Not A War Of Choice |
Foreign Policy > Iran War
Despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Democrat-media complex, the war with Iran is not a war of choice in any practical sense.
Fletch Daniels | May 7, 2026
Despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Democrat-media complex, the war with Iran is not a war of choice in any practical sense. If anything, the current operations represent the end of the great pretending, since Iran has long been at war with us, keeping their attacks just low enough in intensity or with just enough plausible deniability to allow for the continuance of that pretending.
Iran is the single most committed and least deterrable enemy of the United States, and was developing ever more lethal means to inflict grave harm.
Democrats and their media allies who mostly know better are calling operations against Iran a war of choice for political gain. It is only a war of choice if you are okay with Iran using proxies to continually kill Americans, or if you are cool with a smuggled nuclear bomb one day going off in Washington D.C., New York, or Tel Aviv.
We have fought plenty of wars of choice in recent history. In 2010, General David Petraeus, then CENTCOM commander, admitted that what kept him up at night was worrying about Iran.
So, one year later, we got serious about the threat and attacked…Libya. We left Iran to continue killing Americans while we toppled the secular government of Libya, converting it to an Islamist one, and kicking off a disruptive civil war that still rages beneath the surface.
The media adored the “we came, we saw, he died” war since it was overseen by Democrats and made no strategic sense. Not only was that a war of choice, but we were openly acting against our own interests, removing a pragmatic and reformed authoritarian secular government in favor of an Islamist one that would be far harder to deter.
The second Iraq war was also a war of choice,........