Saturday, January 04, 2020

Jason Smith: President Trump- decisive against Iran and protecting our American values

(From Eighth District Congressman Jason Smith)

This past week, an Iranian led militia attacked, torched, and attempted to storm our Embassy in Baghdad. It came on the heels of Iran killing an American contractor based in Iraq one month prior.

These are just two recent examples of Iran’s continued assault on American democracy, and our support for the rule of law, individual and religious freedoms, and the State of Israel.

In response, President Trump stood resolute. He ordered a strike in Iraq against those responsible for the death of the American contractor and the attack on our embassy in Baghdad, including Iran’s Qassem Soleimani.

Soleimani was not only a known terrorist responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. soldiers, but he was also the Iranian Regime’s chief architect of past, present, and future terror plots against Americans and our allies. These plots included additional attacks on U.S. facilities, diplomats, and personnel. The President’s decisive leadership was a show of strength that saved American lives.










Let’s not forget how Iran became this emboldened in the region. When President Obama signed the disastrous Iran Nuclear Deal in 2015, he essentially greenlighted Iran’s war on American values by failing to reign in their destabilizing actions.

Obama allowed Iran to fill their coffers with billions in U.S. cash to advance their ballistic missile program, expand their support for terrorism, and strengthen their reach across the region.

Within two months of the deal, Iran’s Supreme Leader boldly declared that Israel would not exist in 25 years. Then to show he was committed to his goal, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) began major ground offensives with thousands of troops leading tens of thousands more of their militant extremists. In no time, these Iranian backed terrorists secured a base of operations to carry out terrorist attacks against Western Countries and our friends in Israel, while furthering their influence in places like Iraq.

Since the beginning, President Trump has done things differently and consistently fought back against Iran and other terrorist threats to the United States.

During his first three years in office, he left the horrendous Iran Deal, designated the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization last April, and has used a maximum pressure campaign against the Iranian Regime that has crippled their economy. He has eliminated terrorist leaders like Qassem Soleimani and others, like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, and Hamza bin Laden, the son and potential successor of late al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Sadly, the fight for the preservation of our American values, like individual freedom and religious liberty, has followed us home.

In 2019, the U.S. saw a sharp rise in anti-Semitic crimes; New York City alone experienced over 210 of them. There, in just the past month, a Jewish man in his 60s was hit in the face with a brick, then a mother and her child were pelted with eggs walking on the street in their Brooklyn neighborhood, and later two Jewish teenagers were assaulted in that same neighborhood.

The anti-Semitic attacks reached a climax during the Hanukkah holiday when a man broke into a rabbi’s house and stabbed five Jews with a machete during their holiday festivities. These abhorrent and un-American attacks have no place in our country. America was founded by people seeking religious freedom and our Republic safeguards that right in our First Amendment.

Prior to the Hanukkah attack, President Trump had already signed an Executive Order to combat the rise of these anti-Semitic crimes.

His recent actions, including his response to the attack on our Embassy in Baghdad and the death of the American contractor in Iraq, sends a clear message: the open season on our American values—including our support for the rule of law and religious freedom—is over. I’m grateful that President Trump showed the world that our resolve and commitment to liberty at home and abroad has never been stronger.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are you republican war mongers going to volunteer to be the first ones in the fray. Wait, you have your mercenary trained military now to fight you little ego battles to make the orange haired one look important. We need to institute the draft again and see how far your little military-industrial inspired wars go. This almost seems like the 50's with McCarthy revisited again. Maybe we should rethink all we have done in the last 30 years in the Middle East and admit we screwed the pooch on that one as we did in Vietnam and just come home and start fixing our own roads, bridges, water structures, climate change and in general pollution that are killing many Americans at home.
Wipe that stupid idiotic grin off your face or are you trying out for the joker role

Anonymous said...


Don't be so kind to the Republicans.

Republicans have been screwing the pooch in the Middle East and particularly in Iran since 1953 if not before. Here's what the CIA cooked up and did in 1953 when Republican Dwight Eisenhower was POTUS and Dick Nixon was the VP:

Declassified documents released last week shed light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s central role in the 1953 coup that brought down Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh, fueling a surge of nationalism which culminated in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and poisoning U.S.-Iran relations into the 21st century.

The approximately 1,000 pages of documents also reveal for the first time the details of how the CIA attempted to call off the failing coup — only to be salvaged at the last minute by an insubordinate spy on the ground.

Known as Operation Ajax, the CIA plot was ultimately about oil. Western firms had for decades controlled the region’s oil wealth, whether Arabian-American Oil Company in Saudi Arabia, or the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Iran. When the U.S. firm in Saudi Arabia bowed to pressure in late 1950 and agreed to share oil revenues evenly with Riyadh, the British concession in Iran came under intense pressure to follow suit. But London adamantly refused.

So in early 1951, amid great popular acclaim, Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil industry. A fuming United Kingdom began conspiring with U.S. intelligence services to overthrow Mossadegh and restore the monarchy under the shah. (Though some in the U.S. State Department, the newly released cables show, blamed British intransigence for the tensions and sought to work with Mossadegh.) https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/20/64-years-later-cia-finally-releases-details-of-iranian-coup-iran-tehran-oil/