week: Trump Goes to War

• At long last, there’s justice for Cricket.

• The United States, alongside Israel, launched decapitation strikes against Iran. Justification has been abundant since the Iranian Revolution: the hostage crisis that birthed our enmity, the Iran-sponsored Hezbollah bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983 and the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks the same year, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the roadside improvised explosive devices used to kill our troops during the Iraq War, the plots to assassinate President Donald Trump and other American citizens. The regime has been in a de facto state of war against the U.S. since its beginning. The world had mostly treated the Iranian regime as a perpetual threat to be intermittently mitigated rather than solved. Trump has decided that it is a threat he is no longer willing to live with. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s fanatical ruler for 37 years, was killed in a missile strike. The next ayatollah is expected to be his son, Mojtaba Khamenei. For a regime supposedly guided by the hand of Allah, it sure looks like just another self-serving authoritarian state. We do not know how this conflict will end; the painful lessons from the Iraq War remain fresh in many Americans’ memories. But no rational voice can disagree that the Iranian regime was one of the world’s most brutal and hostile.

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Graham Platner

Operation Epic Fury

• At long last, there’s justice for Cricket.

• The United States, alongside Israel, launched decapitation strikes against Iran. Justification has been abundant since the Iranian Revolution: the hostage crisis that birthed our enmity, the Iran-sponsored Hezbollah bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983 and the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks the same year, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the roadside improvised explosive devices used to kill our troops during the Iraq War, the plots to assassinate President Donald Trump and other American citizens. The regime has been in a de facto state of war against the U.S. since its beginning. The world had mostly treated the Iranian regime as a perpetual threat to be intermittently mitigated rather than solved. Trump has decided that it is a threat he is no longer willing to live with. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s fanatical ruler for 37 years, was killed in a missile strike. The next ayatollah is expected to be his son, Mojtaba Khamenei. For a regime supposedly guided by the hand of Allah, it sure looks like just another self-serving authoritarian state. We do not know how this conflict will end; the painful lessons from the Iraq War remain fresh in many Americans’ memories. But no rational voice can disagree that the Iranian regime was one of the world’s most brutal and hostile.