Cal Thomas

Before basketball’s 24-second rule, there was a tactic called freezing the ball. The team that was ahead would attempt to run out the clock by holding onto the ball as long as it could to deny the opposing team an opportunity to score.

That looks like what Iran is again doing – “freezing” negotiations while finishing the final stages of nuclear enrichment on the way to building a deliverable nuclear weapon.

It is important for the U.S. to take Iranian leaders at their word. Failing to do so and believing the regime will pull back on what some of their leaders have said is a religious mandate to wipe out Israel and “the great Satan” virtually guarantees the world will be faced with the greatest threat since the beginning of the Cold War with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union. Except the Soviets were atheists. The Iranian mullahs think doing what they claim to be Allah’s will, especially if it leads to martyrdom, guarantees them a ticket to Heaven.

The West has a history of not taking seriously the announced intentions of its enemies. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publicly stated their economic and political goals, which were fulfilled in the Bolshevik Revolution and the imposition of communism and socialism in Russia.

Adolf Hitler wrote “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle) in which he stated his hatred of Jews, a hatred incorporated in the Third Reich, which led to the Holocaust.

In each instance there were Western academics, journalists, even clergy, who excused, denied or rationalized these objectives. And in each instance millions of lives were lost in a forced famine and gulags (Stalin) and World War II (launched by Hitler).

Past deals with Iran, including initially agreed inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the UN, have been violated. Why does anyone believe the Iranians will abide by a new agreement?

Writing for the publication JNS.org, New York attorney Eric Levine references an April 14 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in which Kerry” discusses what a good deal between the United States and Iran will look like if Iran is willing to reach an agreement with President Donald Trump. Kerry’s hypothetical new Iran deal bears no resemblance to the disaster that he and then-President Barack Obama forced down the throats of Americans in 2015, despite overwhelming bipartisan opposition.”

Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, has no experience dealing with people who claim a religious motivation for their actions. He is no more likely to succeed with Iran than Kerry and Obama who got rolled by the mullahs.

As John Bolton, President Trump’s former national security adviser, has written for the publication Independent Arabia: “Washington has every justification to take military action against Tehran’s proliferation efforts. Iran’s nuclear threat is not a problem merely for Israel, but for the entire world.

For 30 years, the ayatollahs have sought to become a nuclear power, to the detriment of everyone else. America has the wherewithal to eliminate this proliferation threat, and would be politically and morally justified in doing so. Helping Israel de-fang Iran follows quite logically.”

Iran is in a weak position, domestically and internationally. Regime change would be the best option, but the rulers are unlikely to willingly relinquish power. The time to strike Iranian nuclear facilities is now. Delay means we will likely have to face a nuclear armed Iran with the ability to launch ICBMs at Israel and American cities. Who thinks that is a risk worth taking?

<n>Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).<n>

Victor Davis Hanson

Since 2021, the Left has waged a veritable war against the American legal system in a variety of ways.

One serial target of Democrats and the Left has been the Supreme Court.

In 2020, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., spoke to an angry throng of pro-abortion protestors assembled at the very doors of the court chambers.

He threatened two of the justices, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, by name. Schumer yelled to the volatile crowd that the justices’ views would make them “reap the whirlwind,” and the two would not know what “hit” them.

In the ensuing months, protestors mobbed some of the conservative justices’ homes — likely committing felonies. The sympathetic Biden Justice Department chose not to follow the law, and so did nothing — although eventually a would-be assassin turned up.

Former President Joe Biden himself bragged that he would try to ignore the Supreme Court ruling banning his arbitrary cancellation of billions of dollars in student loans. Indeed, he boasted, “The Supreme Court blocked it, but that didn’t stop me.”

In response, no one on the left ever complained about endangering the “rule of law” or Biden as “a dictator.”

For three years, four local, state, and federal prosecutors warped the law to neuter Donald Trump. Most of the charges had never been brought against other political figures in similar circumstances.

The vast majority of the 93 weaponized indictments backfired on the liberal prosecutors, who had contorted the legal system for political purposes and now face their own ethical or legal quagmires.

The federal prosecutor Jack Smith belatedly reported accepting $140,000 in free legal services.

Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis was removed from the Trump case and fined, and is now under further investigation.

New York prosecutor Letitia James is now facing allegations of falsification of documents and loan fraud.

Federal immigration law prohibits the illegal entry into and residence within the United States. Yet the Biden administration deliberately violated the law by allowing somewhere between 10-12 million illegal aliens to cross the border. Thousands had criminal records.

No one on the Left decried any of these various affronts to the legal system.

In polls, by overwhelming majorities — above 70 percent — the public wants the Trump administration to close the border, begin deportations, and start with criminals or those with violent histories and gang ties.

The recent deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal alien from El Salvador, to the vast majority of Americans seems to fit that profile.

Garcia entered the U.S. illegally and was later found consorting with members of M-13 — a State Department-designated terrorist organization — who were selling drugs. Informants reported that he was a gang member. His own tattoos likely confirm those accusations.

Two prior immigration judges found such evidence sufficient to allow deportation proceedings. In 2019, a third judge allowed Garcia to stay temporarily, but only on the grounds that hostile gangs might harm him should he return to El Salvador.

Garcia was pulled over for speeding without a driver’s license — but with eight illegal aliens who reportedly all lived at the Garcia residence. The officer released him, despite suspicions that Garcia was engaged in human trafficking.

Garcia’s live-in girlfriend, now wife, was physically assaulted by Garcia on two occasions, suffered injuries, and initially sought restraining orders against him.

The Left claims Garcia is a “Maryland man” without an arrest record.

But he is not a U.S. citizen or a legal resident of Maryland. Instead, Garcia is in legal limbo and remains what he always was — a citizen of El Salvador with gang ties and formerly residing illegally in the U.S.

The Left also ignores its own hypocrisies and ironies.

Those who weaponized the court system and destroyed the border now rail that Trump is acting unlawfully by not returning an illegal alien, an M-13 member, and a domestic abuser with a propensity to ignore our laws.

How ironic that those who rail about colonialism now sound like 19th-century Yankee imperialists.

Democrats do not own El Salvador — although they act like it when dictating to its government that El Salvador cannot detain one of its own citizens on its own soil for its own reasons.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books.You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.