Several outlets (including our own David Zimmermann as well as Fox News) are reporting that the long-awaited, much-discussed American military strikes in retaliation for Iranian proxy attacks that killed three American service members and wounded dozens of others last weekend have begun. The targets hit are in Syria and Iraq. Fox is reporting that its Defense Department sources say this will not be a “one-off” — there will be a sustained bombing campaign that continues for at least a couple of days.

Weirdly, the Biden administration delayed for so long yet talked about the coming operation so much (as Noah Rothman has sharply observed) that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has been on notice and had plenty of opportunity to get its operatives and many of its assets to safety. The IRGC is Iran’s principal military arm and the coordinator of its proxy forces in the region that have launched scores of attacks on U.S. personnel in the region ever since Hamas (which is also backed by Iran) carried out the October 7 atrocities in Israel that ramped up the latest round of war.

As the estimable Walter Russell Mead tartly noted on X/Twitter today, “Apparently it’s no longer a bad thing to warn your enemy in advance about your next military moves. I must have missed that lesson in strategy class.” Needless to say, administration officials appear to have let Iran know that its own territory is not on the target list.

The president and his advisers have agitated publicly (and no doubt even more in private) about “escalation” and therefore about carefully calibrating a response that is “proportional” (in their now-familiar distortion of that law-of-war term of art. But quite apart from trying to contain the regional war, American officials must also be concerned about attacks in the United States by clandestine agents of Iran and its anti-American sympathizers. Thus, I’ve contended, Biden’s border crisis exacerbates the profound challenge of Iranian jihadist aggression.

Whether, in the end, Biden’s operation re-establishes deterrence or emboldens Iran with a perverse sense of immunity remains to be seen. We’ll be watching over the coming days, and praying for the safety of our troops, who put themselves on the line so we can live in freedom.