The right call, a half century in the making.

President Trump announced that the United States armed forces have completed bombing missions against Iran — specifically against the nuclear enrichment facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. There had been reports earlier this weekend that our armed forces had moved B-2 bombers into position — the aircraft capable of carrying and launching the MOPs (massive ordnance penetrators) that could reach and demolish the Fordow site, which is in the mountains outside Qom, deeply underground.

The president’s announcement on social media does not even try to ground this action in American law. As I’ve argued this week (see here and here), Trump had authority under Congress’s post 9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (September 18, 2001) in light of Iran’s aiding, abetting, and harboring of al-Qaeda jihadists. Moreover, with Iran’s proxies, the Houthis in Yemen, firing at U.S. military targets just a few weeks ago, the president had authority to strike at their sponsors, Iran, which has a long history of using proxies to murder Americans. That said, as Charlie, Rich, and I have discussed at length (see here and here), it would have been better for the mission and for constitutional hygiene if the president had sought congressional authorization. (My weekend column, linked above, addresses why, sadly, Congress is glad he didn’t.)

We’ll now deal with the fallout. Trump’s post proclaims that, in light of the U.S. strikes, “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!” I doubt it. The regime will have to be defeated. That will be for Israel to accomplish.

Iran’s regime is a millenarian jihadist vanguard that defines itself by its hatred of the United States, Israel, and the West — “Death to America, Death to Israel” is a policy, not a slogan. I’ve opined that the president does not grasp fundamentalist Islam. If he is expecting that the Iranians will draw the rational conclusion that they’ve been defeated and need to settle, I would just say that (a) that’s not the Iran we have known since 1979, which is (b) why they can’t be allowed to have nuclear weapons.

Thanks to Israel’s combat operations over the past ten days, the Iranian regime is a shell of its former self: Its air defenses are negligible, and a number of its top military, scientific, and political officials have been killed. Its proxies — particularly Hezbollah and the Houthis, infamous in decades and recent times for attacks against American military forces and other U.S. targets — are battered and effectively nullified.

That said, Iran is not without offensive capabilities, as shown by the last week’s attacks against Israel. Those missile and drone attacks have largely failed, but they have not been completely ineffective. Iran will not surrender at this point, and to the extent that it has striking capability, it will almost certainly try to hit American military targets in the region. An all-out attack against Israel, trying to overwhelm Iron Dome with the thousands of missiles it still has (and the limited launcher capability it maintains to fire them) cannot be ruled out.

There is risk in this for Tehran. Since it has no real air defenses, its firing of missiles against us will invite devastating retaliatory attacks to destroy remaining launchers, which will continue to diminish the regime’s warmaking capabilities. But, again, we’re talking about a jihadist regime, not a normal one; it won’t stop out of the  mutually assured destruction theory because its ideology adulates suicide attacks against the perceive enemies of Islam.

The next 72 hours will be very consequential.

I applaud President Trump’s decision. He rose to the moment and has potentially eliminated the most significant threat from the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American terrorism — a jihadist regime that established itself by besieging the U.S. embassy and taking hostages, and that has killed hundreds of Americans since its inception. For almost a half century, American administrations have known that Iran could not be permitted to possess nuclear weapons but rationalized that the time was never right to act on that conceit. This president acted.