And so it begins.
“Mission creep.”
“Quagmire.”
“The Ghosts of Iraq.”
And no “conservative” armchair assessment of a military conflict that’s extended past ten minutes would be complete without that kiss of death phrase “forever war.”
Hey “conservatives,” it’s been two weeks.
Two. Weeks.
Breathe. Relax. And when you’ve stopped hyperventilating, take a sober look at what’s happening and assess the situation with a rational mind.
President Donald Trump began moving the chessboard pieces into place at the beginning of February. That’s February 2026 for those with short memories. The military campaign was launched in the morning hours of February 28. And what the United States and Israel alone are trying to do is destroy (and hopefully unseat) an entrenched dictatorship that’s had 47 years to dig in and prepare.
So, yeah. It’s gonna take more than two weeks.
Most conservatives know this, and they themselves are mentally prepared to do whatever it takes to get the job done. But a few too many of us are preemptively freaking out] regarding the political impact of a prolonged conflict. Oh sweet lawdy, what will this mean for the midterms? What will the RINOs in Congress do to gum up the works? President Trump assured us this would take four weeks….but what if it’s five weeks?!?!?! What if it’s MORE THAN THAT?!?!?!?!
These “conservatives” aren’t scared of Iran. They’re scared of swing voters in Arizona.
So here’s what we actual conservatives need to do. We have to make our case and make it forcefully. We have to make the case to our wobbly-kneed friends and neighbors and family members and co-workers. And the case to be made, simply and straightforwardly, is this:
This is a 47-year-old war that Iran has intentionally expanded to the point where it can almost be classified a world war, and a nuclear one at that. The Cold War mentality of mutually assured destruction will not deter apocalyptic maniacs whose goal is nothing short of world domination. Yes, oil prices are volatile right now. Yes, our 401(k)s suck right now. Guess what. DEAL WITH IT. If that’s the most you’re being asked to sacrifice in your pampered life, consider yourself blessed. There is no military draft. There are no higher taxes. Nobody is being asked to give up meat or bread for the troops, or to grow victory gardens, or to buy war bonds. So have another spoonful of flax seeds and go fire off an angry email to the airline company for not letting you take your comfort peacock on the plane. Get out of the way and let the leaders lead.
Because the American voter has been conditioned to think that the government must neutralize every global threat, but with the absolute bare minimum disruption to their Starbucks routines, we’ve reached the absurd position of expecting our military to wage a pain-free, cost-free war.
It’s up to us conservatives not to go all Paul Ryan. Remember him? He holds the title of being the only person to ever lose a debate to Joe Biden. And that’s a shame, because Ryan was correct on every single debate point. And yet he lost the debate.
Why? Because he was so damn petrified to say what needed to be said. And what needed to be said was that our social safety nets are bankrupt, our Social Security system is a giant Ponzi scheme, and Obamacare is a taxpayer-funded handout to insurance companies. And unless these programs are completely gutted and rebuilt from the bottom up, they’ll continue to fail us.
But instead, he hemmed and hawed and begged the American voter to understand that all he’s asking to do is maybe possibly perhaps in the year 2089 make 0.000001% cuts to the increase of social spending so that our grandkids won’t inherit a debt so large that mathematicians haven’t yet invented a number for it. He was noncommittal. He was weak. And Joe Biden tore him to shreds.
President Trump is doing what a leader is supposed to do. He made the hard choice, and he explained that choice to the American people. And he’s not hemming and hawing or begging. He’s not making excuses or getting pinned down with artificial timelines. He’s not letting setbacks take his eye off the goal, even if a setback means we need to change tactics.
If we want the freedoms and the rights and the good economy and the peaceful daily routines, we need to cope with the fact that there are maniacs trying to take those away from us, and one of the government’s legitimate functions is to stop those maniacs. And those efforts can cause disruptions to those routines of ours. That those disruptions are as minor and as temporary as they are is nothing short of a miracle.
We’ve lost over a dozen soldiers so far, and will probably lose more. We have pilots flying round-the-clock bombing missions. Leaves have been cancelled, missions have been extended, and we have a whole lot of military personnel in the Persian Gulf right now who have concerns far greater than gas prices and 401(k)s.
And then there are the Iranian people. Some of us seem to be getting a bit impatient that they haven’t yet risen up and overthrown their tyrannical overlords. Don’t they know our gas prices and 401(k)s are unstable?
I’m gonna take a wild guess that their baffling, inexplicable hesitancy just might have something to do with the fact that they’re completely unarmed and that over 30,000 of them were massacred in the streets last month, and those who were captured alive are now chained to cellar walls and having their eyes fused shut with blowtorches. So maybe we can ease up and forgive the Iranian peoples’ supposed lack of courage in the immediate moment. The day 30,000 unarmed Americans get gunned down over a weekend and yet keep charging the barricades is the day we can sneer at the Iranians.
Again, we need to make our case. At the dinner table, at the workplace cubicle, on social media, and wherever else we interact with the sunshine patriots. Our target audience shouldn’t be the left. They want us to lose, and they want the mullahs to win. They have no idea what that scenario would mean for them and their alphabet army, and they don’t want to know.
Our target audience should be those self-congratulatory, insufferable jellyfish who call themselves “independents,” as if staking out a neutral stance in a conflict like this is admirable. There is plenty that this voting bloc is certainly “independent” of (courage, humility, clarity, nuance, critical thinking skills, and a moral compass, to name a few). But this amorphous mass of ethical evasion has unfortunately amassed enough corporeal form to swing elections, and so we need their votes.
We should also work the moderate, centrist Republican types. These types were all gung-ho to set the world on fire in March 2003, but are now one Tucker podcast away from full-blown isolationism. Why? Because they’re making the mistake every general who lost a war has made. They’re fighting the previous war, not this one. But this is Iran, not Iraq. And this is Trump, not Bush or Romney or McCain. And the stakes are completely different. We’re not winning hearts and minds; we’re preventing a nuclear holocaust.
Make the case. Don’t be soft. Don’t play defense. Lay out the clear moral boundaries of what’s at stake. Again and again and again.
Trump is doing the right thing. Let posterity show that we backed him up, loudly and consistently.
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