The argument against the war with Iran boils down to two points. The first point is that this war was initiated by the hated President Trump, and so it should be opposed. That point cannot be rebutted because it is not a point at all; it’s simply a reactionary expression of hate by people who scarcely bother to conceal their hope that Iran wins.

So, let’s move on to the second point.

The second point is that we were able to handle Iran’s aggression for many years without going to war, and so we could have continued to handle its aggression for many more years without going to war. There was no “imminent threat” from Iran.

That argument ignores the fact that circumstances were on the brink of changing.

The impending change is that Iran was getting ever-closer to having a nuclear bomb in its arsenal. And it already had hundreds of ballistic missiles to carry that bomb across the Mideast and beyond.

In addition to the risk of ordinary nukes, there’s the risk of Iran using “dirty bombs.” Those are conventional explosives laden with semi-enriched uranium. A dirty bomb doesn’t produce the megaton explosion of a nuke, but it does contaminate the surroundings with lethal radiation.

Iran could construct a “dirty bomb” of sub-fissile enriched uranium, which it has thousands of pounds of, and mount it on one of its hundreds of remaining ballistic missiles.

Even more worrisome, Iran could dispense with the missile. It could instead smuggle abroad a refrigerator-sized dirty bomb, and position it in a leased office on an upper floor of a building in a major city where the detonation could produce catastrophic and long-lasting radiation contamination.

Think Chernobyl (and the Chernobyl contamination originated near ground level, not 50 floors up in the sky).

Let’s hope Iran has not already constructed and smuggled a dirty bomb to a detonation site where it is waiting only for someone, somewhere to push a red button.

If you think Iran is too pacific and humane to do such a thing, then you haven’t been paying attention. This is a regime that tosses gays off tall buildings, stones women for adultery, dismembers shoplifters, sponsors unspeakable acts of terrorism against women and children and babies, has chanted “Death to America” for half a century, and obdurately refuses to give up its nuclear weapons program.

In the course of the last week, Iran fired thousands of missiles and drones at American bases. Fine, I suppose that’s part of war. But Iran has also followed its policy of firing missiles and drones at both military and purely civilian targets in Israel – as well as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Türkiye, Iraq, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Jordan.  

Iran’s aim is not to subdue those countries – heck, most of those countries are not even in the fight.

Rather, Iran’s aim is to produce a conflagration of the Mideast and the world. “If we go down, we’ll take you with us” is their apocalyptic cry. These are theocrats from the 12^th century.

Can there be any doubt that an Iran possessing nuclear weapons would use them?

Sure, it’s annoying to see the price of gas go up, and to see the stock market drop a couple of percent. But it would be more annoying to see millions of people killed, to see civilians with the lifelong pain of radiation burns, to see cities rendered uninhabitable, and to see a generation of babies with birth defects.  

If necessary, bomb the Iranian leaders back to the age and time they’ve chosen for themselves — the stone age.

Iran consistently promoted and sponsored terror throughout the Middle East and the world. They’ve been chanting “Death to America” for half a century. They’ve been working on a nuclear bomb for decades. Their radical Islami-fascist theocracy repeatedly vowed to wipe Israel off the map, because they believed Allah willed it.

War with Iran was therefore inevitable. The only question was when.

We could have waited for Iran to attack us. America’s unspoken policy over the years, after all, has been not to attack an adversary until the adversary attacks us first.

That sounds noble, but might not be smart. Waiting for Japan to attack us at the outset of WWII almost cost us the war. If not for the lucky fact that America’s aircraft carriers were out at sea rather than at base in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the entire Pacific Fleet might have been destroyed.

So, too, with Iran. We could have delayed this war for months and even years until after Iran restocked its weapons from the blows inflicted last summer by the Israelis and Americans.

By then, Iran would not only be restocked with replacement weapons, but might have a few new ones – such as nuclear bombs or at least a “dirty bomb” that is designed not to produce a nuclear explosion but to simply spread radioactive contamination over a large area such as Tel Aviv – or Washington, D.C.

President Trump was right to stop Iran now, before it regrouped and re-weaponized.

In doing so, Trump showed a level of maturity, discipline and vision that I’ve sometimes doubted he possessed. It would have been easy to just kick the Iran can down the road, down past the mid-terms, down past his presidency, to let some successor deal with the problem.

Yes, the problem would be bigger down the road, but it would be someone else’s problem, not Trump’s.

Trump’s predecessors did exactly that. Biden was of course half asleep, and paid little attention to anything. But I’m less forgiving of Obama, who consciously entered into his 2015 agreement with Iran to let them develop nuclear weapons after ten years – a ten-year period that expired last year.

If Trump hadn’t cancelled Obama’s Iranian deal and if the Israelis and Americans had not taken out Iran’s underground uranium enrichment facilities last summer, it’s quite likely that Iran would have nukes today.

Re-read that last sentencer. Under Obama’s approach, Iran would probably have nukes today. Some of the ballistic missiles they’re raining down on Israel, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere would probably bear nuclear warheads capable of killing millions.

So, when you read the “war-is-hell” headlines from CNN or the depictions of mass-murdering Ayatollah Khamenei as a kindly grandpa from Al Jazeera or the latest “Trump-is-Hitler whine from the hypocritical, pusillanimous Democrats, remember: This war was inevitable – in fact, the Iranians have been fighting it for many years. The only question was when we finally decided to fight back – now when they’re weak, or later when they’re armed with nukes.