The Balloon
By Mitch Berg
War is hell.
I’m not going to be out there chanting “USA! USA!”. War generally means a lot of suffering and misery for the people who *didn’t* start it. It’s nothing to celebrate.
Put a pin in that thought. We’ll come back to it.
So, about some of the stuff I’m seeing on social media about this weekend’s happenings:
1. “Congress needs to approve this kind of thing”
Forget for a moment that no President, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, including Obama, has gone to Congress *before* going medieval since Harry S. Truman.
Let’s go back to December 11, 1941. Remember when Congress declared war on Germany and Italy?
Yeah? You do? Liar. They didn’t.
They didn’t have to. Germany declared war on us. When someone goes to war *against us*, we don’t have to declare anything.
Now – did Iran *declare* war against us? I mean, they stormed our embassy, kidnapped its staff and held them hostage for a year and a half (an act of war all by itself – even Jimmy Carter figured that out eventually), funded and equipped proxies that blew up our Marine barracks in Beirut in 1982, funded other proxies and murdered many Americans all over the world between then and 2003, and covertly but directly supported attacks on US troops in Iraq; they perfected the modern “IED”, and Iranian money (and sometimes troops) were directly responsible for the deaths of 600 US servicepeople and indirectly for many more. And that’s just their attacks on America; their proxies conquered Lebanon (once a moderate, pluralistic nation), Yemen (which was not, but which they drove even further back into barbarism), and were the prime funders of Hamas through years of rocket attacks on Israel, 2-4 Intifadas, and October 7.
So – do we need a notarized form to tell us that Iran considered *itself* at war with the US?
Don’t get me wrong – I would very much like Congress to vote on this. I want to get votes on record. But I don’t care how “libertarian” you are – responding to acts of war against the US is a legitimate executive branch role.
2. “Heyyyyy! Trump ran on being the ‘peace’ President!”
Yep. And the Middle East is the least peaceful place on earth, and with Al Quaeda pretty much vanquished most of that war (see above) has come to us courtesy of Iran; the *many* attacks on Israel by Hamas, Hezb’allah, the Houthis, the Iran/Iraq war that may have killed a million, the civil war in Lebanon that saw a modern, moderate, prosperous multireligious society destroyed with tens of thousands of dead, and replaced by a mini-Iran, the Yemeni, Libyan and Syrian civil wars that’ve claimed perhaps a million lives between them.
And let’s not forget internal peace. Iran’s government had murdered it’s own people well into the six digit range over the past five decades. The Shah’s secret police were really nasty – but the “Revolutionary Guards” were much, much worse in terms of numbers and, yes, cruelty over time.
Will removing the Mullahs make the middle east more peaceful or less?
Oh, yeah – Russia is about to lose its main supplier of drones to shoot at Ukraine, and China just got a big warning sign about invading Taiwan (not to mention the very real chance that the US could cut off China’s supply of oil, especially given the removal of Venezuela). So it’s not just the Middle East.
3. “It’s *reckless!*”
You know what’s reckless AND pointless? Responding to a terror attack that kills dozens of Americans and hundreds of other people by shooting a cruise missile at some empty tents and calling it square. That’s what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did – “sent messages” that, if you got us made enough, we might get angry. At best, it killed some terrorist foot soldiers; at worst, it convinced them that we were impotent – that they could, I dunno, crash planes into our skyscrapers and Pentagon without worrying too much. That all they had to do was hang on; they had plenty of red shirts for us to kill off. They didn’t care.
But now, with Sulemani, Maduro, El Mecia and the Mullahs, we’re doing it different; we’re taking out the head of the snake. War is hell, indeed – but if you’re going to do it, taking out the leadership makes a whole lot more sense than killing bag men, camels or empty tents. We’re not trying to “Send messages” to people who answer their voice mail less often that Gen-Zs. We’re sending it to the foot soldiers: “See what happened to your leaders? You’ve got a chance. Take it”.
Think of it this way: if the US and UK could have killed Hitler, Göring, Himmer, Göbbels, Seyss-Inquart and the rest of the leadership, and skipped Warsaw, Rotterdam, the Blitz, Barbarossa, Stalingrad, Hamburg and Dresden and the extermination camps and millions of lives – is that not a better plan *humanity as a whole*?
