The Iranian Monster Remains Monstrous

Tuesday, March 3, 2026

Yesterday saw a rise in Iranian retaliation attacks on what it considers U.S. proxies.  I guess when you fight through proxies, you assume everyone else does as well.  The Institute for the Study of War says a key takeaway from yesterday’s action is, “Iran is attempting to disrupt international shipping through the Strait of Hormuz as part of a broader effort to impose a cost on the Gulf states. Iran likely seeks to push the Gulf states to pressure the United States and Israel to end their combined strike campaign against Iran. Iranian attacks targeting energy infrastructure in the Gulf have also disrupted some regional oil and gas industries.”  It is a grand scale, regional hostage taking – or at least an attempt at one.

The host is urging the president to stay the course. Agreed.  We are evacuating regional embassies – I hope to enable staying the course.

The math is simple if you think about it.  Iran is acting like the perp in the cop show – surrounded and the cops closing in, he grabs some random individual and holds a gun to their head screaming at the cops, “Back off! or I’ll kill ’em.”  That’s Iran’s plan here.  Hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered, they are attempting to take the Persian Gulf region hostage and force the US. and Israel to back off.  In the cop shows, the cops always figure something out – the dead shot sniper on the rooftop – they know the perp’s gun is empty but the perp doesn’t – and sometimes it goes like the movie “Speed” where the cop shoots, non-lethally, through the hostage.  There is always a way, and there is here too.

In addition to being an act of desperation, the Iranians here are behaving in an utterly dishonorable and barbaric fashion.  They may be using the weapons of war, but this is not war.  One hopes war never happens, but when it does, it is historically done honorably, combatants facing each other.  This is Iran hiding behind innocents unwilling to face their enemy directly – there is nothing honorable about it.  They are throwing innocents lives in front of the bullets rather than face them themselves. In addition to being dishonorable, it is cowardly.

But then that is consistent with the Islamic Republic since its founding.  They were literally founded in taking the US embassy staff hostage.  After 50 years of consolidating their power as a nation/state, they are just doing the same thing on a grander scale.  And had they been permitted to obtain nuclear weapons, they would have done it on the grandest scale of all.

Iran’s “strategy” in this conflict simply proves they are the monsters they always have been – cowardly, dishonorable, monstrous, uncivilized.  They cannot be permitted to continue.