I recall lying on my stomach on my parents’ bed sometime in 1980 and watching CBS anchor Walter Cronkite report that it was Day 100 or 200 or whatever it was of the Iranian hostage crisis. Cronkite had started keeping track of the crisis on Day 50, in January, and now it was part of his nightly broadcast, and my father had just come home from the office and was untying his tie and changing out of his suit, and my mother was about to call everyone for dinner.
This was the first thing that slipped through my mind late Friday night in LA as I was scrolling through my news feed and learned that the United States and Israel had attacked the mullahs.
Mullahs is the operative word. Not Iran or the Iranians, but the Islamists who seized power in 1979 and have been waging a holy war against the West—the United States, the Anglosphere, Europe and, of course, the only truly Western outpost in the Middle East, Israel—ever since.
By Saturday morning, everyone was yammering about Donald Trump, and the fact that this self-proclaimed ender of forever wars was starting a war. It’s true, Trump started this particular battle. But let’s not pretend—at least, those of us old enough to remember—that this is the beginning of the war.
Instead, one hopes, this is the beginning of the end of the war.