4. “He’s acting like a dictator”
He’s doing what Obama did. I was about to say “exactly what Obama did”, but that’d be false: Obama did a lot more of it, but it was a lot less effective. It – his policies and those of Big Guy after him – set the permission structure that led *directly* to Yemen, the Russo-Ukraine war, October 7, and were (and may still) lead to China invading Taiwan.
5. “Regime change is bad, and we suck at it”
We certainly had a 20 year losing streak.
But, er, remember Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia, the eastern third of Germany and, eventually, Ukraine ? The people there will tell you we’re pretty GOOD at regime change when we do it right.
6. “I mean, overthrowing governments to change the regime”
Like, Poland? It was, to borrow a phrase, “mostly peaceful” – but the US, UK, Germany, the Vatican and the *AFL-CIO* joined forces to undermine the Polish government. It was unironically mostly peaceful – ZOMO did all the killing – but it most definitely overthrew the government and changed the regime.
So let’s give ourselves a couple of retrospective “W”s. The people of Poland, Estonia and Czechia sure do.
7. “What about the schoolgirls we bombed!”
Nobody outside the Iran State News Service is reporting that yet. As loathsome as America’s mainstream media is, the ISNS is an *official* propaganda ministry. This time yesterday they were also saying Ayatollah Khamenei was alive and well and leading the troops at the front (?). To the extent there HAS been any independent investigation, there are reports that the school was next to an IRGC base. So did it happen? We don’t know – and when I say “we”, that means “neither of us”. Like I said – war is hell; it is inherently arbitrary, capricious and cruel. Like the mullahs – who, given the context, we’d *really* best make sure are gone for good.
And if you’ve skipped past the murders of 32,000 Iranians in the streets, and likely hundreds or thousands more in prison, not to mention the many tens of thousands murdered over the past 47 years, let’s just say my respect for your point is, er, “nuanced”.
Let’s get this over with, and help Iranians build themselves a free country.
March 2nd, 2026 at 8:22 am
Funny how Starmer now says the U.S. can use their bases. Is that because he’s seeing all of the social media posts asking President Trump to pull a Maduro on him or did he just realize that he was F-ing Around and might Find Out.
Then, look at Russia and China, who are allegedly allies of Iran. So far, all Putin and Xi have apparently done is send the equivalent of their thoughts and prayers to the Iranian leaders, who now aren’t around to read them.
March 2nd, 2026 at 10:32 am
Regarding the declaration of war on December 11, 1941, one can argue all one wants that it wasn’t necessary, but it was indeed done. There are, like it or not, generally niceties that one walks through before doing this, and regrettably, Trump has not really done a whole lot to persuade the nation of what’s going on. I agree something needed to be done–Iran is (with Russia’s help) the world’s worst sponsor of terrorism, and one needs to make that case.
Regarding this case, my overall thought–hopefully I am pessimistic here–is “what is our end game?”. Even if only 1% of Iranians are Shi’a fundamentalists willing to die for the cause, that’s still 900,000 people, and a good portion of them are armed. Bringing liberty to Iran is a huge challenge if you’ve got a few percent of Iranians who are invested of keeping their neighbors in Shi’a slavery and are willing to kill/die for that.
March 2nd, 2026 at 3:59 pm
Good post.
I think the Iran situation was something that messed up whatever plans DJT had (Cuba?, Cartels?) The events in Iran were both unexpected and unexpectedly violent. When the Muslim regime started killing large numbers of people DJT threatened to do something about it if regime crossed that proverbial red line. They crossed it. Not being Obama and just moving that red line under cover of favorable media coverage, he felt he had to respond and here we are.
That said, we most definitely don’t suck at regime change. We’re very good at it.
We suck at recreating western European cultures and governments in third-world 5hitholes. It’s a pretense that was originally sold as a good intention – heck, I believed it was possible once. But it ultimately throws money away on ungrateful barbarians; all the while skimming ever increasing amounts off the top which seems to be the real purpose of these crusades to civilize the third world.
It occurs to me to notice that of course we couldn’t recreate western European cultures and governments in third-world 5hitholes because so many western European countries are governed by people who hate their own culture.
March 7th, 2026 at 1:08 am
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