CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) When Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense, he said something that rang true to me. Someday, you will write a letter to the family of a dead American soldier. You will have to explain what they died for. And if that part of the letter seems silly or stupid, perhaps our soldiers ought not to be there.
“Your son laid down his life at Omaha Beach, so that we may establish a foothold against totalitarianism in Europe” is completely different than “your son died in a drone attack by Houthi rebels at an air base in Jordan.” Jordan? Who knew that we even had a base there. In fact, Jordan shares a border with the Palestinian West Bank. Those are the closest American troops to the fighting between Israel and Hamas. And what are they doing there? Well, they appear to be holding down the fort and taking occasional incoming from Iranian-backed rebels. One of their drones got lucky last weekend and killed three of our soldiers.
It was the 165th time that our troops have come under fire in the region. The fact that we shoot down most of the missiles doesn’t change the intent. They want to kill Americans.
For the rest of the weekend the Biden Administration said there’s no direct evidence that Iran controlled the attack. Really? Last month a U.S. drone strike killed a rebel leader while he visited Tehran. The Iranian-backed militias don’t cover the latrine without an okay from the mullahs.
The Biden administration’s policy towards Iran is nonsensical. We are trying to get them back into a nuclear agreement that they have no intention of honoring. We’ve given them $6-billion in frozen assets, supposedly “administered” by Qatar. The Qataris are most unusual mediators. They are the builders of the hospitals in Gaza that have military tunnels underneath them. They are the owners of Al Jazeera, which broadcasts the names of suicide bombers across the Arab world and praises them as freedom fighters.
Iranian-backed rebels believe that they have enough political cover to take shots at U.S. bases and ships with no consequences. If that’s true, then our soldiers should not be there in harm’s way. Or, perhaps, we should use our overwhelming firepower to teach a lesson and to change their calculations.
Chris Conley
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