By Louise Mathews
It appears that the latest fixation for the Perpetually Outraged is No Wars, funded by the same anti-United States billionaires who underwrite the No Kings inanity. The new target is what they have termed the “War on Iran.” These folks may believe that history began with their birth. I remember when Iran declared war on us.
Throughout my life, there have been wars and rumors of wars. I was born during the Korean conflict and spent my teenage years watching Vietnam on the evening news. There were terrible threats, too. I remember my mother, who lost her first husband in World War II, watching television during the Cuban Missile Crisis, clutching her rosary, with tears trickling down her face.
Later, wars such as Panama and Grenada were small, contained. I was driving the 30 miles between remote classes and my home when reports of Desert Storm’s “shock and awe” first came over the radio. That seemed like the real deal, a big war.
The first Gulf War ended quickly. It was declared a success although, at that time, the USA and allies stopped short of toppling Saddam Hussein.
The response to the massacre of September 11, 2001 was never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Twenty years of conflict wore out more than those beleaguered nations. The resulting American reticence to engage in forceful foreign policy led to decisions our enemies interpreted as weakness. They took our cash and laughed at American attempts to buy them off.
Which leads me back to 1979, when a revolution in Iran deposed the Shah and ushered in a theocracy led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. The new Iranian regime and its followers screamed “Death to America!” We feared for the lives of 66 Americans hostages, most of whom were imprisoned for a year and a half.
This was only the beginning of a 47-year shadow war Iran has waged against the United States which it routinely calls “the great Satan.” We were more concerned with domestic issues and events in other nations than we were with Iran. We hardly noted that Iran was waging war through client organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, a Shia Islamist terrorist militia with a political wing. In 1982 Iran helped create Hezbollah with financing, training, and arms.
To think that Iran has not targeted Americans over the past four and one-half decades is foolhardy. Some of us remember the overwhelming sadness of an October Sunday in 1983 when a truck bomb loaded with the equivalent of 12,000 pounds of TNT penetrated the four-story cinder block Marine headquarters of a multinational peacekeeping force at Beirut International Airport. The massive blast killed 241 American military personnel. Sixty were injured. On the same morning, a car bomb killed 58 French peacekeepers in Beirut.
Hezbollah conducted the operation, but Iran directed it. The United States government kept this information secret for 20 years because it involved a grievous failure in our intelligence community.
According to a 2009 Heritage Foundation study of the Beirut bombing, the commanding officer of the Marine unit targeted by Hezbollah wrote: “Unknown to us at the time, the National Security Agency had made a diplomatic communications intercept on 26 September … in which the Iranian Intelligence Service provided explicit instructions to the Iranian ambassador in Damascus (a known terrorist) to attack the Marines at Beirut International Airport. The suicide attackers struck us 28 days later … (www.heritage.org/defense/commentary/the-1983-marine-barracks-bombing-connecting-the-dots).
Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 2001 attacks that killed more than 3,000 people, was inspired by the murderous explosion of the Beirut Marine Barracks. He viewed the United States as a “paper tiger” because troops were withdrawn from Lebanon a few months after the horrific bombing.
Hezbollah, using supplies provided by Iran, also killed 63 people including 17 Americans, in a 1983 suicide truck bombing of the American embassy in Beirut. In 1984, Hezbollah bombed a restaurant near the U.S. Air Force Base in Torrejon, Spain killing 18 U.S. servicemen and injuring 83.
In 1996, Hezbollah steered a truck bombing at the U.S. portion of the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia in which 19 American Air Force personnel were killed and 372 injured. This list includes only those attacks in which multiple Americans were killed; individual Americans have been killed in numerous Hezbollah operations.
With its oil money, Iran has functioned as the master puppeteer behind thousands of killings throughout the world including the Hamas massacre of Israelis in October 2023 and the January 2026 murder of 30,000 of its own citizens.
The shadow war became increasingly dangerous as Iran focused its treasure on a concealed program of uranium enrichment. Once discovered, international pressure forced Iran to shut down the program in 2003 under a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. When the U.S. withdrew from that agreement in 2018, Iran began outwardly enriching uranium again. Iran said it needed to fuel its one operational nuclear power plant despite the world already having reached over-capacity of enriched uranium for power generation.
On June 12, 2025 the International Atomic Energy Agency declared Iran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations as it was producing highly enriched uranium (HEU). The next day, Israel began attacking Iranian nuclear enrichment sites. The United States blasted two underground nuclear bunkers near the end of June in Operation Midnight Hammer.
In October 2025, Iran officially declared that all restrictions on its nuclear program were void. Despite Israeli attacks and Midnight Hammer, Iran signaled its intention to produce highly enriched uranium which could lead to its having nuclear weapons.
For years, Democrat and Republican presidents have warned that if Iran develops highly enriched uranium that can be deployed on ballistic missiles, it will use them. They have cautioned that once Iran had enough HEU, it could launch nuclear attacks “in a matter of weeks.”
Reports suggested Iran had reached the 60% benchmark for enrichment. Enrichment at 20% qualifies as HEU, and weapons grade uranium is 90% uranium 235. The higher the percentage, the smaller the amount of HEU needed for a weapon.
There may be publicly unknown reasons why President Trump decided to attack Iran now, but it appears he believed Iran would continue its nuclear agenda. This threat from the regime that has never lessened its belligerence to the U.S. posed a grave enough hazard to justify launching Operation Epic Fury.
Whether or not Iran has enough weapons-grade uranium to imminently attack is not the question. Is a small cancer tumor an imminent threat to a person’s health, or should the medical team wait until it is big enough to actually kill the patient? As it has proven for almost half a century, the Iranian regime is a cancer on the world, and the United States finally has a President with the resolve to excise it.
Louise Mathews retired from a career in community colleges and before that, theater. A 13-year come-here in Beaufort, she has been a dingbatter in North Carolina and an upstater from New York.