ABC News Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl somehow thought that this was the moment we needed to hear from Tucker Carlson. In an interview Saturday morning, Karl elicited Carlson’s condemnation of the joint U.S.-Israel attack on Iran. Carlson said the attack on Iran is “absolutely disgusting and evil.”
Well said, in a sense. A purer case of projection you will never find.
I can think of many reasons why Trump might not have undertaken the strike on Iran. All of us can. Here are just a few — one or two are even good reasons.
Since 2015, Trump has run against wars of regime change. This operation more or less started with the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader. Israeli jets dropped 30 bombs on Khamenei’s compound. “Mistah Khameni, he dead.” The Israel Defense Forces also announced the elimination of 40 Iranian commanders in strikes on Iran. Among those killed, the IDF said, were the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Defense Minister and “the majority of the highest-ranking senior military officials.” All in all, some 40 senior political and military leaders have been eliminatied. A change is gonna come.
The Israel Defense Force has announced that in addition to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, it also eliminated the Commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Minister of Defense, Chairman of the Organization of Defensive Innovation and… pic.twitter.com/ONrZ0LOkOa
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) February 28, 2026
Since 2015 Trump has run against “forever wars.” This one won’t be a forever war, but at least to some extent it runs against the grain of the ethos he invoked.
What comes next? We don’t know. It’s a military operation. The uncertainty entails risks. A lot could go wrong.
The political impact of the operation is similarly unpredictable. The Democrats will oppose it because Trump. Some segment of Trump’s supportes will oppose it because they are isolationist. Another segment of Trump’s base will oppose it because of Israel’s involvement and the suspicion that the Joos control Trump. I’m not naming any names, in this paragraph anyway. Some will oppose it because it appears optional.
Trump didn’t have to do it. The action appears optional. There may be intelligence that supports the existence of an imminent threat of some kind, but he hasn’t chosen to share it yet.
Trump could have pulled an Obama. He could have pulled a Biden. He could have talked tough and carried a small stick. He could have chosen to fund the Iranian regime and instructed Israel it has to learn to “share the neighborhood.” He could have borrowed the pseudosophisticated rationales that have governed our willingness to tolerate the regime’s support for terrorism and offenses against the United States.
Indeed, Trump could have forgiven and forgotten about the regime’s numerous depredations — let’s call them acts of war — against us. Those acts of war are roughly coextensive with the 47 years that the regime has been in power, but he could have let bygones be bygones, even if the bygones included efforts to kill Trump himself.
George W. Bush himself chose to ignore the death and mangling of American soldiers facilitated by the Iranian regime on American soldiers serving in Iraq. Washington Post reporter and editor David Finkel spent eight months embedded with soldiers of the Army’s 2-16 infantry battalion in Iraq during the surge. Finkel’s devastating and widely praised The Good Soldiers (2009) is based on the time he spent with the unit in Iraq. “The good soldiers” were chewed up in the war waged on them by the terror masters in Iran.
Trump nevertheless rejected all of the above. His words are to be taken at face value. Speaking of the Iranian regime, he recalled and assessed:
Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world. For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted ‘Death to America’ and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder targeting the United States, our troops and the innocent people in many, many countries. Among the regime’s very first acts was to back a violent takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, holding dozens of American hostages for 444 days. In 1983, Iran’s proxies carried out the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American military personnel. In 2000, they knew and were probably involved with the attack on the USS Cole.
Many died. Iranian forces killed and maimed hundreds of American service members in Iraq. The regime’s proxies have continued to launch countless attacks against American forces stationed in the Middle East in recent years, as well as U.S. naval and commercial vessels in international shipping lands. It’s been mass terror, and we’re not going to put up with it any longer.
From Lebanon to Yemen and Syria to Iraq, the regime has armed, trained and funded terrorist militias that have soaked the earth with blood and guts, and it was Iran’s proxy, Hamas, that launched the monstrous October 7 attacks on Israel, slaughtering more than 1,000 innocent people, including 46 Americans, while taking 12 of our citizens hostage. It was brutal, something like the world has never seen before.
Iran is the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror and just recently killed tens of thousands of its own citizens on the street as they protested. It has always been the policy of the United States, in particular, my administration, that this terrorist regime can never have a nuclear weapon. I’ll say it again. They can never have a nuclear weapon. That is why, in Operation Midnight Hammer last June, we obliterated the regime’s nuclear program at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. After that attack, we warned them never to resume their malicious pursuit of nuclear weapons, and we sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. Again, they wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. They didn’t know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil, but Iran refused, just as it has for decades and decades.
They rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore. Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas and could soon reach the American homeland. Just imagine how emboldened this regime would be if they ever had and actually were armed with nuclear weapons as a means to deliver their message. For these reasons, the United States military has undertaken a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests. We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally, again, obliterated. We are going to annihilate their navy. We are going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces, and no longer use their IEDs or roadside bombs, as they are sometimes called to so gravely wound and kill thousands and thousands of people, including many Americans.
In short, Trump pulled the trigger because he thought it was the right thing to do for the United States.
