Iran has been at war with the US for 46 years

Peloni:  It is time for America to undue the betrayal dealt to people of Iran, Israel, America and the entire world when it supported the replacement of the Shah with the Islamist regime which has harvested an ongoing threat of terror and war against the world over the past nearly 50 years.

“America can’t do a damn thing against us.”

Daniel Greenfield

“America can’t do a damn thing against us,” Ayatollah Khomeini bragged while holding our hostages.

The Carter administration had undermined the shah’s government in favor of the Islamists who seized power in 1979 and then prevented the Tehran embassy’s Marine guards from defending the facility and the people inside against the Muslim “student” groups who claimed to be coming in peace.

The “peaceful” student activists took over our embassy and held our people hostage.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei taunted President Trump with the same slogan in June after being asked to give up Iran’s nuclear weapons program. “Our response to the U.S. nonsense is clear: They cannot do a damn thing in this matter,” he echoed his regime’s founder.

Carter’s failure to defend Americans had turned Khomeini’s taunt into a confident slogan.

America couldn’t stop its diplomats and soldiers from being taken hostage and paraded through the streets. In subsequent decades, future administrations couldn’t stop other Americans from being taken hostage again, tortured and executed. By the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iranian IEDs alone had accounted for as many as 1,000 American victims.

Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s IRGC terror mastermind, thought that America couldn’t do a damn thing. In January 2020, President Trump taught him otherwise with a Reaper drone.

It was the first time in a long time that America had done a “damn thing” about Iran.

In 1983, Iranian-backed terrorists set off truck bombs in Beirut that killed 220 U.S. Marines and 21 other servicemembers. Mohsen Rafiqdoost, Khomeini’s bodyguard who helped found Iran’s IRGC terror force, boasted that “both the TNT and the ideology, which in one blast sent to hell 400 officers, NCOs and soldiers at the Marines headquarters, were provided by Iran.”

Beyond a few airstrikes, America didn’t do a “damn thing” because the intelligence proving Iran was behind the attack was suppressed so that it never reached Reagan. Eventually we placed multimillion dollar rewards on the heads of Hezbollah’s Ibrahim Aqil and Fuad Shukr, who continued to live without a care in the world until Israel took them out after Oct 7.

The Biden administration assured the media that it had nothing to do with the Israeli strikes.

Over the decades, Iran’s Hezbollah proxies took dozens of American hostages. Some were released after months or years in exchange for concessions, while others were killed.

In 1984, Hezbollah kidnapped, tortured and killed CIA station chief William Francis Buckley, whose identity the terrorists learned from classified documents seized from the embassy in Tehran. Buckley was transferred to Iran and tortured there, before being returned to Lebanon. Videos distributed by Iran’s jihadists showed him in agony.

“Buckley was close to a gibbering wretch. His words were often incoherent; he slobbered and drooled and, most unnerving of all, he would suddenly scream in terror, his eyes rolling helplessly and his body shaking.”

Once again, America did not do a “damn thing.”

In 1985, Hezbollah hijacked TWA Flight 847. One of the terrorists was Imad Mughniyeh, who had also interrogated Buckley. U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem was beaten and kicked to death before his body was dumped on the tarmac.

“They were jumping in the air and landing full force on his body. He must have had all his ribs broken,” Uli Derickson, the stewardess, described. “I was sitting only 15 feet away. I couldn’t listen to it. I put my fingers in my ears. I will never forget. I could still hear. They put the mike up to his face so his screams could be heard by the outside world.”

Instead of sending a message and holding Iran and its terrorists accountable, the United States made a deal to have Israel free hundreds of jihadists.

In 1988, Hezbollah kidnapped U.S. Marine Corps Col. William R. Higgins in Lebanon and tortured him for months. An autopsy found that he had been starved, the skin on his face had been partially removed along with his tongue and he had also been castrated. Finally his body was dumped near a mosque.

“I am one of a small handful of Americans who knows the exact manner of Rich’s death. If I were to describe it to you now—which I will not—I can guarantee that a significant number of people in this room would become physically ill,” a friend of Higgins said.

