Is the “worth it?”
“It” is the loss of 13 American soldiers and scores more seriously wounded. If, as widely expected, those human costs will climb.
So too will gas prices and the prices of everything that depends upon oil. Some cost hikes will be immediate. Some will be longer in arriving. But the worlds most necessary commodity cannot go from $60-$70 a barrel to $100 and higher without a price shock in the wake of that rise. Every American will be impacted.
President Trump knows this, of course, and argued to Bret Baier in an interview from Beijing last week that while the loss of the soldiers was awful and he regrets it, the war is a necessary evil as wars often are. The president also expressed sympathy for people feeling the , but again stated plainly: Operation Epic Fury had to be undertaken.
The reason is quite simple. Iran intends to obtain nuclear weapons by any means available, and the original ruler and his senior leadership â all dead now, as are their replacements, and many of the replacements of the replacements are dead too â were “crazy,” “lunatics,” and generally fanatics dont make for good negotiating partners. President Trump has tried. Hes tried at least four times. But he is not former President Obama for whom any “deal” with Iran was a good deal, even the absurd, loophole riddled “JCPOA.”
Unlike Obama, Trump will not let those sorts of people have nukes. They would have used them, President Trump stated again and again, and Israel and all of the Middle East would have been hit with nukes even as the regime hit 14 different countries with ballistic missiles. (Recall that Obamas absurd theater-kid diplomacy produced a JCPOA that did nothing about Irans ballistic missile program or its support of terrorist proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. There is a reason Obama chose to sit down with to defend the JCPOA last week. The failed president knew the failed late night host would not be bringing up the obvious flaws in the JCPOA much less the “sunset clauses” that would be kicking in right about now. Colbert, of course, didnt.)
If you dont believe President Trumps assessment of Iranian leadership, reconsider your reasoning. President Trump is right. Religious fanatics cant have nukes. Period.
About the cost of gas: An argument was often made about the and Iraq wars that average citizens were not called upon to do anything to support the war.
No draft. No rationing. Not even higher . War bonds, if ever considered, were never offered. Rather, enormous deficits were run up to pay for the decade of war in Iraq which has ended in a stalemate of sorts, and two decades of war in Afghanistan which ended in the debacle that former President Biden simply ordered be abandoned despite the awful cost of that debacle of an exit.
A small percentage of the country that served in its military and their families bore the burdens of those wars. The approximately 7,000 killed and 55,000 wounded in the long wars made the ultimate sacrifice and they and their families carried the heaviest burden, but the entire military made the lift beyond what any civilians did, a collective sacrifice by the military which bear no comparisons. But civilians? No, we did not.
Does not the rise in gas prices destroy at least the argument that the civilians bear no costs of war at least when it comes to this, the Iran War?
You may not like paying the sacrifice. You might want to distributed the cost a different way, say by income tax surcharges. But the cost of war is at least being felt beyond the military.
Americans will soon have a chance to vote on whether they will bear that burden without objection or perhaps even gladly. No small portion of the United States fully supports the crippling of Iraq even at the cost of higher gas prices. The longer the war goes on the higher the cost and the more often and more bluntly President Trump and his closest advisers must make the arg
