Guest Columnist Martin Hackworth: Mr. President, Finish the Job!

This was the unbounded power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ – Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.

Death to America? Death to Israel? Well, according to Donald Trump, You’re a daisy if you do. This is one of the principal reasons that Trump is currently president, again. Americans actually prefer leaders who don’t take crap from adversaries sitting down. Imagine that.

Iran has been making threats and going much further by promoting and funding acts of agression and terrorism against the United States for nearly five decades. It’s about time we settled the score. Way to go, DJT. Now, finish the job.

To my friends on the left who are currently fixated on Trump’s preening bloviations about ending civilizations to the exclusion of all the chatter about America the Great Satan from the mullahs in Iran, I say this: you weren’t exactly running against Abe Lincoln in either 2016 or 2024, and yet you still got clocked. That should tell you what you need to know about what the rest of us think about your views on what’s right and what’s not. The fact that nothing seems to drive that point home is a you problem. Good luck with that.

Displaying no backbone in dealing with Iran is nothing new. American presidents have been fearfully (or naively) mismanaging Iran since the administration of Jimmy Carter. But perhaps none more egregiously so than Barack Obama. Obama, as far as I’m concerned, is a genuine piece of work, just not in any complimentary sense. Iran is near the top of the list of exhibits in favor of the proposition. We are where we are now largely because of the failures of Obama’s foreign policy in the region. Not in spite of, because of.

After the novelty of being the first black president fades, something that is actually happening much more rapidly than I anticipated, the legacy of Obama will very likely suffer under even very reasonable scrutiny. As president, Obama assumed the role of a smug academic who could justify anything because, in his arrogance, he always imagined himself the smartest guy in the room.

To his credit, Obama is, in fact, a bright, well-educated individual. I’m sure that he’s an engaging conversationalist. But he’s living proof that smart isn’t at all the same thing as wise. And we are all worse off for his arrogance.

The damage wrought to this country by Obama (and his lackey, Joe Biden) on many fronts is profound. Obama is the ideological progenitor of every woke policy that came out of academia in the early 21st century that you couldn’t argue with because it was just “right.” His way of thinking, when manifested into public policy, wrecked health care, education, science, and law and resulted in unparalleled attempts to turn the power of American government against its own citizens—at least those whose minds weren’t “right.”

But perhaps nothing exemplifies Obama’s grandiose betrayal of the American people more than his signing of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 and his shepherding into fruition the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—more commonly known as the Iran Deal—which was negotiated in 2015 by Iran, the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and the EU.

The JCPOA was a terrible agreement unlikely to accomplish anything beyond kicking a can down the road. The first Trump administration instigated a unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018, after Iran failed to comply with many terms of the agreement (although Trump did grant some waivers related to plutonium production that worked in our favor).

I doubt that any rational national security expert was delusional enough to imagine that Iran would fully hold up their end of the JCPOA. I’m certain that Obama didn’t think so either. The JCPOA was two things at its inception: Obama’s bid for some instant legacy building by handing off an inconvenient national security issue to a future administration (presumably Hillary Clinton’s) and self-serving political theater. It did absolutely nothing to ameliorate Iran’s antipathy toward The Great Satan—something that even the lefty, touchy-feely Aspen Institute recognized at the time.

So yeah, you in the Obama-was-the-best-of-us crowd screaming about how Trump is handling this—bugger off! We tried it your way (actually, we tried lots of things your way) and never made America safer vis-à-vis Iran. At the very least, Trump has decapitated one, possibly two, levels of leadership in an Iran bent on our destruction and seriously attrited whatever is left of the regime’s ability to strike at us through military force. They are simply not what they were a month ago.

It’s an imperfect campaign, and there are certainly challenges remaining, but I applaud the effort. It’s a gutsy step in the right direction.

Perhaps most productively, Trump has shown our geopolitical adversaries that even if you have a vote on the UN Security Council, you’d best go hide after you chant “Death to America.” Obama used 563 drones and Seal Team Six to kill roughly 4000 people in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan during his administration, yet, with the exception of killing Osama Bin Laden, accomplished far less. Lines in the sand, notwithstanding.

Like most Americans, I am concerned about the dour economics of Iran holding the world hostage via the Strait of Hormuz. I’m retired and living off of investments that look a lot less solid than they did a few weeks ago. But few things worth doing come without a cost. If some temporary financial stress is what it takes to put some boots in some mullahs’ fannies who have it coming, as far as I’m concerned, so be it.

I think that the current “cease fire” is a ruse. But, as Luther Ray Abel points out in a piece in today’s National Review, the “ruse” may not quite be the terrible deal for Trump that American media seems all too eager to report. Trump is erratic, but he’s shown a lot of cunning in dealing with foreign adversaries so far. My guess is that he’s out to give what’s left of the old regime in Iran enough rope to hang themselves.

I’m all for that. I suspect that a lot of the Iranian people and their neighbors in the region are as well. About the only people who don’t seem happy about what has already been accomplished in Iran (and Venezuela and Cuba) are the media and the TDS-obsessed left.

Frankly, I really don’t give a d*** what they think anymore.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, climber, skier, motorcyclist, musician, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time raising four kids. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.