We Bombed Iran. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? by John Zmirak

By John Zmirak, The Stream, June 23, 2025

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.

Like any decent person, I’m relieved that jihad-obsessed Iran is further away from having nuclear weapons today than they were on Friday. As a patriot, I’m proud of our country’s technical and military excellence. Being a well-instructed Christian, I wish Israel’s people well. I trust President Donald Trump’s good judgment far more than I did George W. Bush’s in 2003.

But I worry, and I am praying, and I hope that you are too.

It’s easy to rattle off the benefits of Saturday night’s attack on Iranian nuclear sites, as it was easy to explain why the U.S. didn’t want North Vietnam to conquer the south and why the Soviet Union wished to shore up a friendly regime in Afghanistan against Islamic fanatics in 1979. The motives for Lyndon Johnson and Leonid Brezhnev to take the first fateful steps of wading into those quagmires seemed perfectly rational. Both nations seemed plenty strong enough to quash the petty, poorly armed radicals who opposed them. But things didn’t work out well in either case, did they?

It turned out that both imperial powers were wobbling on feet of clay — the U.S. deeply divided over racial and social issues in the 1960s, the Soviets riven by ethnic conflict and mired in economic decline. And however “limited” and “incremental” the American and Soviet interventions seemed to begin with, they escalated inevitably. The harder each superpower punched the tar baby, the deeper it got stuck in. …

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