Finally, decades later, in the last days of the George W. Bush administration, the CIA teamed up with Israel to take out Mughniyah with a car bomb in Damascus. America had finally done a “damn thing.”

But Iran continues to hold American hostages today, like former FBI agent Robert Levinson.

In 1996, Shi’ite terrorists backed by Iran bombed the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American servicemembers, but Iran was also pursuing other options, including a new Sunni terror group.

Al Qaeda built a relationship with Iran. The 9/11 Commission noted, “Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11” (with the aid of Soleimani, later taken out by Trump) and “Al Qaeda members received advice and training from Hezbollah.”

After 9/11, some Taliban leaders relocated to Iran to fight America. By 2010, Iran was paying $1,000 for each American soldier killed and Iranian IEDs were claiming American lives.

After losing in Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda relocated much of its operations to Iran.

Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, responsible for the bombings of American embassies across Africa, was taken out in Tehran in a joint Israeli-American operation during the first term of the Trump administration.

Saif al-Adel, the current leader of Al-Qaeda, lives in Tehran and has been there for two decades. Even while supposedly in Iranian custody, he ordered the 2003 bombings in Saudi Arabia that killed nine Americans.

As recently as last year, Iran and its terrorist proxies continued murdering American soldiers and contractors including Scott Patrick Dubis in 2023 and U.S. Army reservists Sgt. William Rivers, Specialist Kennedy Sanders, and Specialist Breonna Moffett in 2024.

No matter how much politicians and social media influencers may insist that we’re not at war with Iran, the Islamic terrorist state has been at war with us for 46 years. And it is still fighting us.

It only takes one side to have a war. Fighting back isn’t what makes the war endless.

Refusing to fight back or to fight back effectively is what makes wars endless.

The Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush administrations for the most part failed to act. The Obama and Biden administrations took it one step further by aiding Iran. President Trump was the first to stand up to Iran and show the Islamic terrorist state that there would be consequences.

“America can’t do a damn thing against us,” the ayatollahs mocked us as they killed our people.

For the first time in two generations, the smirks have been wiped off their murderous faces.

Those complaining that President Trump is too tough on Iran aren’t upset because the president isn’t keeping his campaign promises, but because he is, they’re not upset because he changed his foreign policy, but because they want the old Carter and Obama appeasement of Iran back.

America is not contemplating bombing some “random Middle Eastern country.” After 46 years of kidnapping, terrorism, torture and murder, we’re fighting back against Iran’s war on us.

Originally published by FrontPage Magazine.

June 21, 2025 | 5 Comments »

Leave a Reply

5 Comments / 5 Comments

  1. DONALDO-

    I fully agree with you about Carter, he was a sub officer but not on a nuclear one; but Biden beats him out by a long way. Even a couple of years before the stolen election, when he stated that the Dems had the best voting fraud system, he was non compos mentis.

    He made no decisions, everything from that Govt was either from his wife or his senior handlers. Very much like the last year of Woodrow Wilson’s Presidency.

    But that was the only similarity. Wilson’s last year was comparatively up to standard, Whilst Biden’s WHOLE term was a shambles of unparalleled proportions.

  2. Today – a day that will live in history books

    B-2 bombers take out the nuclear weapons program in Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan.

    Trump: Promises made to the good people of Israel and America, promises kept.

    To the Ayatollahs: Allah spits on you.

  3. These details provided by Daniel Greenfield tell the story of Iranian determination to destroy the US and Israel. The willingness to torture human beings is a clue to the psychopathic nature of the Iranian regime and its military.

    Israel is doing all the heavy lifting on taking down the entire Iranian regime, its nuclear project, its military heavyweights, nuclear scientists, as well as destroying the media that his hated by the Iranians. I believe Donald Trump will help Israel reach all of Israel’s goals in this effort because Israel’s goals are the goals for the US as well.

  4. Carter was a halfwit. In spite of Sleepy Joes issues. Carter still holds the record as the worst president in US history.

    He was a fraud coming in – NOT A NUCLEAR SUB CAPTAIN..closest he evry came to nuclear material was holding a mop ot clean up some spilled heavy water – in Canada.

    And even after he left office,

    He was a fraud coming out. Certifying the South African elections where 3mm more ballots were cast than total voters.