More than two months into the U.S. conflict with Iran, President Donald Trump is digging in while his detractors grow more impatient. A frequent critique among Democrats and liberal media commentators is that Iran is a "war of choice," and has made things worse with the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz and a spike in oil and gas prices. For his part, Trump is holding his ground. "We're doing a service to the world," he told reporters in the Oval Office this week, noting that Iran having a nuclear weapon to threaten the world is unacceptable. Trump has also refused to put a hard timetable on the effort, recently pledging the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ships will continue as long as it takes.
While Democrat lawmakers and left-wing commentators pontificate about what they see as Trump's folly, national security experts are siding with the commander-in-chief. Writer Fletch Daniels argues in the American Thinker that Iran is "not a war of choice in any practical sense." Daniels writes, "Iran is the single most committed and least deterrable enemy of the United States, and was developing ever more lethal means to inflict grave harm."
National Security Analyst Edward Turzanski is even more direct, noting that Iran has been stockpiling ballistic missiles while ramping up its uranium enrichment in recent years, all while lying about it to the rest of the world. "To the war-of-choice crowd, my question is: How much longer should we have waited to let (Iran) have not just more ballistic missiles, but nuclear warheads to go on those missiles?"
Another criticism aimed at Trump by both critics and even some of his supporters is that the war in Iran is taking too long. Turzanski thinks that is ridiculous, given the sheer size of Iran and the decades they have been threatening the U.S. "They've been at this since 1979, and Trump's been at it for, what, two months," he tells KTRH. "And people are asking why we didn't get this done in two months?"
"Look, other administrations have kicked the can down the road," he continues. "Trump stomped on the can and said I'm not kicking it anymore...We're going to put an end to this regime, and its nefarious capabilities."
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