Opinion: The Significance of Trump’s Actions in Iran

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

How does the United States “start a war?”

Well, we are a republic, with a constitutionally organized separation of powers. In the USA, to start a new war, the Congress declares it after taking a proper vote.

This hasn’t happened very often – not because we don’t like the method or we don’t want to follow the rules, but because circumstances often dictate otherwise.

Why? Because it really only takes one side to start a war, especially in the age of nuclear bombs, ICBMs, and biological and chemical warfare, in which a war could be both started and lost in the time it takes for the House to assign the resolution to the right committee.

We therefore have other legal methods, such as the War Powers Act, that assign the authority to White House, in certain cases and for certain periods, when either there just isn’t time to wait for Congress to deliberate, or Congress is on break and would need to be reconvened – or nowadays, when a relatively new problem has arisen: when so many leaders of one political party are clear traitors that any intel provided to them would be in the hands of our enemy quickly enough to sabotage the operation and endanger our troops.

In response to President Trump’s June 2025 decision to finally eradicate much of Iran’s nuclear weapon development through bombing strikes, there will be lawsuits filed, which should be thrown out as frivolous – and congressional speeches and resolutions against it, which should be laughed off as ludicrous – and furious diatribes from pundits on radio and television, who will deservedly lose rating points for their foolishness.

Why?

Because in this case, we were already at war anyway.

Many have forgotten – in fact, many never even knew, because of the sorry state of education and news media in the United States – that the United States has been at war with the current government of Iran for 46 years now.

We didn’t start it; the revolutionary islamic government of Iran started it. They declared us The Great Satan and declared us their mortal enemy before most of today’s pundits were even born.

There was a time, just fifty years ago, when the United States and Iran were the best of friends. The Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, was a close ally of the western powers, working hard to westernize his country. Religious observance was optional, not fully mandated by sharia law, in the Iran of those days.

In those days, the people of Iran were freer than in most countries of the region. Persian girls went to school and even to college, dressed in western attire, and women were free to pursue normal careers. There were student exchanges between Iran and the United States (this writer personally attended a Roman Catholic high school in Illinois in the 1970s with several sons of Iranian generals and businessmen, the two populations were that friendly).

Iran was then a nation of muslims and Christians and Jews and Sikhs and Bahais and more, generally peaceful, happy and prosperous – with the exception of the small marxist insurgencies that the Soviets sponsored worldwide throughout the cold war, and the small Shiite extremist groups who wanted a Shiite government.

Unfortunately, for not just us but the world, in 1976 the United States narrowly elected the Marxist, self-righteous, anti-semitic, jackass governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter – a tool of Satan on earth if ever there was one – to the Presidency.

And in the middle of his single miserable term in the White House, Jimmy Carter led a coalition of fool liberal western governments, especially France, to essentially install Ayatollah Khomeini (who, until then, had been languishing in prison in France) as the leader of a revolutionary government over Iran (and don’t let anybody tell you that we didn’t know that was going to happen; the people behind this chain of events knew full well that the design was for the ayatollah’s hordes of bloodthirsty jihadists to depose the Shah and set up the ayatollah in his place).

And then, as perhaps the greatest example of utter ingratitude in human history, as soon as the West installed the ayatollah and his demonic mullahs, they declared us the Great Satan and have been at war with us for these past 46 years.

Iran has attacked our troops, our ships, our foreign installations, our forces on the ground in other wars that they were theoretically not part of. Iran has kidnapped and tortured our civilian tourists, missionaries, and businessmen. Iran has fought our allies both during wartime and during peacetime. Iran has sponsored terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, the IJ, the PFLP and more, who have attacked both Americans and our many allies, usually focusing on innocent civilians, tourists and businessmen. Iran has disrupted and attacked global commerce routinely, from attacking our ships to outright shutting down Red Sea shipping (through their proxies, the Houthis).

And never forget, the first of all these terrible abuses was their takeover of our embassy in Tehran, and their imprisonment of the 66 Americans inside, both staff and civilian, for 444 days.

This state of war has continued on a constant basis for 46 years. Iran’s mullah-directed government has never let up.

Why? In part because of the peculiar Shiite doctrine that Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth in order for their imagined “twelfth imam” to make his grand return. This branch of islam has a political-religious commitment to genocidal war that, to them, trumps peace treaties and international law. As such, this denomination can never be safely entrusted with the leadership of any country. Such a government is a clear and permanent danger to its own people, its neighbors, and in fact the entire world.

As a result of the countless violations of international law by the mullahs’ regime over these 46 years, the United States has responded.

We have placed sanctions of various types on Iran for 46 years. We have banned direct importation of goods from Iran and banned almost 100% of potential commerce in both directions, for 46 years. We have had to expend immense resources defending and supporting friendly nations in the area from Iran’s frequent attacks, and have had to fight directly on multiple occasions in skirmishes both publicized and otherwise. And as Iran has worked to spread its terror cells all over the world throughout this time, we have had to root them out, confront them, and defeat them – a costly, painful, almost impossible task.

So, in short, this was not a “new, unauthorized, and illegitimate escalation” by President Trump.

We were already at war. We have been at war for generations.

So don’t listen to a word of the partisans, the marxists, the naifs, the jihad-sympathizers and the TDS-riddled fools who claim that these bombing raids were illegal or otherwise illegitimate. It’s a ridiculous claim; they are wrong, and most of them know it.

Now, this isn’t necessarily to say that it will turn out to have been the best course of action. That’s another question. Only history can tell.

Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t. Maybe we should have waited for another week of Israel’s attacks, or maybe another week was all Iran needed to load the weapons they had into their delivery system. Maybe the war will be resolved faster because of our action and maybe our action will prolong it. It is too soon to tell for sure.

But President Trump acted when he did because the intelligence on hand indicated that Iran was so close to delivering a nuclear weapon that we simply couldn’t put it off anymore, and that fact is what makes this move the right move, without a doubt.

When a neighborhood blowhard issues threats, with nothing to back them up, you may be able to dismiss the threat. But when someone with an army, navy, air force and robust nuclear weapons making programs spends 46 years attacking from all directions, 46 years threatening to blow you or your allies off the map, and he finally has the ability to really deliver on that promise, it only makes sense to take him at his word and assume that if you don’t strike first, you will indeed suffer that very hit that they’ve been promising.

This isn’t the end of it, of course. Much work has to be done still – to contain the threat, to supervise either just a complete weakening of the regime or a libertarian-republican government change, to research how Iran obtained all the cash and materiel to get so far in their war machine, and to prosecute the many treasonous Americans who were responsible over the years for enabling the mullahs’ government to become such a threat.

But on the subject of the hour – the question of whether President Trump acted legally in bombing the mad mullahs’ uranium enrichment facilities – the question is easily answered and closed:

Of course President Trump acted legally, morally, and rightly.

And we Americans should be relieved – and proud – to finally have a real president at last, willing to do what’s necessary to help defend the free world against one of the globe’s most dangerous rogue states, and to support our ally Israel in its hour of need.

Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo